4 October 2026 Forget that old slogan that "Everything's bigger in Texas" ... at least when it comes to YMCA facilities. If you want to go to the biggest YMCA in the entire world**, you have to head south of Calgary, Alberta to the Brookfield Residential YMCA at Seton. I took great advantage of their 10 lane, 50 meter pool (now #830 on my #1001pools list) on four separate visits when we were out there for a family wedding in early October ... ... getting in three long cours

12 September 2026 I have had the good fortune of sharing a number of my pool tourist explorations with all of my daughters, my siblings, father and, on one occasion, a swimmer niece. But I have had more of these shared experiences with Maia, my oldest daughter, than anyone else. She’s always game for a trip and a swim, still taking that advice that her maternal grandfather gave her before she went off to university in Vancouver, “Say yes to everything!” Maybe not the safest

6 September 2026 My memories of Bracknell go back 20 years ... but not for swimming. In the summer of 2006, I was building the European arm of the first analytics startup I had become involved with a few years earlier. I had built my fledgling team in Theale to maybe 4 or 5 people. We were the scrappy startup division inside a scrappy startup company (HQd in the USA). Over that summer and into the early fall, we engineered a deal with a client HQd in Bracknell that more th

6 September 2026 After a Saturday night swim (#821) at the University of Surrey, I started off my Sunday morning with what would become a three-pool day and a four-pool weekend at the iconic Guildford Lido (#822) ... This nearly 100 year-old facility lived up to all the love and hype I've seen online. It routinely appears on online lists of the best lidos (such as this one from Time Out), but I have also had many of my fellow pool tourists tout this pool on Instagram in thei

5 September 2026 I had signed up for tomorrow's Berks & South Bucks County Masters meet awhile back (as I do), both to swim in the Bracknell Leisure Centre pool and to get some "racing reps" in. I entered before I figured out the travel logistics to arrive in time for the "day of event" confirmation (check-in by 9:15am) Then, a number of weeks ago, I saw the 3 bus - 1 tube - 1 train approximately three-hour journey that would have required me to leave home at 5:30am ... and

23 August 2026 My 1,001 pool quest originally started from a desire to get and stay healthy after a period of intense work and business travel while building a startup tech company between mid-2002 and 2007. After the sale of that company later in 2007, I realized I had let my work consume me ... and let my nascent masters swimming career (begun in 2001) and attention to fitness fall far too low in my priorities. It's not like my work life got a lot less intense after I sta

18 July 2026 I really, really wanted to love the new Canary Wharf Sea Lanes. Maia came up from Brighton to spend the weekend in London with us ... and the timing was pretty perfect as it was almost three years ago to the day (July 9, 2023) that we had swum together in the "OG" Sea Lanes pool down in Brighton. We booked our swim for 3pm and had absolutely perfect conditions, with fairly skies and the water chilled, but not too chilled. The location is less than a ten minute

4 July 2026 King Charles happens to be in residence this weekend at nearby Palace of Holyroodhouse, but, though he was a keen swimmer in his youth, I didn't see him at either Friday or Saturday morning's long course lane swimming times at the fantastic Royal Commonwealth Pool: Speaking of royalty, this pool was officially opened January 16, 1970 by Princess Anne and it was her first ever solo official visit. This facility also has the superlative as the only pool to ever hos

30 June 2026 As I was planning our move to London in 2023 and started swimming around the town on visits that summer, I started to learn about English lido culture and began to hear about this apparently magical, 90-meter long unheated Tooting Bec Lido in south London, London's longest lido (and, I believe, second only to Cambridge's 91-meter / 100 yard length Jesus Green Lido in terms of longest pools in England). I did make it down to the indoor, 33-meter long Tooting Leisu

23 June 2026 I had written over nine years ago about the four Olympic pools in which I'd had the pleasure of swimming, but that post was a couple of years after I had swum in that fourth Olympic pool, the Peter Daland pool at the Uytengsu Aquatics Center on the University of Southern California campus in 2015 ... and that was pool #206 on my #1001pools list! It's taken me over a decade and 600 new pools tallied before I got to add my fifth Olympic pool, but the Olympia Schwim