Thursday, October 1, 2009

endless swimming at Trispot!

For info on our yoga for athletes program..... see the link over there on the right!

Yesterday I got to spend a few hours over at TriSpot, a nifty place less than 60 miles from my house, and essentially the nicest candy shop for triathletes around! Located just on the east side of Buffalo Trispot is not only a multisport store, but it's a training center. With 8 computrainers in a race zone you can come and do testing, training or sign up for their indoor time trial series. I spent a bit of time in the brick room, which is located at the back of the store. For an hour I rode the spinning bike, for 30 min I ran on the treadmill and then I hopped into the Endless Pool. My favorite bike mechanics ; Will worked on my bike and the cutest Bull Dog ever kept taunting my desire to get a Bull Dog. Or take that one home.

Now I've tested these out but aside from a 10 minute demo I have not spent much time in one of these things. It was pretty neat, and very different. You swim in the middle of the pool as a current comes at you. It wasn't wide enough to have 2 swimmers swim side by side, but enough that you could easily swim into it. It felt weird, a cool kind of weird.

To set the pace, you used a remote control to set the pace clock. Because I knew I wasn't all that comfortable in the pool yet I set it to a 1:40 (per 100 yard) pace and for 15 minutes just swam really slow.

There are two mirrors in the pool. One directly below you and one right at the bottom of the pool where the floor meets the wall, at an angle. I tended to look at the one in front of me. I could distinctly see a few flaws in my stroke, which my swim coach constantly tells me of.

First I have "paddle hands" meaning I often swim with my fingers closed and my thumb sticking out, a result of a lot of pulling. Easy enough to correct.

Second I don't always tend to pull underneath my body. By watching the mirror and swimming slow I did just that.

I played around with paces and the current, trying to figure out how I would plan a workout in this thing. I wanted to do 10 X 100 on the 1:15..... so I set the pace to a 1:15, pushed off the back wall into the current and swam. The pace can bounce a bit, so setting it to 1:15 might mean it will vary somewhat from 1:18-1:14, not a big deal. If you started to fall off the pace, you could swim out of the current then to the front of the pool and jump back in.

There isn't a way to set 100's in an Endless Pool so I counted my strokes. Knowing I took 18 strokes per length , I counted to 72 and knew that was close. At that point I just drifted to the back wall and took 5 seconds of rest.

I really really liked the Endless Pool, I hope to use it once a month or so in my 2010 training, or at least in my winter training. I am an old school swimmer so things I sorely missed were: my lanemates, flip turns, and actual sets. I don't think the Endless Pool replicates open water swim conditions, because you don't swim into a current in open water. Or at least so much of a current that you go nowhere.

Kevin Patterson is the owner of TriSpot and he's done an incredible job creating an atmosphere where you can just come in, hang out, shop a bit, shoot the breeze, do a day's worth of training and have one of the areas best mechanics work on your bike.

However i think he's nervous I might beat him down in Clearwater. Shoot. I tried to keep my goals quiet. Now he knows. I thought it funny that another shipment of mallow creme pumpkins was on my car this morning.......

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