5 minutes will make all the difference!

Dear Swimmers

So, this morning was our first early morning session at Challenge Stadium. It was a little chilly on pool deck, but in the water was lovely (apparently!). I had thought about setting up a side-line business renting out Ugg boots to get you comfortably from the changerooms to the pool without your feet getting cold...who knows, maybe it could catch on, but no doubt that'll be a lot of soggy post-swim Ugg boots to cart around! My suggestion is to wrap-up warm and have a nice, warm, thick towel waiting for you. Obviously this would be the same swimming at Claremont Pool too...it's just getting into the cooler winter months that is all.

There were a couple of the expected remarks of "it's soooo far to walk from the reception!" but really it's not that bad and we have to comfort ourselves with the fact that if it wasn't for this lane space availability at Challenge Stadium, there would literally be no squad swimming over the winter until Claremont reopens. For this I am extremely grateful and hope that you all can see the positives in this, even if it's just the fact that you all knocked out some pretty impressive 100m splits this morning with the pool being that good bit quicker than Claremont!!

OFFICIAL EARLY MORNING SWIM START TIME = 5:35 / 6:35am:

OK, so enough of the waffle then - one thing that we have decided to act upon with the slightly longer distance to walk is the official session start time. I asked Adam to meet you all in reception to get a good gauge of exactly when you'd be let in. All the clocks at Challenge (for your reference) run 3 minutes fast (this is true, seriously). Adam noted that you were actually let through reception at exactly 5:29am (real time). I was ready to greet you all set-up on pool deck and the first swimmer hit the water at 5:34am. Given that this is likely to be a standard occurrence we have decided to make the official start time for the 5:30am squad 5:35am. This will put the 6:30am squad back to 6:35am. Both squads will run for exactly 1 hour as normal. I am hoping this minor shift will not inconvenience anyone but allow the 5:30am squad in particular some slight relief from worrying about if they'll only get a 55 minutes session in! Someone asked why I would do that as surely this would only encourage people to be 5 minutes later getting out of bed in the morning (!) and if this is you then so be it, but please know that we are doing this to be fair to every member of the squad - fair go, mate! 

I will get the 5:35am crew started as soon as you get down on to the pool deck, so there's every chance that you might squeeze in a couple of extra minutes depending who lets you through on reception.

This change will only effect the 5:30am and 6:30am squads due to the reception opening time being the unavoidable hurdle that we have to get around here. 9:30am / 1:00pm sessions will still be at 9:30am / 1:00pm.

One final thing...the pool allocation details that I sent through last week have so far only been 50% accurate (ho-hum!) and as mentioned these are subject to change. Please always check the white board at the bottom of the stairs as you come through reception.

More food for thought on Busselton swim times:

Kindly sent through from Lindy Brand:

 

I had a friend of mine who is a bit of a stats guru (and a tri nut) look at the HIM swim times last week. He noted the following:


"the avg swim time for the top 50 finishers in 2009 was 26:16, 
the avg swim time for the top 50 finishers in 2010 was 29:18min - 
that's 3:02min slower on avg

, so if you went slower by less than that - well that counts as faster in my book!!!

 Luke McKenzie was 1:57 slower himself..."

 

Maybe of some comfort for those that did the HIM this year in terms of slower swim times… Apparently there is talk that the swim course was a little short last year, hence the difference.

Cheers

Paul