Pools & Whirlpools

This morning I met Laura at the 92nd Street Y for a swim. We were able to use our passes with no hassle at all. We walked into the locker room, which was much nicer than the locker room at the Westside Y (although not nearly as big!). The showers also looked promising. We walked out into the pool area, which looked nice as well.

We hopped into the water and started swimming. The one weird thing I noticed right away about the pool was that the walls of the pool were really high. Most pools have somewhere that you can hang onto the edge in the deep end (more of a ledge), but this pool just had a tile wall all the way around. It sort-of made it harder to turn around at the end of the pool. Probably an argument to do flip-turns could be made here, but they just really make my ears hurt. As an aside, I did get some ear plugs at the NYC Triathlon Expo, so maybe I should try those out with flip-turns sometime soon.

Again, I didn't really have a set swimming plan in mind. I did think that I wanted to keep working on this more straight-leg kick to see if it can help me with my times, so I thought should do a lot of kicking today. This was what I ended up doing:

200 Free (warm-up)
300 Kick
200 Free
300 Pull
200 Free
300 Kick
200 Free
250 Pull

1950 Yards = 1.1 miles in 42:05

I thought that the alternating between swimming, kicking and pulling was actually really helpful. It let me concentrate on either kicking or pulling and then I would try to put it all together when swimming.

I had asked Laura at about 7:45 if she would want to get out 5 minutes early from our swim so that we could go check out the whirlpools that were next to the pool. She hesitated for only a second before saying yes. We got out of the pool at 7:55 (I had to cut my workout a little short) and headed over to the whirlpools. Stepping in was so nice! It was warm and had jets. I could have stayed there all day long, I think. Of course, we only stayed in for about 5 minutes before heading to the showers. Next time we go there, however, I'm definitely going to plan on staying in those whirlpools for a longer time and will have to schedule my swim around my whirlpool time!