Balcones Pool

Today was my first time at Balcones Pool. I should have gotten up early to go to Barton Springs, but I was too lazy laying in bed and didn't. But I went ahead and brought my swimming stuff in the car to work in case I had the opportunity to get out around lunch time. I did, and so I decided to head to Northwest park to swim. But when I got there, the parking lot was suspiciously empty. I walked in and saw the pool empty and all of the life guards playing cards around a table. "Sorry, our pump is broken," they said. Aargh, there's a waste of time (and gas) driving over here for nothing!

So on the way back, I though that I'd check out Balcones. It's pretty close to my work, just in the other direction (it's north on Mopac, just off the Duval exit at the corner of Duval and Amherst). I found it easily and saw that a) it was basically empty, just a few lap swimmers, and b) it had *real* lane ropes, about six of them! And as an added bonus, it's a free pool, so I didn't even have to burn any of the punches on the swim card.

But the real bonus came when I jumped in; the water was actually _cool_. Not (of course) Deep Eddy cool, but I've swum in Ramsey and Northwest pools at this time of year, and I know what an Austin pool feels like in August, and this was not at all what I expected. I guess that they must have an aerator or something to keep the water from boiling in the Texas summer.

I had already planned a basic anaerobic workout because I only had a little bit of time left on my lunch, so I got in a short 1300 yards, including a 10x50 on 1:00, trying to swim fast and hold a consistent pace. Today my pace turned out to be about :33. Definitely not fast, but probably the best I could do given how little I've been swimming lately and how warm it was.