The pool sessions are some of my favorite kinds of exercise and I got to cash in my free voucher at the swim club that was terribly busy the last time I went. I only cashed it in because the ticket was going to expire. I had a time in the afternoon on a weekday where I didn't have to work and just as I suspected, this is the best time to go to these sorts of places as it was almost completely unoccupied.
As I tend to do I was curious about how many calories a 25 minute session would burn especially if I wasn't really trying to push it. Remember, I don't do hardcore exercise that really hurts me because my idea is to get exercise into my life that I do not hate and therefore don't mind doing it the next time.
This was a 25 minutes session because your timer starts as soon as you scan the QR code and then a number pops up on the wall letting you know how much time you have left that everyone can see from the pool. It is a pretty interesting system actually. It will turn red once you time is up and while they aren't huge on the enforcement in the middle of the day, I feel as though 25 minutes is enough. I'm kind of bored of it at this point anyway.
I guess I have a pretty consistent pace when I am doing the breaststroke and there was only one drop off during my entire session. That was when my goggle strap came loose for some reason and it took me about a minute to get it sorted out. During that time I accidentally discovered that this pool must be salt water cleaned because the usual burning out of the eyes with all the chemicals didn't happen during this exposure to the water. This is incredible. I remember the chemical baths I had a child and this is a much better system. It doesn't burn at all!
If you are not familiar with "SWOLF" just know that it simply measures your efficiency as far as distance and number of strokes is concerned and it appears as though I am pretty consistent with the one exception being when my goggles fly off my head for some reason. In SWOLF a lower score is a better score just like in GOLF. I don't really know what to make of this and believe it is just some new sort of made up statistic so that the watches can claim to have other information that they are giving you.
I really wish I could get more swimming into my weekly workouts but because real-estate is so expensive in downtown Chicago, these places are kept really expensive. Almost none of the gyms here have swimming pools included in the membership fees simply because of the enormous amount of space that a pool occupies. This swimming club is really expensive with a half hour session normally costing around 10 dollars. That's just crazy talk to me but just like anything else in the world they have figured out how much people will pay for something and that is how much they charge.
I kind of miss the days of public pools when I was a kid living in more rural areas and I think I was able to get into the place for the entire day for less than a dollar. Such is the way of living in one of the most populated cities in the world I guess. I seriously need to look at moving away from here so I can experience those things again.
It will likely be quite some time before I go swimming again but maybe one of these days I should head down to the great lake that is right next to my neighborhood and see what that is all about. I have been in this city for years and haven't so much as dipped my toes into Lake Michigan.