I made a mistake in my plan yesterday. Because I don't feel like I am workout out my upper body as much as I would like to, I decided to go to the local pool for some laps and when I do this, I normally will do breast stroke because I am not looking for efficiency, I am looking for maximum upper body workout and while Butterfly is technically more demanding in that regard, I cannot do that stroke or not for very long anyway. I can do breast stroke basically endlessly and I quite enjoy having access to air so often.
But there was one thing I didn't factor in before I went to the swim club and that was that it was a public holiday for a lot of people and once I saw the crowd in the pool I should have just turned around and left. Instead, I figured that "oh i'll just slot right in there" and well, this was a mistake.
This is not my picture but this is kind of what it was like. The lanes were marked off by strokes and in the breast stroke one you have to contend with people that are doing all manner of strokes including backstroke, butterfly, that silly survival side stroke and whatever the hell else they want to do.
I can relate to the people that were having difficulty controlling their trajectory with backstroke because I have that too. Unlike these people though I would never attempt to do this stroke in a busy pool during apparent peak hours.
I booked for 30 minutes but after 17 and getting whacked in the face and also a guy behind me that was constantly running into my legs even though the "burdan of avoidance" lies on whoever is behind, I decided to bail out early. Thankfullly, one of the lifeguards noticed my frustration and gave me a little waterproof token that entitled me to a free session in the future. The token is only valid during off peak hours and I think this is actually a pretty brilliant marketing scheme on their part. Let the people know who get frustrated by the crowds when they can come and not have the crowds. Since I have variable hours with my job this works out wonderfully for me and I will take advantage of it in the future.
I have no idea if this pace is good or not but I also know that this is not an accurate representation of my actual pace because there were many dangers during this pool sesh. There were arms and legs flying all over the place and honestly, that was a really stupid idea for me to attempt to be part of it.
My app pushed out another dataset and I have never heard of this before. SWOLF is a silly term that combines Swimming and Golf and it is simply a measurement of how efficient your strokes are. Basically if your app knows how tall you are, and how long the pool is that you are in, it can generate some sort of efficiency score and the "golf" portion of SWOLF probably comes in because a lower number is a better number.
I don't know what to do with this information other than be happy when it is lower I guess. Like a lot of my other training I am not looking to become a super efficient swimmer, I am just trying to work out my upper body.
My dream swimming workout is to arrive at a pool so empty that I think maybe the place isn't actually open for business and that I am trespassing. That is extremely unlikely to ever happen unless I genuinely do break into the place though, given where I live.
I don't know if I believe the 278 calories burned in 17 minutes but even if the real number is only half that much I am happy with it.