Plan B

One of THOSE mornings down at the pool today. A morning where, despite the best efforts of everyone, the morning resolutely refused to go to plan.

It is funny how disrupting a little thing like an alarm clock can be. However, if you are a pool manager and your job is to get to the pool at 5:15am to open the pool for 80 odd people for their morning swim, an alarm clock can be a pretty disruptive device. You can probably see where I am going with this.

Yep, it was one of those mornings where the pool didn't open. Everybody has them from time to time. We have been pretty lucky at Claremont pool in that it hasn't happened for years, but today if did so. It is up there on the list with lightning and a coach sleeping in for frustrating things that can competently throw out a session out the window

In the end we finally got into the pool at about 6:10 for a session that was due to finish by 6:30. As you can imagine most people had given the session up for a bust and had either headed home to get on with the day or headed to a different pool to try and salvage their morning. Both of those would have been good choices.

By the time it hit 6:00am I figured I might as well keep waiting as I was unlikely to do any training if I went home.

While it wasn't ideal, hanging around did seem to work okay. For the few that waited we managed to get in the water about 6:15 and after a very brief 200m warm up were able to do about half of the main set before the 6:30 squad came down for their swim. Coach Sal was very accommodating and let us finish the main set while the 6:30 squad warmed up and then we joined in with them to do half the main set again to bring the mileage up a bit.

The way the session eventuated was far from ideal, but it actually worked out okay.I certainly got in a good solid swim session, and I think the mixture of two sessions even meant I swam further than I usually would on a Friday. It just goes to show that with a bit of flexibility and perseverance even the most lost of causes can be recovered.

Probably a lesson in that for all of us.