Practice in Santa Clara

I just finished practicing at the Santa Clara International Swim Center. I'm still feeling like I'm on Michigan time so I woke up way too early and decided to head over to the pool at 7am PST. I was the first one in the water (unbelievably good luck). Some things I've noticed about the facility and meet:

• Pool water has a really weird taste, they say it's chlorine, but it tastes funky. Then again, I'm not used to outdoor pools
• Pool is really shallow, 5 feet at the walls, 7 feet in the middle.
• No permanent scoreboard, or timing system, they're on trailers
• The starting blocks looked like I made them.
• They have 8 JBL 15" full range speaker cabinets for music, I wish they were playing good music though...
• Plenty of helpful volunteers, mostly parents of age group swimmers, I made sure to thank them for their time.
• it's 8:18am and it's already feeling pretty hot (who would have guessed?)
• I might be the only one without a tan here.
• I might be the only one without sunscreen here.
• I'm probably the only one updating their blog on the pool deck
• I'm probably the only swimmer to have taken 8 business calls during warm up
• During warm up I felt pretty worn down since I did weights and 5k for practice yesterday, I did about 3k for morning practice today.
• They call the pool "the competition tank"

Here is a panoramic picture I took of the pool

That's about it for now, I'm excited to watch some great swimming. I don't have any events today, I'm just here to watch the magic happen. I have the 50 Free Saturday and the 100 Back Sunday, I leave Monday.