Holiday Hours...

Between this week and last week, I've had to move my swims around a bit to deal with the modified holiday hours. Fortunately, aside from being closed on a few days the pool that I usually go to is keeping the same basic schedule so it was just a matter of moving days around. When I got to the pool for my planned session this morning, however, there was a sign that it was closed due to a pool malfunction. Making this worse was the fact that the other two pools I typically use are down for scheduled maintenance, so I had to take a look at my other options.

Unfortunately, the holiday hours are pretty pitful at most of the pools and none of them had anything longer than an hour. As I need about two full hours to do my scheduled workout, I figured I'd do the session tomorrow after sitting down with the schedules to figure out what works. Looking at things now, the closest pool that will have sufficient hours is in Thornhill (about a 30min drive) so I'm likely to be going way out of my way. The upside is that that pool (Garnet Williams) is open for 4.5 hours, so I should have enough time to do a few more drills than I'm usually able to get in. The downside, however, is that it is also a much busier pool which is likely to be compounded by the fact that the other pools are closed.

My other option is to head down to the city and take the opportunity to try out one of the 50 meter pools (Douglas Snow or the Olympium). It means a bit more of a drive, but the longer lengths will be a better simulation of open water swimming. I've wanted to try out the bigger pools for a while now, but having to go that far out of my way has always put a damper on that front. They don't have quite as long hours as Garnet, however they're open for more than 2 hours so I shouldn't have any trouble. The other benefit is that the Toronto pools appear to be open on New Years Eve whereas the Vaughan ones are on severely restricted schedules so I'd still be able to get two sessions in this week.

Either way, I'll have to do a bit more digging to figure out what I want to do. At this point what I'm leaning towards is trying out the Garnett pool tomorrow and then heading down to Toronto on Thursday. I havn't visited any of these three pools before, so it would be good to get a feel for what my other options are.