Excellent Egham (Pool #743)

25 June 2025

I had a business lunch meeting at a Thames-side hotel in Runnymede today, so I switched up my morning swim plan from the London Aquatics Centre to the Egham Orbit, a local leisure centre opened in 2019. Like usual when I roll into a new public pool, I never know what to expect.

What I found today was wonderful:

• 8 lanes

• 25 meters

• Maybe 3-5 other swimmers in the pool and both of the "Fast" lanes empty.

• The pool has an adjustable floor depth (set to 1.2M) for 5 lanes, but then sloped down in lane 6 to a 1.8M constant depth for lanes 7 and 8. I swam in lane 7.

• Pace clocks at both ends, not synchronized, but visible (even with my sub-standard vision).

I was absolutely delighted with this setup as I had planned to do my 3 x 300 Test Set after 1,800 meters of my standard warmup sets. It's been a long time since I've done that in a SCM pool (all the way back to 2021), but I was very consistent with doing this from 2009 to 2016 when I primarily trained SCM in either my backyard pool (#54) or the Scottsdale Lifetime Fitness (pool #2). The full list of those SCM times is on this post, but I've also done this a huge number of times in SCY. It's the test set I return to most often.

• My best SCM performance ever was March 26, 2012 when I went 3:28, 3:25, 3:24

• My results today were quite respectable at 3:34.6, 3:37.3, 3:36.5

I was using my FINIS Smart Goggles for timing, so I could see that, despite my intentions to hold back on the first 100 and try to swim consistent 100s within each 300, I was 1:09.8, 1:09.7 and 1:09.6 on each of my first 100. Each of my 2nd and 3rd 100s were tight, but this meant I averaged 1:13.2/100 on the back 200 of each effort. I will want to work on being more even within each 300 ... and, of course, faster overall.

All in all, this was a glorious 4,000-meter workout. Afterwards, I had more than two hours to work in their quiet cafe, powered by a solid double espresso, and decent wifi before making the ~20 minute walk to the hotel where my lunch meeting was.

This was kind of a random collusion of geographies for the three of us to meet here; I'm not sure if circumstances will ever bring me back to this area southwest of London, but, if they do, I'll certainly be back,