Life in the Fast Lane

Today is a swimming day.  I got up early, as usual for a swimming day, got my act together and went to the station to get my usual train to the pool.  There is a tube strike today.  One of the reasons that James and I chose to live where we do is that we would not be reliant upon the tube to get to work.  We live very close to the mainline train line and, as a result, we are still able to get into the City when the Underground is not working.  This morning, however, both the train I normally get and the train after were so full that I could not physically get onto them.  I contemplated going home, unpacking and repacking everything and getting on my bike, turning it into a cycling day, but then realised that my saddle was still attached to the turbo trainer and I didn't know where my gloves were, so my turnaround time might not be that small.  I stuck to the train and got on the next one, which was reminiscent of a cattle truck, half an hour after the time of the train I was supposed to be getting.  This was too late for me to get my swim in before work, so I headed straight to the office and contemplated my next (training) move.

A chap I saw on Whitecross Street
I only ever walk the other way,
so I hadn't seen him before!

I had a look at the swimming pool website and ascertained that it would be open and not full of lessons, water polo or frogmen at the time I would be likely to leave work, so decided to go on the way home.  It was a little odd going the "wrong" way up Whitecross Street and through St. Luke's to the pool.  Once I was changed and in, I briefly regretted my decision as, at about 7.10 p.m., it was packed.  Every lane was full.  I started my warm up in the slow lane, doing 2 x 120m of breaststroke.  By the time I was half way through the first part of my main set (540m of arms only - it was supposed to be 5 x 100m, but it morphed into an odd patchwork of sets as I had to let others go before me and I swam an extra length because I needed to do an odd number, which would have made me finish in the deep end and would have been suboptimal) the pool had thinned out considerably and very few people were still there.

All of a sudden, the penny dropped - it was ladies' night (or, rather, a women only session) and all the men had left the pool at 7.30 p.m.; there was a blind down completely blocking the training pool from view so that those who are at an all-ladies session for religious or cultural reasons could be attended by an all-female staff and not seen by any male staff who happened to be around.  The main pool, however, even though the swimmers were all female, had a male lifeguard.  One poor chap had used the automatic check-in kiosk in the lobby (so didn't speak to any staff at the desk) and almost made it into the pool before the lifeguard told him he perhaps might feel out of place in all-female company.  He didn't look like he would be bothered, but left without a fuss.

The spread of swimmers in the pool was heavily weighted toward the slower end of the dolphin spectrum and, when I finished my arms-only set, I realised that while the double-width slow lane was reasonably busy, the two medium lanes had only a couple of swimmers in each and the fast lane was home to a lone backstroker.  I also saw that the swimmers in the medium lanes weren't really going very fast at all so I thought "why not?" - I went in the fast lane.  Yes, the  fast lane!  I did 7 x 60m, alternating hard and easy effort, and I was going at a slightly faster pace than the backstroker, but we were about a length apart, so we passed each other midway down each length, but neither ever caught the other.  It was somewhat serendipitous.  I don't know if it will ever be repeated when chaps are in the pool, but I still feel like I've achieved something.  The last bit of my session was 4 x 30m (2 x breaststroke and 2 x best stroke front crawl).

Today's session highlighted the problem with training in a 30m pool as, in spite of a bit of scaling for the longer pool length, I ended up swimming significantly more than I was supposed to (10% more, in fact).  Today's tally was 1.32km, taking my total swimming sum to 11.68km!  Tomorrow is a cycling day, which may involve some more firsts - check back to find out what I've got planned!