Today wasn’t a huge touring day. At noon, the US climbing team shuttled off to a gym to workout together this afternoon. So, this morning the girls and I walked around the Olympic Park some more. About a city block from the hotel is a track and field venue, though it doesn’t look big enough to have been the main track and field spot...maybe a warmup track. Outside the venue was a huge sculpture, The Sprinter which was really nicely done. It was moved there after the Olympics - during the Olympics apparently it was with several other sculptures of gymnists and other sports figures and they were perched on 30 meter pedestals.



Not too far from this sculpture and directly diagnal from our hotel is this myriad of poles. Each pole either had a list of names of Olympians who particpated (alphabetically), or the stats and results from the events. Often the poles were themed for the event, so for example, the pole that applied to crew had oars attached to it, the basketball pole had a small hoop sticking out from it. If you look closely you can see the pole with the oars on it (has a white paddle about 2/3 of the way up the pole.)



The paralympics were also represented on these poles.

Chauncey found the “Co” pole and we found that Cox is a very common last name :-)



After we spent time at the poles, we found an outdoor chess game and I played Chauncey, Ali and several other interlopers who tacked on to them. We had a lots of people come over and watch - some Australian boys chatted us up and probably were looking for an excuse to meet some American girls. Jesse and Lisa found us there and Jesse joined the girls team. Marah Bragdon came by and joined the girls team and pretty soon it was me against the Quad-Brain team.





I barely skated by with a win when it was all said and done. It’s pretty hard to pull one over on a group.

After that rousing game of combat chess, the climbers had to assemble and they went off to the climbing team training.



Alishaunia and I went to the Acquatic center where the highlight of my day was swimming in the fast lane of the main pool. I worked myself out out good which didn’t take too long.






The water was pristine and I’m confident I’ve never swam in such a beautiful pool before in my life.

I spoke with various guards about the pool and found out that the same designer designed this pool as the one in Bejing. It even has the extra buffer lanes on the side. The depth was about 7 ft on the ends because itwas about a foot over my head and it ramped down to 3 meters in the middle so it was over 10 feet deep in the mid section. Apparently the Australian swimmers remarked that the pool in Bejing was a very similar layout, down to the warmup pool and everything.

Here’s a shot of the warmup pool. There’s a walkway that goes across on a upper level that splits the area between the main pool and the warmup pool.



One of the unique things about this warmup pool is that they can adjust the depth of it to be very shallow or deeper - almost 10 feet deep. It’s a fixed depth on one end and then about 15 yards from the fixed end, it can change depths all the way to the other end.

If you died and went to swimmer’s heaven, this would be it.

The photos from today are on this album.