(My trip to Oxford today took too much out of me for an end-of-day run to seem sensible, but it was awfully nice to get in a swim yesterday! And tomorrow I will be HOME, which is very good...)
I had lunch yesterday with my dear friend friend Jane, who tipped me off to there being a much cheaper swimming pool (three pounds versus fifteen pounds) at the Oasis Sports Centre, but I had no obvious way to get online and check the address, so I went to the YMCA as planned.
I had a lovely swim - it is a beautiful deep-blue-tiled pool, very spacious feeling (this may be a psychological effect of wide lanes plus 25M versus 25 yards!). The fast lane was closed off for a children's swimming lesson, so fast and medium were combined in one lane - I was swimming at an appropriate speed, I thought, but my workout was pretty random because I occasionally switched from stroke to freestyle so as not to cause lane congestion when someone faster got in.
By this point I really do not at all remember exactly what I did or how much of it, but I swam for about fifty minutes, so I am thinking that 1600 meters (!) would be a fair assessment. Mostly freestyle, ome 50s of breast, some 50s of back-free and fly-free, several hundreds of IM, etc. etc. All very unfamiliar in terms of feel and distance - no backstroke flags, quite different wall configuration (water right up to flat perpendicular straight-edged pool rim, couldn't quite get the hang of how to grip it for a quick open turn) - but not in a bad way.
It has been a very good trip in many respects, but I am a homebody, I will like it better when I am at home and back on my regular work and exercise schedule - gallivanting and restaurant meals do not suit me so well!
(That said, we had a very lovely dinner last night at Baltic - I shared an order of bacon-and-pork pierogi with my Cousin George, then had a very delicious crispy grilled sea bream on a bed of fennel with cherry tomatoes and arugola, and a rhubarb, almond and plum crumble for dessert - delicious! Even though I do not like coming across as a fussy customer, I made sure to interrogate the waitress re: possible inclusion of DILL in anything, because it is my anathema - this is the sort of restaurant where virtually everything has that evil plant in it - but with her help I was able to dodge the bullet...)
2 comments:
It sounds like a lovely pool!
We will do an open turn session one day. You don't actually grip the wall ... you allow your forward momentum to carry you in, touching with your hand flat, bending the elbow as your momentum brings your head closer to the wall, and then plant your feet. (This is also how you turn on bulkhead walls.)
And now I have a sudden pierogi craving!
Don't they call arugula "rocket?"
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