Swim lane reservations - love it or hate it?
I personally friggin’ LOVE them and sincerely hope they continue this practice after COVID is no longer a threat. Can’t even begin to say how amazing it is to be able to preserve an entire lane, no worries about craptastic circle swims midway through your interval set, and even the 45min slot I get is fine for me - makes me stay focused on the quality the whole time.
I hate the reservation process in my city. It open at 9 pm each night for all swims 2 days from then. If you are late (like 9:01 or 9:05) all the slots are gone. But assuming I get in around 9 sharp, its great for when I am actually swimming. We have 1 hrs slots so twice I have booked back to back 1 hrs slots with 15 min in between. So I just come 10 min late for the first slot and then spend it doing warmup and drills and short set and then do my main set after the 15 min break. But mainly if I want a longer swim day I just do a 1 hrs swim at lunch time and a 1 hrs swim at night and its always better quality than a single 2 hrs swim block
2 days is a pretty short window - that would annoy me too. In fact, in the first month that our pools sort of opened, I had similar problems - ZERO pool access despite reservations due to instabooking of all available slots the moment they appeared.
Now my local pool has a 1-wk window for booking and fortunately enough slots that if you’re a week out you can get the slot you want, but even 2 days out you can get some sort of time slot if you’re flexible.
Our reservations start at midnight and if you’re as late as 12:15am… you might miss one for the following week!
And we have to pay for them at $10 a time so it costing a stupid amount per week for a dual athlete family.
And the 45’ maximum time is annoying…
Hoping SF moves into the orange tier next week so indoor pools can start to reopen and add capacity to the pool system in the Bay Area!
Love it. Predictable, own lane, 60 minutes, can reserve two weeks out and it’s less competitive to sign up than the open swims all summer (diving boards, water slides, etc.). Only downside is we’re limited to 3x/week. I’m about to ask if I can reserve under my wife/kids names for myself after I’ve reached the 3x/week max.
Im in the love it category. Makes scheduling my day so much easier. Show up, jump in my lane, do my thing, and head out… at the exact time that works in my schedule.
Absolutely hate it.
Some days I’m out of the office at 5:30, some days 7:30. Tonight was the first night I dealt with reservations. The other pool I swim at is 6x the cost than the pool inseam in tonight, but it’s no reservations, I walk in whenever and almost always find an open lane. Sure?m, it’s insanely expensive, but once the Denver rec pools open back up, it’ll be fine.
45 min isn’t nearly long enough.
Fortunately, we don’t have a reservation system. I’m pretty sure I would hate it.
Not only would it not allow for flexibility (what if something comes up and I have to swim at 4pm instead of 3:30pm like I thought I was going to do)?
Likewise, my experience of other reservation systems for activities like this is that several people will reserve and then no show. So I wouldn’t get the slot I want and the lane goes empty.
Yes, I’ve had to wait a few minutes sometimes when I’ve arrived, but no more than 20 or so. With a first-come-first-serve system, you don’t have to arrive on-the-hour or on-the-half-hour, so when I arrive some are just starting, some are in the middle of their swim and some are finishing or near the end of their swim.
Our pool has been great and you can reserve weeks ahead of time.
BUT last week they let the geriatric arthritis group start their aquasizing classes again and as usual they get priority use of the 83F pool. if it was the 80’s it would be like Cocoon, in 2020 it is a Deathpool…so I found another place to swim even though it is more expensive and inconvenient.
I have to think that these responses are probably split between people who have predictable lives and those who don’t. If you are someone who has a job that is not 9-5, or own a small business, there is no way that a reservation system works. I often swim “after workâ€, and hit the pool on my way home, which could be 3, 5, or 7, just depending on how my day goes. I am fully aware that I may show up and all lanes may be taken, and that’s ok. But booking a time and guaranteeing I will be there at that time is all but impossible.
On the whole, don’t like it.
+’s
Get a full lane to my self
Can reserve up to 7 days out. Have figured out to reserve early
-s
45 minute limit: I need 1:00-1:15
My schedule is sometimes unpredictable
$5 fine if you don’t show up at scheduled time
Availability isn’t too bad, but likely to get worse when we go to indoor pool where state’s COVID capacity limit is 50% of outdoor pool capacity
I like it, yes.
The good: reserve up to three days in advance, 1 hour slots. I go for 6 AM, and the life guards have gradually relaxed the start time for this first slot so I could start 15 minutes earlier (facility actually opens at 5:30).
The bad: My pool (YMCA) initially reopened with 2 people per lane, splitting the lane, which I really liked. The lanes are about 8 feet wide so reasonable distancing. A couple of weeks ago, the local provincial health authority decided to “improve” social distancing by requiring pools to make lanes double width and put 4 people per lane swimming loops. We MUST swim loops, even if there are only two people in a double width lane (the teenage life guards don’t have the authority to allow splitting the lane). I contacted the health authority (voice mail) and pointed out that swimmers don’t exhale sideways and swimming loops means we are breathing the air (and viral particles, if present) that someone had exhaled, probably through the densest cloud of particles if you are right behind someone. The YMCA has taken up the cause as swimmers all over the city have been complaining. Hopefully it will change.
The ugly-isa: A kids swim team has started showing up, making it more challenging to book the early time. I counted 10 yesterday using one lane (although it looked like only 4 in the water at a time, but with the rest in a group on the deck while waiting a turn to swim). On the plus side, though, with a pool capacity of 16, that meant 6 people sharing three lanes, which works for me (except for the loop requirement). I really don’t mind have the group of 10 kids + coaches on the other side of the pool from me.
love
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OP here - I’ll clarify as well for myself, since I honestly forgot that it influenced my decision highly when I answered my own original question, that I find my optimal training for tri swimming at 1, maybe 2 pool swims per week and the rest on my Vasa erg (typically 2-3 extra hrs/wk).
On thinking about it, if I didn’t have my erg, and could ONLY use reservations as is for now in my pool, I’d probably find it slightly suboptimal as the cost per swim is high ($12 here) and I definitely would not be able to find additional slots that work with my schedule as is. I’m fortunate in that I only need/want 1 pool swim per week, so I can fit that in very easily on my off day or some other time and I don’t mind the cost/logistics if it’s only 1 pool swim . Definitely a different proposition at 4-6 swims per week!
No reservations at my local pools. Just first come, first served - but limited to a single swimmer per lane, and 60 minute maximum. I love the single swimmer per lane, and would even be willing to sacrifice the longer sessions I used to do (75-90 min) to keep the state of having a lane to myself.
I actually recommended to the city they only open up online booking ~4 hrs before the swim or at 8 pm for any swims that start before 10 am. this way only serious people would show up, because in my city you can book without paying so slots go unused. Or charge when you book, but in our communist country I doubt they will do that (they claim their quickly rigged together portal does not have payment capability, but the same city website uses VISA payment for parking tickets, so it must be doable.
In any case, I have an 11 am and 5:15 pm swim booked today and tomorrow morning 8:45 to 9:45 and 10 am to 11 am. I may cancel this afternoon in favour of a ride since we’re getting a perfect NorCal style weather day at the end of September, which in this part of Canada is almost never.
SAME.
The big loops at my local Y are killing me. I spend the entire 45 min swimming around the three 80 year olds rather than focusing on my stroke.
Also, 45min is barely enough time for a warm up and hard set.
SAME.
The big loops at my local Y are killing me. I spend the entire 45 min swimming around the three 80 year olds rather than focusing on my stroke.
Also, 45min is barely enough time for a warm up and hard set.
Hah - you literally described the vast majority of my pre-COVID YMCA pool swim experience to the T during the hours I can attend regularly which is about 90% of the time that I go there. Shared craptastic circle swim in the clearly labeled “FAST” lane where the average speed of the other people in the lane is typically 2:30/100yds, which in itself shouldn’t really be a problem if they know pool etiquette and can yield at the wall to the faster swimmer behind them, but that’s like 1 out of every 5 swimmers, which means most of my prior workouts were total mishmashes of 100s and 200s as hard as possible if the lanemates were cooperative, degenerating into 25s and 50s because of the congestion.
Which ymca ? Sounds like RockyRidge or Seton in Calgary if I had to bet.
Teams have different rules from AHS and totally different protocols vs the general public. I’d rather see an unavailable time slot and have them in there separately from the public at Rocky. Seton having 20 lanes is a better fit for a shared scenario.
My son swims at the University and the swim club is the only group allowed in the facility during practices. That pool is still closed to the public.
I think I would hate it. I may have plans to go swim at a certain time and then I’ll get sucked into a project at work and not be able to get away so that would not work for me.
The Masters group has reservations because they have a limited number of lanes and there’s only two people to a lane. If you don’t sign up right when the email comes out, then you’re probably out of luck. Plus, there is no actual coaching going on. You have to print out the work out and bring it and do it on your own so why pay for that since I have access to the pool because I also belong to the gym so I just swim on my own during open swim hours. No reservations for that and they only allow two people per lane, but I have never had to share a lane and sometimes there might be only one or two people there. But this is a 25 yard X 50 m competition pool and it’s set up for yards so there are lots of lanes.