Junk meters???

I think tonight's workout qualified as basically a meaningless waste of time. I've now gone 9 days without a rest day, including a race and a couple of hard workouts. Every time I do this, I curse myself afterwards. My body needs rest. I do have at least one rest day planned for this week, but I've got a few days to go before I get there.

So I went to swim practice exhausted. It was actually an easy workout -- only form drills, no speed work. But I didn't even feel like doing the form drills. I more or less kept up until we had to swim butterfly. This is where I said no. I just hung around at the end of the pool waiting for that drill to end. I was not swimming butterfly today (and I got absolutely no argument from my coach). Then I swam 200 meters on my back with fins and my leg started to feel stiff -- this leg has been giving me trouble for a couple of weeks. So I took off the fins and skipped the next drill (I think -- at this point, I was losing track of what we were doing). In the 50 or so minutes that I was actually in the pool, I swam 1100 meters. In addition, I spent a lot of time having a nice conversation with my teammate who was also skipping half the workout (he has a much better excuse for being tired than I do, though, plus, swimming is his weakest sport, not his strongest).

We've all heard of junk miles. Well, these were junk meters, I think. I can add 1100 meters to my weekly and monthly totals, but they were mainly a waste of time, as I didn't even put a lot of effort into concentrating on my form and that's what we were working on. Maybe there is something to be gained from swimming aimlessly back and forth and I guess it felt good to be in the water, but it's kind of hard for me to even call what I did a "workout".