Let's be nice and call it "interesting"

Since only four people from my swim club qualified for Worlds (and one for Kona, which really, if you think about it, 5 people out of about 40 is a pretty damn good rate for any club), and most people would be taking a bit of a break, there's no organized swimming until November. That leaves the few like me to our own devices, which translates to "public lane swim". Since my preferred schedule doesn't leave me many options for swim times, I'll be back at my old pool twice a week from 9 -10:15 pm. I've gone through my last few weeks of coaching, and adjusted some of the workouts so I can get ~2400m at a time. That will have to do, I guess.

And now the fun begins at the pool. There are six lanes in the 50m pool, but it's roped to only have three "lanes": slow, medium, and fast. The slow lane is for old people who are walking in the water, and Chinese ladies who are bobbing up and down. The medium lane is full of old Chinese men casually breaststroking the length of the pool. The fast lane, then, is pretty much everything else. At any given moment, there were 8-12 people swimming, with a variety of strokes, speeds, kickboards and other implements. The military has a term for things like this; it starts with "cluster" and ends with "firetruck", minus the "iretr". The only positive is that the lane is so ridiculously wide that passing is easy enough to do, except right by the wall where people will turn in any number of fashions.

The one thing I was pretty confident would happen came to fruition. My pullbuoy was "borrowed". Luckily I didn't need it again during my main sets, as I passed the end of the pool, I noticed it had gone missing. I saw one other swimmer using a pullbuoy, and as I finished up my work, kept an eye on his whereabouts. When he came by as I was about to start my cooldown, I grabbed him and said, "I think you have my pullbuoy." He stared at me blankly. "Where did you get that? From the deck?" He nodded. "That's mine." "No, uh ..." "It has my name written on the side, it's my pullbuoy." And I got it back. Am I the only one left who wouldn't think of taking something that isn't mine? If there's one pullbuoy out, I would think somebody has it for their workout, they may not be using it right now, but will in the future. If I didn't set it out, it would never occur to me to just take it and start doing lengths, potentially screwing up someone else's sets. I think from now on, I'll grab two of the pool's buoys and leave them on the deck, so if somebody takes one, I'll still be good.

Only twelve (or 11 if the pool is closed on Thanksgiving) more sessions like this to go.

Swim: w/u - 200m each free, non-free, pull
500 free as 75 ez/25 quick, 30"
400 ez pull, 30"
300 free, HIM pace, 30"
200 ez non-free, 30"
100 sprint (1:35), 30"
c/d - 100 pull, 100 back, 100 breast
Total: 2400m