18 April 2026 Just like last weekend , I lined up a full "Swimming Saturday" ... 3,200 meter morning Barnet Copthall masters team workout Gargantuan chicken caesar salad at the Silver Service Cafe for our team breakfast/brunch ... and then, starting from the end of the Northern Line at Mill Hill East, a tube, train and bus to head out to Swindon's Link Centre for an afternoon of racing This massive, if dated, facility has come to closest to reminding me of a Canadian commun

11 April 2026 I decided to really put my heart through its paces on Saturday, starting off with a 2,600 meter workout with my Masters team at the Barnet Copthall pool ... ... which featured a warmup set of 16 x 25 (where I started to ramp up the heart rate) before a main set of 9 x 100, 3 each on 1:35, 1:30, 1:25 where I held mostly 1:13/14s through the first six and then descended down to 1:08 on the last three. I then had enough time to have a great, if a bit abbreviated,

5 April 2026 Bella and I have locked into our top five features for our travel perfection: Fitness first – pools for me and great gyms for her Food next – we aim to eat our way around locations, going in for local over global, flavour over fullness (though sometimes we indulge with filling local flavour!) Walk ing, walking, walking – we walk A LOT with history/city walking tours and food walking tours booked whenever possible.  This both serves goal #1 and is the best wa

3 April 2026 While the swim/workout and the pool itself are the primary goals behind all of my pool tourism, a very close third place is the journey to and from the pool. Particularly when I'm in a new city, I view the travel as part of the challenge ... and the delight. It can also be humbling ... but in a growth-oriented way. We arrived into Madrid on Thursday late afternoon and I was smugly confident in my ability to navigate the Metro from the airport to our hotel. Mad

25 March 2026 Mainz, Germany really is a wonderful city, nestled on the south side of the Rhine River, due south of Weisbaden and southwest of Frankfurt, this burg of about 225,000 people has everything I need for a productive business trip: an easily accessible main train station with decent hotels and reasonably priced (but good) restaurants in walking distance and two great public pools. Until today, I've always swum at the Taubertsberg Bad as it's an easy 5-10 minute wal

28 February 2026 Given the massive sun exposure I’ve had over my life, from swimming & lifeguarding as I grew up, to a quarter of century living between Texas and Arizona, it’s a bit surprising I haven’t had more “suspicious growths” … but, over the years of periodic skin checks, I’ve been remarkably problem-free.    Which makes me inexperienced when it comes to what happens when the dermatologist does remove something for further investigation.    Which means I wasn’t aware

20 January 2026 I'm not into numerology, so I wouldn't call this angelic , but, if I had young kids** and lived in Camden, I'd bring them here: With a gently sloping beach entry and very fun-looking water slide (closed during Fitness Swimming time), this is probably a great place for families. It's not the place for serious swim workouts, though it was better than I anticipated given some of the online comments I had seen. There were three lanes with proper lane ropes as yo

16 December 2025 I don't think I've ever been more surprised by a city than I was by Warsaw. Admittedly, I had done very little reconnaissance ahead of this trip so my pre-conceived notions of Poland were overly-influenced by memories from letters from a friend of mine who worked here in the post-Solidarity, re-opening to the "west" days of the early 1990s. Letters which painted an expectant and hopeful society, but bleak skies and an even bleaker infrastructure. I fully r

14 December 2025 I first found out about the European Masters SCM Championships in early September, saw the opportunity to visit Poland for the first time, and had no problem convincing my wife to make a long weekend of it, with a couple of days planned for racing in Lublin and then a couple of days for pure tourism in Warsaw. With Ryanair flying non-stop to Lublin, BA doing the same out of Warsaw, and the excellent and economical PKP Intercity train service between the tw

25-26th October 2025 I can't recall when I first learned about the Pond Forge International Sports Centre , but I've been wanting to compete here, or at least train here, since before I moved to England a couple of years ago. Some of my late 1980s University of Texas teammates raced here at the event the pool was built for, the 1991 World University Games, but I was completely off the grid living in rural Eswatini (now Swaziland) then, so I think this facility more likely ca