Zurich - Pool Swimming Baseline

Oerlikon Swimming Pool

I’ve been busy since returning to Zurich so, despite working only 60%, I still feel I haven’t had enough time to go swimming as often as I would like.

One thing I hadn’t realized would be complicated when moving out of Zurich City and into an outlying area was that my year’s swimming pass would no longer be valid. I hadn’t realized that it covered only the city pools and not beyond that.

I’m lucky enough to have a local pool about 10 minutes’ walk from where I live and clearly this is really where I will want to go a lot of the time. Nevertheless, I will definitely use the city swimming pass for the summer season of swimming in the lake. Although my local pool also has an open-air pool (50m) for the summer (which I will no doubt also use), swimming in the lake is still the best.

Anyway, in the end I decided that I was getting myself wound up over nothing and I could easily afford to have a 6-month pass for where I live in addition to my year’s city pass. I was fortunate that the local pool has a flexible system where you can choose how many months’ subscription you want – in the city, you have either a summer pass from mid-May to mid-September, or you have the whole year. The swimming pass for the local swimming pool is actually very good value – I only need to go twice a month for it to pay for itself.

I generally find that if I go swimming in the morning before work, it’s easier to go to my local pool. It’s only 25m, but the big advantage it has is that it’s usually fairly empty and I get a lane to myself. The changing rooms are also more private than in the Oerlikon (city) pool.

At weekends, I go to the Oerlikon pool. This is better because it is 50m; however it attracts the more serious swimmers and I feel pressurized to swim faster than I’m really able. I end up stopping and resting to let people pass and it’s always busy. I’ve finally decided that my local pool is for practicing my distance swimming and the larger pool for practicing swimming faster.

I’m delighted to say that when I’m pool swimming, I’ve risen to the top 70% (ie, bottom 30%) according to my Suunto Ambit watch vs the top 100% (ie, bottom 10%) that I was when I was open-water swimming. My normal speed is currently a pretty consistent 2.3km/h in the local pool or even in the Oerlikon pool if I hit it on a quiet day and can swim at my own speed without having to wait for others to pass (vs 2.0 km/h in the sea). When I'm pushing myself at the Oerlikon pool, I get up to an average of around 2.6km/h or 2.7 km/h over short distances. It's normal for people to be faster in a swimming pool than in open water.

My improved percentile ranking when pool swimming vs open water swimming (I don't believe for a moment that my swimming has suddenly miraculously sped up!) supports my contention that the average open water swimming speeds collected by the watch are inflated due to people using the watch to measure windsurfing speeds, etc. under the rubric of open-water swimming. There will be less scope for large inaccuracies such as these when collecting pool swimming data - at most any unrealistic higher speeds recorded may be caused by people using aids such as flippers, but that's not so extreme as comparing open water swimming with wind surfing, for example. I feel much better now about my swimming speed (although it's still slow)!

I’m not noticing any improvement in my swimming so far, but I’m also not going frequently enough to expect it. Hopefully I will be able to settle down in my flat and focus back on the fun stuff soon.