Depends where we swim from.

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"How bad can it be?" - SimpleS

Really??? So, sometimes they just pull their tops down right there on the beach???

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Yeah sure, after all the puritans left for the New World some years ago ;-)

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"How bad can it be?" - SimpleS

Oh, right, I'd forgotten about that!!! Maybe I'll have to make a field trip to England sometime and check it out!!!!!

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I would time it for about 3 weeks time when the water temperature starts to drop ;-)

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"How bad can it be?" - SimpleS

I think if someone called a 3x1000 or 6x500, their would be mutiny on the team. Not to mention it's a SCY pool and 300's are enough to throw me into flip turn hell.

i would love to stay after or show up early for extra yards, but we swim in a high school pool during the winter and they (literally) kick us out after an hour. Luckily the team owns their own LCM pool, but it's an outdoor pool and a little brisk at the moment.

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sometimes you just have to eat the cake

Hmmm, you guys just don't like distance, do you??? It's a bummer you can't get another 30 min so could have a 1.5 hr workout but oh well...Do you do any Sat or Sun swims, when you could perhaps get more time???

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

The school is actually worse on weekends then it is during the week. They have another group booked right after us, so the pool deck is lined with people watching us cool down.

I personally like distance, which is why I like having unstructured morning workouts. We have plenty that like distance, it's just that they mostly swim OW and do all they can in the summer. Once winter hits, they can't stand to swim in a hot, short pool and sit out. So we have our distance people, but they just don't frequent the workouts in the winter.

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sometimes you just have to eat the cake

I would think a person would get pretty far out of swimming shape if they only swam 6 months a year or however long your outside pool is open. I gather from your other posts that it's already closed now. If I did only swam 6 months/yr, it would take me the whole 6 months to really get back into distance swimming shape. A talented sprinter can get into pretty good shape in 4-6 wks but not a distance person. Actually, we have that same situation at my club at home, but the "fair weather swimmers" are not what I would call distance swimmers but rather they are "tourists" in the pool...

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

i should also add this is the first year the school as been an ass to us and it's my first winter season swimming with the team. Previous years, they had the pool for 2 or 3 hours on the weekend.

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sometimes you just have to eat the cake

I had the oddest encounter at the pool last night,

I was doing some drill sets (swimming clockwise) and initially had the lane to myself, when another guy came over and got in the lane, he waited till I came back to the wall, said hi and we quickly agreed to split the lane, since we were bith doing drills/intervals, thus being easier to not interrupt each others workout.

a little later, a third guy came along, and we repeated the process, quickly and happily, resuming a clockwise pattern again.

I was amazed but happy, what are the odds, that three swimmers at random would have a clue about lane etiquette!

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!
Adam Savage

To all ST-ers who actually like swimming:
Do you ever have to force yourself to take a day or two off from swimming??? I love swimming so much that I could swim 2 hrs/day, 365 days/yr, and love every minute of it. The only problem would be that I'd prob be swimming slower at the end of the year than at the beginning. I'd still be enjoying it but actually slower, plus also I might blow my shoulders out and have to take a month or two off. I guess my love of being in the water is why I have a hard time understanding the 95% of ST-ers who just tolerate swimming or outright hate it. Everyone's different I guess but for me swimming is the best; nothing beats it for "getting away from it all" ==>> you just put your head down and get into it and you don't have to talk anyone for as long as you want, plus when you're done you're all stretched out and totally relaxed...To quote Tigerchik, "Find the silken feel of your stroke and just melt into it..." Anyone else feel that way???

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I do. Swimming rules.

 Great, thanks!!! SWIMMING RULETH OVER ALL OTHERS!!!!!

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Thats the way I am. People say they clear their head while running... I'm able to space out and clear my head in the pool.

That is, until I run into one of the above mentioned denizens that make me laugh/question their sanity/or get annoyed.

"Hell is other people... in your lane"

I think I have a swimming pool nemesis. Every time I have ended up splitting a lane with this guy (who swims kind of sideways, really slowly, and ALWAYS in the fast lane) he has glared at me, kicked extra hard when we cross paths (why, I don't know) and asks me to move to another lane as soon as one opens up. Of course, because I'm kind of an ass, I won't move. The other day, I was swimming in the lane next to his lane and as soon as I got in he stood up, gave me a disgusted look, and moved one lane over. This guy, who I have never spoken to, dislikes me so much that he needs at least two lane lines separating us.

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my severely neglected blog

Maybe he's telling his friends on the swimming forums about the strange tattooed woman who keeps trying to disrupt his workouts?

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Ignorance is bliss until they take your bliss away.

I've never run across any swimming forums...Has anyone else??? I don't know that swimming lends itself to endless debate as much as cycling and running, for a number of reasons...especially since it's such a visual sport in the sense that it helps to be able to visualize the perfect stroke in your head...

Have any of you seen that Endless Pool thread??? Personally I would only rarely use one even if they gave me one for free. It seems like it would be boring like the treadmill...

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Just this AM I'm at the pool and all lanes are full. I stand at the edge of one with a man in it I've seen swimming before. I wait until he get to the wall, look at him and ask if it's ok if we share.

He looks right at me, says nothing, and swims away down the middle of the lane. There is no way he didn't see or hear me, we were looking right at each other, and he didn't push off again until I finished my question.

Luckily the guy in the next lane was getting out. Maybe he didn't speak English...

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Come crawling faster

If the guy in the next lane had not gotten out, I would've just gotten in the lane on whichever side I preferred, waited for him to get back so that there's no way he couldn't see me, and then start swimming. This will solve problem even if he doesn't know any English...

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"ANYONE can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Maybe this is a regular scene, but not for me...last night, a male gets into the pool at the gym where I work...in his tightie whities and starts to swim! Well, not really swim, but at least he got wet. I had to keep working with my training client, but I could hardly contain myself from laughing at the realization that this man would soon have his underpants around his ankles when he stood up.

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DFL > DNF > DNS

Oh man, this thread is hilarious. I spent a bunch of time yesterday and the day before reading this at work, thinking to myself how happy I am to not encounter any of these types when I swim - besides the people who decide to swim several lanes faster than their abilities, of course.

But today at the pool was a whole different story! The first guy, I don't know whether to call "nonsensical conversation" guy or "intentionally trying to screw with my workout?" guy. I'm still not sure what the eff he was talking about...something like "Did you feel slower on that one?" (I'm thinking "what one? I just finished my warmup...") I just said "No...did I look slower?" He replies, "I put the speed-brakes on you. I got right behind you and went like this..." and waves his hands (with paddles) in the water in front of him, "...but it didn't work." I think I just replied "Oh." Now, I'm not exactly sure what that means. I did notice him close behind me on my turn before my last 50, but was he in my draft, thinking he could slow me down that way? Was he trying to create turbulence for my push off the wall? And he admitted to trying to disrupt my workout? No freakin clue.

The second guy I'll call "I've never had a problem with you before" guy. I see him at the pool regularly, and he's pretty fast and I get the impression that he gets almost as annoyed as I do when there are slower people in the fast lanes. Today he was in the lane with me, doing a bunch of freestyle and backstroke with paddles, and every time he did back, he was right on the lane line, but every time he did free - right down the middle of the lane. We made it almost 1900 meters before an arm-collision. Not a big deal, but bizarre that he could keep in under control on backstroke but had no idea where he was on free.

The kicker was, while I was cooling down, I was groped by the guy doing backstroke in the next lane over. Not uncommon for someone doing back to reach under the lane line, but this was the first time in ~17 years of swimming that someone's made direct contact with the cash & prizes! That's the most action I've gotten in a while, so I'm not complaining!

Mark

Merry Christmas STers. I got to the leisure club pool 10 minutes after they opened at 0800, expecting an empty pool. Wrong! There were 12 people in the pool, 9 of which were in the two lanes that splits the pool down the centre! I can't ever recall seeing that many before, it's normally at very unutilised 25metre pool which is why I joined.

Anyway, there were 5 in the fast lane but everyone knew the ettique so no problems occurred.

What's the strange part? When I was changing afterwards one of the other guys told me that a woman was at reception complaining that there were too many people SWIMMING in the pool. My first thought was that she wanted a max number of people in each lane but her issue was that people were swimming in the lane! The punchline was that they were swimming too fast in the fast lane!

Crazy world we live in!

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"How bad can it be?" - SimpleS

Well, I can finally add something here.

Last night, I'm swimming my laps, and as usual I very rarely look at the clock (I hate it -- it does nothing but remind me how fkn slow I am). But at one point I sneaked a look up and couldn't see it. Huh, odd. Next lap I look again. No wonder. Someone had used it as their towel rack!! The middle section of the clock was covered for a solid 20 mins. You could still see after :05 and up until :55, and the people at my pool (who actually swim and use the clock) are pretty nice and didn't bitch.

Had a good laugh with mt lane mate over it. Clearly not a hardcore swimmer!

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Too f@ckin depressed from various injuries to care about having a signature line.

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