The coronavirus pandemic is getting worse and worse by the day. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, has just announced that all pools and gyms will close beginning December 12. I don't live in Allegheny County, but I live nearby, so I'm wondering when and if this becomes a statewide mandate like last spring. I'm a huge proponent of staying safe and reducing risk, so I will not complain if my pool access is prohibited. However, I need a plan.
Last spring, all pools were shut down for about six weeks. At the time, I was training for Ironman Lake Placid and swam a little over 18,000 yards in the month of February. I was using the pool at our local YMCA. Then, halfway through March, the facility closed. I just shrugged and kept running and bike riding until the end of May when I learned that IMLP was cancelled. If it wasn't for my wife's almost obsessive need to swim, I would not have started to swim again until the pool at my college opened up in the fall. But Shannan is a stubborn one, and she convinced me to go with her on the hour-long drive to Moraine State Park each week during the summer to swim in the lake. I'm not complaining here. I'm glad we did that.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention what Shannan was doing during the spring shutdown. She bought an outdoor pool and set it up in March when the air temperature was still cool and the water was even colder. She wore her wetsuit and strapped a bungee around her waist, and went swimming in the pool. I was very impressed with this...though not impressed enough to join her. That water was too cold.
I'm writing about all this now because I need to figure out what to do before the college pool shuts down. In the month of November I swam almost 13,000 yards, and my planned yardage will only increase as I once again begin training for IMLP. It really is too cold now to set up the backyard pool. First, the water will freeze, but more importantly, the pool has a fatal leak and needs to be replaced. Open water swimming is out as well, due to the cold weather. So that leaves dryland workouts. I really, really, don't like those because I'm not confident I'm doing them right, and they don't seem hard enough. No wait, those aren't my true concerns. I guess I'm just not convinced they are worth it. I don't see how exercising my arms with an elastic band is doing the same thing as swimming laps.
I know, this is my own stubbornness talking, and my concerns aren't even true. Swimming is, in one sense, a cardiovascular workout. If I cannot swim, it's not necessary for me to make up the deficit because I'll be doing biking and running to keep my heart and lungs and blood vessels in top shape. Swimming, in another sense, is a strength workout for muscles, and if I take time off from that, my muscles will miss it. It is this aspect that can be made up--at least a little--with appropriate dryland workouts. My plan, therefore, is to find dryland swimming workouts to do and do them. If I am unsure of how to do them, I will study them. I might even video myself to see if I am doing them correctly. And if I need to purchase more gym equipment, let's go. We just bought a treadmill. I might as well add to the collection. 'Cause who knows how long this pandemic will go on. I want to be optimistic, but I'm really not. Vaccine distribution won't proceed as smoothly as predicted since no one has experience doing it on such a giant scale.
I'm writing about that nowIt reopened for a time over the summer but it was under such financial burden that it closed again. Today the YMCA is open for a few activities but it's on life-support and if it comes back to life, it won't be until late 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment