Thoughts While Swimming

This morning I met Laura at the Manhattan Plaza Health Club for a swim. It's a bit of a dreary morning here - overcast and sprinkling - which always seems like a good day for swimming. The pool was fairly decent. It's a 25-yard pool with an atrium that has a retractable roof over half of it. I can imagine that on a sunny day it would be really nice, but today it just looked okay. I also thought it was a little weird that they had the roof open about a foot wide, but maybe they only close it all the way if it really starts raining.

We lucked out because right when we got there two guys who were in one lane got out so we had a lane to ourselves ... but only for about half of the time. Then a guy came who was swimming pretty quickly and caused a bit of congestion. I was actually really nervous a couple of times because I would be swimming one way, Laura would be swimming the other, and the guy would swim in the middle of us and I was worried that one time he and I would just bash heads, bleed out and drown. Probably a little melodramatic on my part, but what else is there to think about while swimming?

Anyway, I had printed out a workout from swimplan.com and I was really happy because the pool was the right length and I didn't have to do any funny conversions! This was the workout:

Warm-Up:
8 x 25 yd Freestyle Swim (even pace), rest 0:10/25 yd
Build-Up (repeat 8 times):
1 x 25 yd Single Arm (6 x left, 6 x right, 6 x full stroke), rest 0:10/25 yd
1 x 25 yd Freestyle Catch Up, rest 0:10/25 yd
Core:
6 x 50 yd Freestyle Swim, target time 0:48/50 yd, rest 0:20/50 yd
6 x 50 yd Freestyle Swim, target time 0:48/50 yd, rest 0:15/50 yd
6 x 50 yd Freestyle Swim, target time 0:48/50 yd, rest 0:20/50 yd
6 x 50 yd Freestyle Swim, target time 0:48/50 yd, rest 0:10/50 yd
Warm-Down:
2 x 50 yd Freestyle Easy, rest 0:15/50 yd

Total Distance: 1900 yards (1.08 miles) / Total Time: 47 minutes

During the warm-up and build-up portions, I didn't take the rest times. I just swam through that portion. During the core, my time was probably more like 0:49 seconds each time on average than 0:48. Some I got 0:47, some were 0:50, but the majority were 0:49. I was a little frustrated because I only got 0:48 once, but a lot of the times it would be 0:49:03, so if I had just looked a half-second sooner, I would have been right on. During the core portion was when there was some traffic problems in the lane, so sometimes I took a longer rest than was specified in order to let the traffic clear and sometimes a shorter rest just depending on how the positioning of people was.

I thought the pool and the facilities were okay. Definitely a good location for a pool for both me & Laura. Luckily we had both brought everything we would have needed, including towels because they only had towels available to rent, which I think is a little bit lame. The hair dryers weren't that great and although I had brought my own, it wasn't really worth the effort to get it out. All in all, I think that I'd definitely go back and use the free pass that we have once more, but I don't think I'd seek out a membership there.