Transway Finning
Had my 1st shot at scuba diving at Transway Golf and Country Club, tucked behind New Town Secondary and Singapore Polytechnic, boasting of a small swimming pool which I arrived at slightly after 7pm.
Stepping into the dingy changing room put a stop to all the prancing images of a spanking new, posh country club toilet like the one at Changi Safra... after all...this used to be Warren Golf Club for civil servants as well. Chairs, tables and various frames were stacked in one corner of the toilet, the bathing cubicles were bereft of doors and faced a row of urinals, which reeked of ammonia and looked as if they hadn't been scrubbed in a few months. There was a sauna, which got Yao Hong and I pretty excited...but someone apparently decided some tables and chairs needed to use the sauna and stacked them inside as well. In comparison, the toilets in TRACOM were much much better, even though the place is probably older than this 'country club'.
The pool hadn't seen cleaning for quite a long time, and by the time I was done with one lap, the extra ingredients inside stung my eyes so bad I couldn't swim in a straight line, but it made it easier for me to tread water.
Well, I thought, given my swimming prowess, that I'd own the pool. I couldn't have been more wrong. Once I put on the mask, I started floundering. Everything went against a lifetime of training and conditioning. It didn't feel right being able to breathe underwater, and my head kept telling me that I needed to surface in order to get air. I had to consciously tell myself to suck in air from the regulator instead of surfacing. I couldn't exhale from my nostrils like I'm used to in order to clear the water from there and when I involunteerily did it, my mask flooded with water. For the first half of the session, I half felt like I was drowning most of the time. And everytime I went under, my sinuses demanded to be cleared, the areas covered by my mask started to itch....dammit I can't scratch THERE...
But once I got used to it, boy was it fun. Finning around the pool. Breathing the cool, compressed air underwater. Heck..that air felt purer than the air I'm breathing right now, and I sounded like Darth Vader. How cool is that?!? It would have had been more fun if the water wasn't so murky I could only see 3 lanes ahead of me, but what the heck...I can stay underwater for more than 3 minutes! And I can actually go around the circumference of the pool without using my hands to pull. Convenience at its peak. Not that it'd do any good with regards to the RXZ spare tire I have around my tummy....
Dammit...I'm so looking forward
Riding hard, fast, safely AND taking a few corners.
Stepping into the dingy changing room put a stop to all the prancing images of a spanking new, posh country club toilet like the one at Changi Safra... after all...this used to be Warren Golf Club for civil servants as well. Chairs, tables and various frames were stacked in one corner of the toilet, the bathing cubicles were bereft of doors and faced a row of urinals, which reeked of ammonia and looked as if they hadn't been scrubbed in a few months. There was a sauna, which got Yao Hong and I pretty excited...but someone apparently decided some tables and chairs needed to use the sauna and stacked them inside as well. In comparison, the toilets in TRACOM were much much better, even though the place is probably older than this 'country club'.
The pool hadn't seen cleaning for quite a long time, and by the time I was done with one lap, the extra ingredients inside stung my eyes so bad I couldn't swim in a straight line, but it made it easier for me to tread water.
Well, I thought, given my swimming prowess, that I'd own the pool. I couldn't have been more wrong. Once I put on the mask, I started floundering. Everything went against a lifetime of training and conditioning. It didn't feel right being able to breathe underwater, and my head kept telling me that I needed to surface in order to get air. I had to consciously tell myself to suck in air from the regulator instead of surfacing. I couldn't exhale from my nostrils like I'm used to in order to clear the water from there and when I involunteerily did it, my mask flooded with water. For the first half of the session, I half felt like I was drowning most of the time. And everytime I went under, my sinuses demanded to be cleared, the areas covered by my mask started to itch....dammit I can't scratch THERE...
But once I got used to it, boy was it fun. Finning around the pool. Breathing the cool, compressed air underwater. Heck..that air felt purer than the air I'm breathing right now, and I sounded like Darth Vader. How cool is that?!? It would have had been more fun if the water wasn't so murky I could only see 3 lanes ahead of me, but what the heck...I can stay underwater for more than 3 minutes! And I can actually go around the circumference of the pool without using my hands to pull. Convenience at its peak. Not that it'd do any good with regards to the RXZ spare tire I have around my tummy....
Dammit...I'm so looking forward
Riding hard, fast, safely AND taking a few corners.
posted by Metalfyre at
6/02/2005 01:06:00 AM
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