Jarred, Eric and Miguel sit shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder behind one mic in Texas for the first-ever Rule Your Pool Podcast recorded in the same room. We didn't know how to set up multiple mics, so we made do. Also, Miguel says stuff in spanish that lead Jarred and Eric to believe he's making fun of them. They recap Jarred's Swim Across America experience, which is funny because he lived to talk about it. But the core of the episode is talking about swimming pool winterization.
00:00 - Intro - We're doing it LIVE
01:54 - Orenda help line rings with people asking about winterization
03:19 - The type of safety cover affects water chemistry
05:20 - Winterization is like bear hibernation
06:21 - Sanitizing and Balance: two separate things
08:28 - Winterization kits miss the point
11:38 - Even sitting next to each other looking at the same laptop, Jarred is still somehow not looking at the show notes
14:24 - What is a winter watch program?
15:32 - Spring openings
19:54 - What are calcium crystals?
22:04 - Winter dust
23:22 - Swim Across America recap. Jarred survived...barely.
30:13 - Introducing our spanish podcast hosted by Miguel, Controlando la Piscina
30:56 - Summary. Thanks for listening!
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Connect with Orenda Technologies
Website: https://www.orendatech.com
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Swim Across America | Team Orenda: https://www.swimacrossamerica.org/goto/orenda
86. Winter is Coming (Again)
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Welcome back everybody to the Rule Your Pool podcast. This is episode 86, and this is a special episode because we are in Dallas, Texas right now at Orenda headquarters. And for the first time ever, we are sitting in the same room. And it's not just Eric and Jarred, though Jarred is here. We also have Miguel Chavez here, Miguel say hi to the audience. This is your first time on our podcast.
[00:00:23] Miguel Chavez: Hi everyone. I'm really glad to be here. I'm usually running my own podcast in Spanish. If you've heard it, it's called Controlando la Piscina if you're interested. If you have some guys that speak Spanish and want to learn what we learn every week in this podcast. We also have it in Spanish.
[00:00:38] Eric Knight: I didn't get a word of that, Jarred. Did you?
[00:00:41] Jarred Morgan: No hablo español.
[00:00:42] Eric Knight: Maybe he'll speak English later in this podcast, but for now, I'm just messing with you, Miguel. Yes, we do have a Spanish podcast. Every episode that we do here in English. Uh, basically Miguel, I mean, We could talk about this further down the episode, but essentially everything we do in English is being converted by you into Spanish.
[00:01:01] Miguel Chavez: That's correct.
[00:01:01] Eric Knight: So you're about what 14, 15 episodes in right now?
[00:01:05] Miguel Chavez: The 14th episode was just released last Friday.
[00:01:08] Eric Knight: You know what you really need? You need Blue, the cat to walk across your keyboard. You're trying to catch up to us now.
[00:01:14] Jarred Morgan: You need Blue, the el gato to walk across the keyboard. Yeah. We have a Marge here though. Everybody.
[00:01:19] Eric Knight: Yeah, we have Marge the cat here. So you've got to get a cat to walk across your keyboard and you need a co-host that doesn't read show notes. So find someone.
[00:01:28] Miguel Chavez: We'll see how it goes.
[00:01:29] Eric Knight: Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, in this episode, we are going to recap what we just did here in Dallas, yesterday, which was Swim Across America. And furthermore, we're going to talk about the winter because winter is coming again. And we get a lot of questions about this on our hotline. So without further ado, this is episode 86. Winter is coming. Again.
Hotline calls about Scale during the winter
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[00:01:54] Eric Knight: All right, Jarred, we get a lot of calls on the hotline specifically asking what do I need to put in my pool to winterize it so I don't get scale? Even though we know it's not scale. It might be winter dust, it might be crystals, but you're not going to get scaled during the winter.
[00:02:27] But before you put a cover on the pool, the main question is what do we do? How do we winterize it our way? How many of those calls have you been getting?
[00:02:34] Jarred Morgan: Right now, since it's that time of year, we are definitely getting more than normal. And we're telling people basically how to put their pool to bed. The reason why it's extremely important to start thinking about this ahead of time, as we've made a major update on our app, if you have been paying attention, or if you listen regularly, you will know that.
[00:02:52] But there's features that we've added along the way that are specifically designed to help you manage your pool better and not fight it. Like for example, the pH ceiling. Or the future alkalinity calculation that is now on there. Because everybody needs to understand as these temperature changes happen, as you close a pool down, you need to plan accordingly for these specific items so that you do not run into problems when you go to open it.
Your type of safety cover matters
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[00:03:19] Eric Knight: Well even on a weekly route, we are concerned more about where's the LSI going to be when you come back, as opposed to where it is today. Like when you immediately treat it. Now, you obviously don't want to over-correct and go red on the LSI at any time, but you can make your corrections on a weekly route into the yellow, knowing that the pH is naturally going to rise up into the green.
[00:03:39] But when we winterize, we're not talking about a seven day timeline. We're talking about several months. And that's a huge difference. It actually matters more the type of safety cover that you have versus the type of surface you have. So you could winterize a vinyl liner, fiberglass, or gunite pool basically the same way for a solid cover.
[00:04:01] And you can do the same thing on the surfaces for a mesh cover or no cover because the cover matters more than the actual surface type. Because the LSI is the LSI. Water is water. And the question is carbon dioxide. Will you have CO2 that is able to escape to get up to that pH ceiling? And are you going to have dilution from rain and snow?
[00:04:20] Now Miguel, most of the territories you cover are in the South, like Southern California, South Florida. They're not winterizing at all. But they are getting dilution in Florida, but not Southern California. So what are some of the differences that you're experiencing out in the field?
[00:04:35] Miguel Chavez: I think all across the board it's very common to see that people just tend to ignore temperature. Whether it is for the winter, or whether it is in their hot tubs or spas. Temperature also plays an important role in that situation. So even though we're not facing a lot of winterization in South Florida, or Texas or California, they still have to take that into account, that temperature is going to be an important factor.
[00:04:59] And I do receive some calls from New Jersey and up there from that area. And people tend to have problems and they have calcium crystals when they're opening their pools because they tend to fail to realize that two of the moments when they're going to have the most damage to their pools is when they do a startup, and during the winter.
Winterization and Hibernation
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[00:05:20] Eric Knight: I kind of liken winterization to the hibernation of a grizzly bear. If you have a bear that goes to bed hungry, it's going to wake up hungry in the middle of the winter, and it's not going to be happy. But if that bear gets fed and eats all the salmon all year long, and it goes to bed fat and happy, it's going to hibernate throughout the winter. It's going to wake up just fine. You do not want your water to wake up in the middle of winter because it doesn't have enough of what it needs when that temperature drops.
[00:05:46] That's where you start to get fading vinyl liners. That's where you start to get degrading gel coats of fiberglass pools. And then eventually those degrading gel coats get oxidized and they turn white. We call that chalking.
[00:06:00] We also see, of course, calcium crystals, um, winter dust, ghosting, just general discoloration of cement-based finishes. And it's because the pool was not winterized properly. If you winterize a pool properly, spring opening should be a breeze. And there's really two disciplines of this. There's balance and there's sanitizing.
Sanitizing and Balance
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[00:06:21] Eric Knight: Sanitizing just means keeping your pool clean. The way we winterized that is with enzymes, phosphate remover, and chlorine. And of course, physically cleaning out all the debris. And then throughout the winter, keep your leaves, pine needles, whatever else, off the cover. That's basically it, it's not that difficult to do. But you'd be surprised at how many people call us and talk about, Hey, we've just had piles and piles of leaves on this mesh cover and we opened the pool and it looks like tea! You know, it's like brown, dirty water because all of that decaying organic material was sitting on the cover for months getting rained and snowed on.
[00:06:57] And my thought is why did you leave it there? Why didn't you get a leaf blower and just blow it off? It's not that difficult to do, but yet, maybe that's something that people expect the pool company to do. And if you don't have them hired on the winter watch, why would they do it? They're there. They're not in the backyard.
[00:07:11] Jarred Morgan: Well, cause most people aren't paying attention to their pool in the winter time. Which is normal. It happens. But we're trying to change that narrative so that we can pay attention in the winter time because we understand that's when some of this damage and a lot of the damage to your surface is going to occur. So this actually came up a couple of years ago. Whenever we were digging in and looking at pool crystals on plaster surfaces. And the winter watch idea came about because we figured out that as water sat stagnant, and your LSI wasn't balanced, it created this problem. The stagnant water promoted the growth of these crystals, because it just sat there. And it was over many, many months.
[00:07:50] We first came up with just peeling back a corner and getting a brush or something in there just to move that water around occasionally. Which then turned into, well, then if you could string a sump pump over here in the water and just turn it on, you know, periodically to move the water as well, that's obviously a level up version of what we're talking about to move the water. If we can move the water. We can make chemical adjustments during the winter time.
[00:08:14] It's a value added service that if you're a service company, you can be doing once a month, once every six weeks, or if you're a homeowner just periodically go out there and check these things so that you know you're not damaging the surface over the winter.
Winterization kits miss the point
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[00:08:28] Eric Knight: Well, it's chemical adjustments for balance, not necessarily sanitizing. Let's talk about winterization kits. Now I know Miguel you're relatively new to the industry, but if you were to go into a pool store and buy residential closing kit, you're going to have a type of shock. Right? Jarred, I mean, you've seen this shock, algaecide, sequestering agent, um, maybe something else. I don't know. But those three for sure.
[00:08:51] To us, that's missing the point by a lot. Chlorine shock in the fall? I mean, I guess it won't hurt you, but it's also not really as necessary as you might think. Because the colder the water gets, nothing's going to be reproducing. You're not going to have algae reproducing below 55 degrees or for our international audience, about 13 degrees Celsius.
[00:09:12] Nothing's reproducing in that water. Now you do want to get it out while it's still warm. Don't get me wrong. But focusing on chlorinating all winter long is kind of irrelevant. What you should be focused on is balance. Because that's what really is going to matter in the longterm. And then if you have a mesh cover, of course, tannins that come from organics that can come through that mesh cover as rain and snow dilute it. Those will get in, but they're not living. So it's just another thing to think about that contamination is going to be really dependent on the type of cover that you have.
[00:09:46] Jarred Morgan: So let's get into the, the winter watch. Why and how often, and what are we doing specifically? And I think we need to understand that when we're talking a winter watch here, we're balancing the LSI. Okay. And in the wintertime, the easiest way to balance the LSI in our opinion is keep an eye on your calcium hardness level and your alkalinity. That's really all we're trying to manage. Uh, if you can do those things and keep them in a happy level and keep your LSI balanced when the water gets down to 33, 34 degrees, that's the key.
[00:10:16] And as it rains and snows, and it sits on the cover and dilutes the top layer of the water that is closed, we need to make sure we mix that up so that it's not, you know, stratifying in your pool if it sits stagnant. That's why we're talking about moving the water and making chemical adjustments.
[00:10:33] Eric Knight: You also want to ease into the winter and you want to ease out of the winter. You don't have to. But we want to, if we can. So the idea that you have to get your calcium hardness up in the winter is true. But a lot of questions that we get is, well, if I add, you know, if I get up to 500 parts per million calcium hardness right now in September, I'm going to have a purple LSI today. And that could be true. So the better way to do it would be to get up to maybe 400 today, and then next month you get another a hundred parts per million in, as the temperature drops down. And that really depends on where you live. The pace in which you winterize is determined by the temperature that you're dealing with.
[00:11:13] If you're in Michigan and it's going to get colder a lot sooner. Then get it in sooner. If you are in Virginia, you may not be that cold for another month and a half or two months. So you have more time. So just gauge it based on where you are and that's another benefit of the winter watch. You could actually hire your service company to come there a month later and then add additional calcium chloride.
[00:11:38] And that's another thing that is on the show notes. That is it's in front of all of us. We're actually all looking at the laptop, but Jarred is still finding way to not read them. Which is amazing. He's just looking away at the wall. I don't know. How, how are you doing that?
[00:11:50] Jarred Morgan: Y'all you don't understand. We're sandwiched here and probably a
[00:11:54] Eric Knight: shoulder to shoulder.
[00:11:55] Jarred Morgan: Three square foot area in front of one microphone. And it's closer than I really want to be to Eric.
[00:12:01] Eric Knight: We're like a doo-wop group from the fifties where we only have one microphone to sing into.
[00:12:05] Jarred Morgan: So I'm trying to look everywhere except in Eric's direction.
[00:12:10] Eric Knight: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Jarred. Miguel you buying that? Or is he just playing hard to get?
[00:12:16] Miguel Chavez: No, I think he likes to look everywhere. It's trying to stay creative, you know?
[00:12:20] Eric Knight: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's what he's doing. That's what he's doing. But we can all agree he's not reading the show notes. Uh, now Miguel, what are some of the questions that you get from the Spanish speaking callers that call our hotline?
[00:12:36] Miguel Chavez: Well, most of the times they take the reactive approach. Once a problem shows up, then they try to fix it. And it's happened a few times where this customer keeps doing things the same way he's having the same problem over and over. One of the problems that we see a lot when we have different problematic situations is that the key here is communication.
[00:13:01] They have to have real expectations with the customer and the homeowner needs to know that service during the winter is also an important part of pool care. And as long as the pool professional and the homeowner are both aware that this is necessary, that this is something that they have to do. Or they'll pay the price. They'll pay the consequences. Once it's time to reopen the pool. Everybody's going to be in a good spot.
[00:13:26] Jarred Morgan: This kind of ties into an episode or two ago when we talked about is good enough, the enemy of greatness. And this is specifically. You know, addressed here. If a winter watch is above good, you need to go that extra step and that extra mile and provide value to your customers.
[00:13:43] And this is part of that conversation of greatness that you can do. Like Eric saying, blow leaves off the cover, get the pool maintained and balanced throughout the winter to add that value to your homeowner and explain it to them upfront. Communicate. Why? Why is it important? Oh, you should know by now why it's important and you can take that message and explain it to your customers or send them the podcast first you know, I don't care.
[00:14:06] Eric Knight: Yeah, let us say it. We can handle that. We can handle homeowners listening to us, even though we're not quite at that 70 listeners that we're striving for, but this episode might get us there. What do you think Jarred?
[00:14:17] Jarred Morgan: We'll just wait till we start talking about Swim Across America. We might explode the 75.
[00:14:22] Eric Knight: We're going viral on this one.
What is a winter watch?
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[00:14:24] Eric Knight: So let's talk about what is this winter watch? Well, you're going to be peeling back a section of the cover, and you're going to be moving water around to get a sample of water. You don't want to just grab a sample of stagnant water. You want to move it around. So the sump pump idea is great, or at a minimum, a brush of some kind to stir up some water.
[00:14:41] Grab a good sample of water and then warm it up. Because you're not going to get accurate readings of cold water.
[00:14:47] Jarred Morgan: Specifically calcium, your calcium reading is not going to be accurate below what, 60 degrees?
[00:14:53] Eric Knight: Uh, or so, I mean, it depends on the test kit, but I think every test kit manufacturer acknowledges at some point cold water distorts readings.
[00:15:00] Jarred Morgan: Warm it up.
[00:15:00] Eric Knight: Warm up the sample in water bottle, tuck it in your jacket or whatever, and then test it. So what a winter watch visit is, is primarily blowing leaves off the cover, if you have them. Getting a good sample of water, warming it up and testing it. And then maybe adding calcium. But honestly you may not have to add anything until the spring. And then when you're in the springtime, you know, a week or two before you open up, put PR 10,000 in there to get a jumpstart on things so that when you open it, all you're doing is cleaning it out anyway. And you just have that one less step.
Spring openings
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[00:15:32] Eric Knight: So it's one visit before opening that you would do the phosphate remover. You can do the enzyme then too, if you wanted. Everybody does it a little bit differently, but the idea is optimize your route. Optimize how you're opening pools in the spring by closing them properly in the fall.
[00:15:47] Jarred Morgan: Well and what this also does is it kind of minimizes the scramble whenever the spring rolls around for everybody that wants to pool open. And the problems that are associated with. You know, you open a pool in late may or whatever that is. Well, the water's warming up. More problems are going to occur as the water gets warmer. So that's why there's this mad dash to get these things open so you can get them balanced. Yeah. Well, you can get some chemicals in there on a winter watch program a month and a half before or a month before, you're going to be better off than the next door neighbor who didn't do anything until they decided to open the water in May 20th.
[00:16:22] Eric Knight: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt as the water warms up. I mean, the Delta of temperature from being in the thirties to the sixties, by the time they open it. You know, 30 degrees or more Fahrenheit. That's a massive difference on the LSI. But it also gets warm enough so that things can start reproducing again. So then chlorination starts to become a lot more important.
[00:16:43] The idea is prepare your water ahead of time for what you know is going to happen. And what that really boils down to is having a foundation with calcium hardness. Especially if you have a mesh cover. Go back and listen to our episode, I don't remember what number it is, but you can go back and listen about the type of pool cover matters. If you have a mesh cover, that is an advantage in some ways and a disadvantage in others. The advantage is CO2 can leave, which means your pH can get up to its ceiling and stay there. And that's good. And you can also get dilution to reduce if you had really high TDS, but more importantly, cyanuric acid. But you're also going to be diluting calcium hardness.
[00:17:25] You need to be aware of that. So when you winterize a mesh cover or no cover, you need a lot more calcium hardness. You don't necessarily need a lot more alkalinity. Because the pH is going to rise. So in that circumstance, if you need to pick a calcium harness and an alkalinity that allows you to be LSI balanced in cold water when the pH is at its pH ceiling.
[00:17:46] This is why we added it to the app. When you push show secondary readings, drop the temperature on the LSI and look at what your pH ceiling becomes when you have that alkalinity and calcium hardness in those settings. And if your pH at that pH ceiling is a green LSI at your coldest temperature, you're good to go. That's awesome. Good for you.
[00:18:08] Now a solid cover is a little different. You need a little more alkalinity because when you put that cover on CO2 can no longer escape. So you need that extra insulation of alkalinity to force that pH higher so that you can be insulated for the winter. You do need calcium, but you may not need as much because you're not getting dilution. One exception to this would be the solid covers that have that dilution hatch in the middle. I've seen a few brands that do that, that they actually allow for dilution, but they don't allow for CO2 to escape.
[00:18:37] So if you have any questions on that, contact us. You can go to our help center ask.orendatech.com. You can email ask@orendatech.com or podcast@orendatech.com. Anything you guys want to add before we start talking about Swim Across America?
[00:18:53] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. The one thing I wanted to add here is whenever we talk to customers, a lot of times we'll send a recommendation for our calcium level, for example, at closing, and we'll say 500, 550 sometimes. And people are like, well, that's too high. I'm going to have scale. And just understand that our approach to scale per se is scale is fine. We can fix scale. A lot of products can fix scale, but you cannot fix etching. You cannot fix aggressive water problems that occur after the fact. And we also understand that when we tell you to close a pool at 500 parts or 550 parts calcium, that's generally for pools that are up in New York, New Jersey, Michigan.
[00:19:30] You know, those areas where it gets extremely cold. You might not need 500 or 550 let's say if you're in Georgia. Okay. This is tailored for your pool and you need to take this water temperature that you're going to get to into consideration. And every pool is going to be different. So play with the calculator. Get these levels where you think they're going to be, get the temperature where you think they're going to be and plan accordingly. And that's it.
What are Calcium Crystals?
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[00:19:54] Miguel Chavez: There's one thing I want to say. So I think most pool professionals can agree that a faded liner or discoloration is because aggressive water. They recognize that. But I've seen that there's still a little bit of confusion about why calcium crystals appear. Some people tend to think that it's some sort of calcification or they call it crystallization. They're like, oh, it's because my water was too oversaturated in the LSI. So can you go and explain a little bit more in depth, chemically what's happening when you start to see those calcium crystals during the winter?
[00:20:26] Eric Knight: Certainly. And we do have another episode Miguel, on calcium crystals. And we can put that in the show notes below of what episodes those are. But if you have a cement based finish. And you open that pool up in the spring and it's got sharp calcium on it. That is not scale. Now I say that it's only because in these years that we've been looking into it, it never has been scale. Scale is an over-saturation of calcium carbonate, which means it comes from the water and it lands on surfaces.
[00:20:57] And the way you can really tell for sure, case closed, if it's scale or not, is, is it on every surface or not?
[00:21:04] If you look at plastic fittings and lights and the face of tile, maybe glass tile or whatever else you have. If it's not on that, but it's everywhere around it, it means it's coming out of the cement. Because otherwise it would have landed on the plastic fittings. It would have landed on the metal ladder. It would have landed on the tile.
[00:21:20] But it's actually coming around it through the tile grout, or just through the cement. And that tells you that the water is extracting it from and pulling it in. Our best understanding of this, we know of at least four different types of crystals, having lab tested them, um, it's aggressive water drawing in the calcium that it needs. And when that happens, the pH locally spikes.
[00:21:42] Now we do not typically see crystals in pools that have circulation in the winter. It's stagnant water pools that have crystals. And that makes sense, because if you had water moving. The water would be too turbulent to allow these crystals to form.
[00:21:56] Jarred Morgan: And you wouldn't have an isolated rise in pH right there on the surface. Instead, you're moving the water around and you're mixing it up. So it's not sitting there with a high pH stagnant.
Winter Dust
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[00:22:04] Eric Knight: Right. And if you have a solid cover, you tend to actually have winter dust as opposed to crystals, which we found kind of interesting. And winter dust is basically the same chemistry, except that you don't get the crystals going into the fall. Because the water is eating only to its saturation point. It's just eating until it's fine. And then it stops eating. And that's great and you're totally fine in January and early February. But then the water temperature starts warming up.
[00:22:32] Okay, well, you have this spiked pH because you just etched the walls, And you've got this extra calcium that the water just dissolved. But now the temperature starts going up from the thirties to the fifties, to the sixties. And now your LSI is way off because you were at a zero LSI in the dead of winter.
[00:22:51] Take the LSI calculator at home. Balance it at 35 degrees. And then just change the temperature to 65 degrees and look what happens. You're going to get a purple number on the LSI, which means that dust starts to fall out because the water's oversaturated now. The conditions have changed. It was fine when it was cold. It is no longer fine now. So that's really what we see in the winter. And if you were to balance for the cold ahead of time, you're going to be fine coming out of the winter as well. Especially if you have dilution. But that's a very good point Miguel.
Swim Across America
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[00:23:22] Eric Knight: So we did swim across America yesterday.
[00:23:25] Jarred Morgan: That's. That's why we're all here. Just so you know. It's because we enjoyed it. We had a goal to raise some money for a good cause, and specifically for one of our employees, Kelly, who died earlier this year of cancer. And we swam in her honor. Um, and when we make a commitment, we're going to see it through. That's really what it comes down to.
[00:23:44] Eric Knight: And true grit on Mr. Jarred's part for not being a swimmer. I've got to hand it to you, man. It took some, some guts to do what he did, but he got in there and he swam a half mile and he is not a swimmer. And it was hilarious.
[00:23:58] Jarred Morgan: Let's just get something straight. I'm an idiot. All right. My wife told me that.
[00:24:04] Eric Knight: I could've told you that.
[00:24:06] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. And every, everyone told me the weeks leading up to it, you should probably go get in a pool and swim some laps. See what this is like. And, you know, my approach is I run. I like to run. I don't know if anybody likes to run. I run. I run two, three miles three, four times a week. It's a, um, my cardio is okay. I'm not the most fit person in the world. If you saw the videos. I'm not a swimmer, I'm not Miguel or Eric. Um, but you know what? I can do it.
[00:24:32] Eric Knight: Miguel, he's just defending himself now.
[00:24:34] Jarred Morgan: Well, I'm defending myself against my wife who doesn't listen to this podcast, or I don't even know if she knows the podcast.
[00:24:39] Eric Knight: I don't think anybody listens to this podcast.
[00:24:41] Jarred Morgan: We should get our family members to listen to our podcasts.
[00:24:43] Eric Knight: That will bump us over 70 for sure! Exactly!
[00:24:46] Jarred Morgan: That's a good way to do it. Okay. Well, she told me numerous times that I'm an idiot. And I was like, no big deal. Well, ladies and gentlemen. After the fact, I'm going to tell you right now. I'm an absolute idiot. Because that was. Extremely hard.
[00:25:04] Eric Knight: You would think that he would listen to Eric and Miguel who you know, we might know what we're talking about, but no, he didn't listen to us. We kept saying, you need to practice. You need to get familiar with the water. The half mile is not the same as running a half mile or even two miles or three miles. Because you can breathe whenever you want when you're running. You're on land.
[00:25:26] Jarred Morgan: I get a half a mile run and you know, four or five minutes. No problem. But you look at it on the distance wise. That's not that far.
[00:25:33] Eric Knight: Then you get in the water.
[00:25:35] Jarred Morgan: Not just any water. You get in open water with waves with 10 to 15 mile per hour gusting winds that are pushing water into you as you're trying to swim. And not just that, I show up there and just my normal American flag swim trunks. And Eric just looks at me like. What are you? What.
[00:25:55] Eric Knight: Yeah, no, no. That's, that's not a good plan. I'm glad I brought the extra trunks I had a feeling that Jarred was going to show up woefully unprepared, and I was right.
[00:26:04] Miguel Chavez: And he did. That's a fact.
[00:26:06] Eric Knight: You delivered buddy. You delivered.
[00:26:08] Jarred Morgan: After I switched into my speedo-esque type swimsuit, jammer, whatever you want to call it. It was a Speedo in my book and, uh, anybody that sits at a desk long enough, who's not that physically active as myself. Um, my physique is not like Miguel or Eric's, and it's unfortunate, but.
[00:26:24] Eric Knight: Well, we weren't looking Your physique. We just wanted to make sure you lived. So, you know, anyway, Miguel and I did the mile. Miguel won by about three and a half, what? Three and a half, four minutes. Something like that ahead of me? Uh, my thing is I was actually pretty pleased with how fast I swam. Uh, Miguel trains. So you're actually in a lot better shape. And you know, we're going to use that as an excuse. Is that a fair excuse?
[00:26:47] Miguel Chavez: Yeah, very fair.
[00:26:48] Eric Knight: I'm an older guy. I'm an older guy. Yeah. So Miguel actually still swims a lot. But it was hard to see. It was a morning swim when I've done swim across America in Charlotte, it's like three in the afternoon. This was nine in the morning. And we wanted to do Facebook live, but the problem with Facebook live is we couldn't get internet reception at this side of the lake for some reason, we tried.
[00:27:09] Numerous times to put something up. But, uh, You couldn't see. There's a sun glare and there were waves and it was just blinding. So it was, it was really hard to see. But then I saw Jarred's bright orange emergency floatie strapped...
[00:27:24] Jarred Morgan: I may have been one of three that had a floaty, which my wife would have been proud of me. Cause she thought I was just going to go out there and just straight rough it. Um, I decided it would be a good idea to put the floaty on and it turns out it was a good idea. Um, Eric and Miguel did a mile, everybody just put this in perspective. I did a half a mile.
[00:27:45] Eric. And Miguel both lapped me. I saw Eric on the home stretch and he kind of grabbed my hand and said, good job, buddy. But this was, as I was laying on my back job. Just backstroking just kicking my legs just sporadically. Just to get by. And guys, I was literally just trying to survive because I could not swim freestyle any longer. I reached the halfway point and I looked back at the shore and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to make it.
[00:28:10] Eric Knight: Oh, it was great. It was so great.
[00:28:11] Jarred Morgan: And then it was breaststroke the entire way in from there.
[00:28:14] Eric Knight: Yeah, it was awesome. Let's just bask in this for a moment, Miguel.
[00:28:18] Miguel Chavez: Yeah. The real question is now after the fact, would you would've done things differently? Or for the future, are you still going to go at it with no practice?
[00:28:28] Jarred Morgan: Well I'm a stubborn individual for anybody that knows me. So I would probably commit to something else in the future that it's just going to, I'm going to wing it. And it's just how my life works. But
[00:28:39] Eric Knight: fins next time
[00:28:39] Jarred Morgan: I don't think swimming is going to be one of those things because y'all right now. I am so sore and I was so tired after I got out of the water that it made me realize how much of a great workout swimming actually is. Like, it makes me want to go swim more because my body is aching in places I did not know that it could.
[00:29:01] Eric Knight: You have soreness in places you didn't have places. Exactly. It was a lot of fun for us to watch that and sorry to participate in it. But the fact is this guy manned up said he was going to do something that he was completely out of your comfort zone, man. So in all seriousness respect, cause that took some guts to get in that lake and swim.
[00:29:22] If any of you listening to this I have a loved one or have battled cancer yourself or anything. We'll probably do it again next year. I'm not sure Jarred will, but we'll probably do it again next year. And if you want to support our team, it goes to a good cause. We don't make a penny on it, but we're going to do it because generally it's a really good event and kudos to the Heritage people, by the way, they were there volunteering and they donated as well, and they actually showed up to the event to support it. So that was a really cool thing to see.
[00:29:52] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. I think that, uh, next year could be a donation worthy cause on my part it's participation. Ehh, not so sure.
[00:30:00] Eric Knight: Maybe volunteer and hand out t-shirts or something.
[00:30:02] Well, I told
[00:30:03] Jarred Morgan: Rob after I finished that I would tell him that I enjoyed it, but I did not enjoy it at all. But it was for a good cause.
[00:30:09] Eric Knight: I enjoyed it thoroughly. What about you, Miguel?
[00:30:11] Miguel Chavez: It was pretty fun.
Controlando la Piscina, Orenda's Spanish Podcast
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[00:30:13] Eric Knight: All right, Miguel, I'm going to give you a minute here just to speak to our Spanish listening audience that are probably bilingual. Tell him about the podcast that you do. And then we're going to wrap this episode up and I'll leave it to you.
[00:30:24] Miguel Chavez: Amigos. Muchas gracias por estar aquí el día de hoy, si hablan español o si tienen muchachos o sus compañeros que hablan español y están interesados en aprender toda la información que hemos cubierto en inglés. Ahora ya tenemos la flexibilidad de ofrecer todos nuestros artículos, nuestros pocas, nuestros videos, nuestros cursos educativos también, y están saliendo en español.
[00:30:46] Entonces, ahora sí que ya no hay excusas y es por el beneficio de todos.
[00:30:51] Eric Knight: I think he just called you out for not practicing.
[00:30:54] Jarred Morgan: I'm just gonna say yes, cause I, I that's, it.
[00:30:56] Eric Knight: Don't even tell us what it was. We're going to go with that. Guys. Thank you so much for listening. This is the first time we've ever done this literally shoulder to shoulder at the end of a desk. Um, next time it'll be probably on zoom, like we're used to doing. But we really appreciate you listening to this podcast. And for those of you who reach out to us with podcast@orendatech.com and through ask.orendatech.com. It means the world to us. I can't believe you're listening to it. We like to make fun of ourselves.
[00:31:21] Well, we would do that anyway, honestly, without the podcast, but
[00:31:24] Jarred Morgan: I make fun of Eric every day y'all, it just happens.
[00:31:27] Eric Knight: That's what we do.
[00:31:28] Jarred Morgan: Easy target.
[00:31:29] Eric Knight: Yeah. But if you have ideas for this podcast of anything else that you would like to us to speak about, then please reach out, let us know. Other than that, have a great week. We look forward to recording the next one. No idea what it's going to be, but we look forward to doing it anyway. Miguel and Jarred. Thanks for being with me.
[00:31:44] Miguel Chavez: Thank you
[00:31:45] Eric Knight: Take care, everyone.