Summary of May

Today was my last swim of the month. This month has been fraught with pool leak issues, rainy weather, and tasks with the back yard.

	Total Time In Endless in hours	Total Estimated Distance  in miles
	7.98	16.34
Date	Time Spent in minutes	Estimated Distance in Yards
5/31/2019	40	2400
5/30/2019	10	650
5/29/2019	30	1800
5/28/2019	35	2000
5/27/2019	60	3600
5/25/2019	30	1800
5/24/2019	30	1800
5/23/2019	30	1800
5/22/2019	30	1800
5/20/2019	30	1800
5/15/2019	49	3000
5/6/2019	45	2700
5/2/2019	30	1800
5/1/2019	30	1800

This month I helped 3 up and coming sprint triathletes with some swim technique advice, and helped Oliver, Sam and Isaac as well. So it's been a great month!

Go Pro suction cupped to the floor mirror.

Most of the swims were in sets of 15 minutes, but I had a few that were sprint/distance reps that were programmed into the Fit@Home app.  Here's a summary listing of the various workouts I've got programmed:

Tomorrow morning I head to the GSL to help Josh and Chad with the race.  I have some friends from work coming. Hopefully we get every kayak filled and the race is successful.  Good luck swimmers!

Ferris Bueller - "I Can't Swim"

I remember watching this movie as a kid: Wargames. It was one of my favorites as I was fascinated with computers, and I also appreciated that it included a swimming reference:




It makes me happy to help people get to the point where they feel safe in the water.  And even more when they take their drive beyond into real competence and skilled!

If you, or someone you know would like some lessons and practice time swimming, let me know!  I don't charge anything. Just encourage membership in the Salt Lake Open Water Swim club.

The Pool is complete!

I finished the insulation and skirting around the pool.  The temperature control display is embedded into the front panel. I assembled a lifetime shed for all the pool cleaning gear.  I bought the pavers for the outside edge of the patio.  But the pool itself is 100% Except for the issue with the lights not running while the pool is operating.  Need to follow up on that one.

So far, I've put in 4 1/2 hours swimming in the pool and each time I'm thrilled with the experience.  I just watched this video clip about the amount of pee in the typical community pool.  It's scary.

One thing I don't have to deal with.  I definitely don't pee in MY pool.  I admit when I was in a lap pool, I didn't care. I guess it's a bit of a reflection on socialism. "It really isn't my pool, it's shared, so I don't give a crap." But with my pool, I'm obsessive about it's cleanliness and upkeep, so if I have to pee I'll get out.  I've reminded my kids with the hot tub to do the same. No guarantees with the kids, but at least they know that if they get caught Hell will follow.

Here is a quick time lapse of this morning's 30 minute swim (2 sets of 15 minute swims at 1:30 pace), wrapped up into one minute:



Gonna take the weekend off, to let my shoulders rest. Then Monday I'm gonna go for an hour swim (2 miles). Which will be a new PR for the year.

SLOW Service project and skirting the endless

Today I met Chad, Josh, Gustavo at the marina with their various family members for a trash pickup.  It was rainy this morning, but just overcast for the cleanup.  Which meant the mosquitos came out and they were out for blood.  I had some grabbers which made it easier to get down into the cracks of the big rocks.

It was fun to catch up with Chad a bit.

When I got home I started working on the skirting of the pool and got quite a bit done.  Got about 1/2 the pool skirting completed.  Can't wait to have it completed!

We put round up on the back yard cause we are starting over with fresh sod.  When the backyard is done it'll look profesh!

Boats and Pools

You know what they say about boats right?

Boats are a money pit

Well what is the inverse of a boat?  A Pool

Instead of keeping water out, we're trying to keep water in.  Well this past week I've been dealing with water leaks.  Fortunately I haven't spent a ton of money on figuring it out, but I did get to the bottom of it.

What happened is the installed motor system is attached to the edge of the pool through the liner "above the water line".  Well I took off the shell of the motor system, and sure enough the screws holding it all to the edge of the pool is actually BELOW the water line.  So the installer told me to keep the water line too high.  The water depth needs to be below the top of the system.

At any rate, I've figured out what's causing the leak, so I got everything reassembled and went for swim tonight, keeping the water depth lower than the screws.  More later on how I can prevent water from still making its way through those points in the liner.

But tonight's swim was kinda tough.  I'm definitely not in swimming shape.  I set up a workout on the app where I did 4 sets of 800 with 1 minute rest between each.

Estimated distance: @3000 yards with 49 minutes of swimming

Looking forward to consistent workouts now that I have a functional pool.

My first recorded swim

I'm keeping record of all my endless pools in a separate tab on my recorded swims.  They can't really account for actual mileage since it's just an estimate. But I can record the time spent, and the estimated distance as a separate metric.

My first impressions of Endless Pool

Pros:

• The full length mirror bottom is awesome. The test pool I swam in didn't have that and my vision of what mine would be like was spot on.  The best upgrade by far.
• The swim current feels natural and I was glad I got the upgraded High Performance version. It boasts a max pace of :56/100yds.  Plenty fast for me.  
• I can control the pool with my phone using fit@home app.  
• I can monitor and raise the temp of the pool from anywhere using my Gecko in.touch app.  

Cons:

• The programmable features of the fit@Home app is pretty wimpy.  It doesn't allow me to export/import from XML, which would be sweet! I have to use the app itself to create workouts, and the app doesn't allow me to create "set groups" for me to copy and alter. I have to create every single set from scratch. 
• The endless controller reminds me of a very simple 8th grade electronics student experiment. On/Off and Up and Down buttons.  That's it.  But with me using my phone instead, it doesn't really matter.  But it's not a great first impression looking at that controller.
• The security cover is definitely not a source of significant heat retention.  If the overnight low is below 60, you're better off putting a layer of poly foam to retain the heat.  The heater for the pool isn't super fast.  It takes a while for it raise that temperature.  If I were to do this purchase over, I would have gotten a hard top cover that includes insulation, similar to what I have for my hot tub.
• I'm worried that the middle of summer, the sun will heat the pool too much and it'll be too hot to swim in.  The pool includes a heater, not a cooler.  So I need to get a sun tent to keep the sun off it in the middle of the day, PRONTO!  As you can see, I keep the pool at an ideal 74 (for now), and it's at 79 degrees.  

A couple of unresolved issues as of now.  I will mark these as completed, once I get them fixed:

1. There is a leak. I'm losing about 1/2" of water over 24 hours.  I suspect the lights, but I'll need to troubleshoot this further.  Good thing though is I have an extended warranty, so worst case scenario I get a new liner free of charge.
2. The lights don't work the same time as the current.  What's the point of having lights if I can't swim with them on, only have them on when the current is off?  I called DC, and he claimed I needed a whole new electrical line to operate the heater/light system at the same time as the current.  A call to endless customer support revealed that isn't true.  They asked me to send a picture of the electrical connections and they'll help me get them up and running.  We'll see....

What if...

• Endless Pools should get an Amazon Alexa App integration, so I can yell out "Alexa, tell Endless to slow down!" which I can configure to mean to slow the pace by 5 seconds per 100.
• Apple produced a waterproof version of an iPad.  My phone is waterproof, but iPads currently are not.  I'd love to be able to position an iPad to the edge of the pool for me to see the stats. Get with the program apple! Get those iPads waterproof and I'll get one. Until then, I'm stuck using my waterproof iPhone8 as the controller.