Back to the pool - 9/23/11

Waaaay back in... late June?  I had an issue where my old HR monitor, that I had been using for the pool (bacause it had lap memory and was more water resistant than my Forerunner 305), had a dead battery.  Upon replacement, I must have been sloppy about putting it back together, because it got water in it - which ruined the display.  Since it was almost summer, I figured I wouldn't worry about swimming in the pool, and take advantage of the opportunity to do more open water swims.  This would give me time to go out and get another waterproof lap watch I could use for the pool when the time came.

Well, that never quite worked out.  I only swam a handful of times over the summer, and decided yesterday that I needed to get back into the pool at some point.  So I spent last night after work scouring the local stores trying to find a cheap, simple wrist watch.  I thought it'd be real easy, I was only looking for the following features:
- stopwatch with lap memory
- waterproof to at least 10ft

THATS IT!  Yet, I couldn't find one.  I hit (in order) Target, Best Buy, Sports Authority, Dicks Sporting Goods and BJ's.  Any place that had anything had HR monitors for $70 or more.  Dicks had watches, but they were all fancy Timex ones for like $50 (for the 50 lap model) or $65 (for the 100 lap model).  What the hell!?  Finally I went to Walgreens, figuring they'd have cheap-ass watches.  Well, they did - for $5 - but they had no lap function.

/sigh

I was really hoping to solve my problem with an investment of less than $15 - but I suppose HR monitors have gotten so cheap that the cheap-ass watches that were ubiquitous when I was a kid have been phased out.

So, it looked like I'd have to deal with a pool session with no way of keeping track of laps, or timing.  The lack of timing doesn't bother me - but I lose track of laps so quickly and easily that a counter is absolutely imperative.  If I concentrated on repeating a number in my head during the whole lap, then I'd not be concentrating on form - and I absolutely want to concentrate on form.

Anyway - I got my butt to the pool at about 7am this morning without any real plan or idea of what I was going to do.  It had been damn near a month since I last swam at all, so my only intention today was just to reacquaint myself with swimming.  Any hope that I had of improvement via various strength training I have been doing went out the window pretty quick, because I only got about 300 yards in before I stopped to take a breather.  Hell, I got halfway through my first lap before I remembered to breath bilaterally.  Obviously, I have some ground to catch up on.

In the end, I did 5 or 6 sessions of between probably 200-300 yards each - so total distance was anywhere from 1000 to 1800 yards.  After about 30-35 minutes, I called it a day and decided that I really need to make sure to hit the pool a good amount over the winter, and I also need to find a damn stopwatch!