This doesn’t seem like a tough concept to me, but apparently it’s confusing to a lot of people… specifically those that use the men’s locker room at Gold’s Gym. The TV in the locker room is there as background noise while you are changing. In the morning it is usually tuned to CNN and you listen to a section of the news as you get ready in the morning. It’s usually tune to ESPN during the day and at night. That’s fine. Listen to the latest scores and catch a replay of a great play while you’re getting ready. I have no problem with that.

What I have a problem with is people that think they should sit in the locker room and watch a whole football game. That is not the reason they put a TV in the locker room.

When I go out to swim, I bring my towel and shampoo with me. When I’m done swimming I take a shower and head back to my locker to get dressed. Last night as I got out of the shower I realized that my locker was blocked. There were 4 old men sitting around on benches watching the football game. Most of them were wearing gym shorts or swim suits. It was obvious that none of them had moved in at least 10 minutes. They were glued to the game. They didn’t seem to notice me standing there asking them to move. How many times should you say, “Excuse me,” before getting upset?

I made my way around them to my locker which clued in the two guys sitting on the bench directly in front of my locker that I was going to be naked soon and if they didn’t want a close-up of my butt in their face, they should move. As they moved away they looked upset that I had taken away their good seats for watching the game.

The locker room is not a sports bar! You don’t go to the locker room to watch the game!

Afternoon:
500 Free warm-up
12 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in between 1:12 and 1:20)
300 Free warm-down
———-
2000 yards

Evening:
500 Free warm-up
8 x 100 Free @ 2:15 (coming in @ 1:15)
200 Free warm-down
———-
1500 yards

We finally got up and went swimming at the Orem Rec Center this morning. Charmaine signed us up a while ago, but we hadn’t ever made it in until today. We had to get ID cards made. I had them use my old picture from when I was at Novell.

The pool there is LCM, which is a big change from the SCY pool we’re used to at Gold’s Gym. That’s about the only good thing.

Pros:
1- The pool is 50 meters.
2- The lanes are fairly wide (compared to the skinny lanes at Gold’s Gym).

Cons:
1- There are a lot more people using the pool at the Rec Center than there ever are at Gold’s Gym.
2- They also don’t have any swim clocks. This makes it hard to do anything other than just swim on your own.
3- The lockers require money every time you use them.
4- The lockers are half-size. This means nothing can be hung up, especially my huge gym bag.
5- The locker room is dirty and filled with old men that take 25 minutes to change.

Swimming:
1100 m Free

Thursday we went to lunch at Betos.  It had been a few weeks since we had gone there.  We also got flu shots in our shoulders, so I wasn’t feeling much like working out.  Then Alex finally made it down here for lunch on Friday, so we all went to The Italian Place.

It’s Saturday today and I’m working.  I messed up my machine on Friday by trying to uninstall all the various sound/audio drivers and components.  I have been having trouble getting ALSA to treat my PCI soundcard as the default.  It always finds my USB camera first and treats that as the default.  There’s no audio output to a camera, so I have been without sound for a while.  In uninstalling the various sound packages, I inadvertently removed everything (those package dependencies will get you every time).  So I started my day by reinstalling my machine.

I got it mostly back up and running again when Joe chatted me up to say that he had crashed the whole datacenter.  I didn’t think that was possible, but sure enough, it was down.  I kicked off a mail to Lin telling him about it and decided to go swimming.  Of course, Lin had solved the problem in the 5 minutes between sending the mail and leaving for swimming, but I went anyway.

500 Free warm-up
500 Free @ 7:00
100 Free easy
500 Kick
100 Free easy
500 Pull
300 Free warm-down
———-
2500 yards

Swimming is amazing for your health.  I was starting to get a bit stuff last night and was worried that I might be coming down with something.  This morning I wasn’t feeling 100%, but I came to work anyway.  When lunchtime rolled around, Joey was nowhere to be seen, so I headed to the gym by myself for some swimming.  When I got out of the pool, I felt so much better.  I really think the combination of the exercise, the pressure on your body from being underwater, and the chlorine help work out the crap from my lymph system and keep me healthy.  Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems to be working.

300 Free warm-up
6 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in under 1:15)
100 Free warm-down
———-
1000 yards

Right after I wrote that last post about not being able to swim because the Gold’s Gym in Orem had drained their pool, I decided that was just another convenient excuse and that I should figure out how to swim anyway.  So I looked up another location of the popular Gym and found one quite close to home.

Joe and Kyle used to work and go to the gym in American Fork prior to joining Bungee Labs.  They still tell stories about how nice the AF gym is compared to the crappy Orem gym.  From the outside, they are right.  It is definitely newer than the Orem gym, but it must get a lot more traffic.  The locker room was trashed when I got there.  Toilet paper was stuck to the floor in several locations.  It was quite disgusting.

The pool is roughly the same size as the pool in Orem.  Three lanes wide, twenty-five yards long.  The lanes in Orem are fairly skinny, compared to the nice lanes I grew up with at Cottonwood Heights.  The lanes in American Fork seem even skinnier.  I don’t think two guys with arms as long as mine could swim past each other in the same lane without having to modify their strokes.

The patio area around the pool in American Fork is much smaller than in Orem and it makes it feel very tight.  I also realized that the size of the overall gym is larger, which means there are more people at the gym for the same size pool, hottub, steam room, and sauna.  That means the pool areas are probably more crowded in general.  It wasn’t crowded tonight, though.  It was a ghost town.  I guess there are usually better things to do on a Friday night.

The pool in American Fork is also setup a bit strangely.  The slow lane is the lane furthest from the locker rooms, and has no entrances.  It has no ladders and no staircases.  How are the slow people (typically extremely large handicapped old people) supposed to get all the way to that lane?  They don’t.  And to make it worse, the fast lane is the lane closest to the locker rooms, and it has both a ladder and a wide staircase entrance.  The ladder and staircase cause extremely strange wave patterns as you swim, making it a horrible place for a fast lane.  Luckily, everyone seems to ignore the signs.  The old fat people that can barely walk use the fast lane, and the swimmers use the slow lane.  At least that’s what happened tonight.  The only other people in the entire gym were these two old people that had 4 or 5 sets of floatation devices and were mostly just resting in the pool while I swam.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in at 1:15)
200 Free warm-down
———-
1200 yards

Although it is highly unusual for me to sleep well when my wife is out of town, I must have.  I woke up this morning at 6:30 and felt like swimming.  I blame the combination of extreme cold (I let it get down to 62 degrees during the night) and the ultimate quiet of the awesome new house for my rested state.

The pool was empty when I arrived, but by the time I had changed into my suit, some of the usual suspects were getting into the pool.  These two, a fat old man and his fat old wife, are there almost every day.  They don’t swim.  They do their own version of the aqua-cow dance.  Luckily they were both in the slow lane, which gave me my choice of the remaining two lanes.

The lane line between the slow lane and the medium lane is always very loose.  The aqua-cows remove it 6 times a week (2 x M,W,F) so they can fit their whole herd in the pool for the aqua-cow dance.  They obviously don’t have access to a wrench, so when I swim in the middle lane I tighten the line two or three clicks by hand, but it’s still not as tight as it should be.

Knowing that these two old fatties would be making a lot of strange wave patterns that would probably cross the loose lane line, I chose to swim in the fast lane.  As soon as I started swimming the old women moved into the middle lane for no apparent reason.  It’s usually bad enough just to have to see her tennis shoes and fat legs as I swim by, but today was a special treat.  Today, like several other days, she almost killed me with the extreme amount of horrible perfume/hairspray she was wearing.  Why do you need perfume and hairspray to go swimming?  As if that wasn’t enough, she started doing a new spin move that crash huge waves of stink from her lane into mine.

It was pretty horrible, but I still managed to get in a decent swim.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 1:30 (coming in under 1:30)
100 Free easy
6 x 50 Kicking @ 1:30 (coming in under 1:00, 0:55, 0:50)
2 x 100 Kicking
150 Free warm-down
———-
1750 yards (1 mile)