A Really Fancy Gymnasium

This morning I met Laura for a swim at the really fancy gymnasium. Drew got an invitation in the mail for you and a guest to go try out the Reebok Sports Club NY for 5 days and he was gracious enough to let me & Laura use it. This morning Laura and I met for a swim at the fancy gym.

Once we were all checked in, we headed to the locker room. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of their locker room facilities because you swap your ID card for a key to a locker. I guess I didn't love having to worry about a key the whole time, since I'm used to using a combination lock on my gym locker everywhere else. Before we headed off to the pool, I needed to use the restroom and when I was trying to find it, I found a hot tub!

I immediately reported back to Laura and we agreed to cut our swim short in order to test out their hot tub. Since we had been planning on swimming for an hour, I had printed out a swimplan.com to keep me focused in the pool. Because we cut the swim short, I had to cut out a little less than half of it.

This is the original workout and the portion in blue is what I actually did:

Warm-Up
4 x 100 Freestyle Swim

Build Up (repeat 4 times)
1 x 50 Freestyle Breath Left, rest 0:15
1 x 50 Freestyle Breath Right, rest 0:15

Core
4 x 100 Freestyle Swim, leave on 1:55
4 x 100 Freestyle Swim, leave on 1:50
8 x 50 Freestyle Swim, leave on 0:58

Warm-Down
1 x 100 Freestyle Push & Glide, rest 0:20
1 x 100 Freestyle Easy, rest 0:20

I actually ended up doing 150 as a warm-down, so my total was 1350 yards instead of 2200 yards. I actually think that it ended up being a really good (and fast-paced) swim for me. The last time I went swimming with Laura I didn't have a plan and I'm realizing that I do much better when I have one. Even if it's not as fancy as this.

The pool itself was fine. For as large as the entire facility is, I would have expected a larger pool. I mean, there are two full-sized basketball courts, I would have thought they could have an 8-lane pool! I swam in the fast lane, which wasn't really that fast. At one point a guy with flippers came into the lane and I was still faster, so that just goes to show what "fast" meant at that pool. The lifeguard actually said that the people swimming in the morning were the fast crowd. My swim workout actually worked really well because it gave my lane a chance to spread out a little bit while I was waiting during the "core" portion of the workout. I had no trouble finishing the distances in the times allotted, so that was a good feeling.

After the swim, Laura and I headed to the hot tub. Soooooo nice! It was hot, but not too hot and it was bubbly and nice and relaxing. It really should be a requirement to have hot tubs at all swimming pools. Because the gym was so humongous, we didn't have a chance to look around, but we're planning on going again tomorrow and using the bikes and I'm going to lift, so I think we'll have a much better idea of how the rest of the gym looks. I'm really interested to see the rest of their facilities! And use the hot tub again, of course!

Time: 28:51
Distance: 0.77 miles (1350 yards)
Pace: 37:28/mile
Calories: 323
Maximum HR: 171
Average HR: 160