Too Hot

Toots usually swims around 15-25 kilometres a week in water temperatures of around 27 degrees.  I personally (and clearly not just me) find this too cold to actually enjoy being in - though I grant you it's not 21 degrees like the pool in Graben was! - but I understand why it's the way it is for competitive swimming and training.  It just means I don't willingly take my kids swimming.

Ever since coming back from Germany though the water in the pool here in our toon has been at around the 33 degree mark*.  Wonderful for the likes of me, but far too hot for the swimmers swimming their tens of kilometers.  As a result they've been reduced to skills sets day in day out, rather than the VO2 or threshold sets they regularly swim (I've still to work out exactly what those last two are other than "they're hard"), so Toots has quite enjoyed the easy start back to swimming after her three weeks off.

For me, the increased warmer temperature has meant it's the perfect time to show my motherly love and take all the kids swimming.  Except it's now taken me 3+ weeks to find the time to fit it into the schedule... and so today when we finally got there we discovered that the pool was back down to 29.7C.  Still too hot for swimmers, but definitely still too cold for me!  So after the requisite play on the mats in the big pool, Joey, Lightning and I (Toots and Tiger were happy enough trying out the AquaRun which you have to be 8 to go on) hopped over into the shallow baby pool, which thankfully was still sitting at 33.8 degrees.  Now that's my kind of pool.

*Our local swimming pool is old.  So old that it needs to be knocked down and replaced. Work has now started on the new Academy, which will include a new Community Centre and an all singing-all dancing swimming pool, but until then we need to live with the 48-year old pool we have.  Problem is that the 48 year old pool also has a 48 year old heating system, which apparently does not have easily sourced parts.  Or that's the story the swim club is being told...