Flight Delay? Swim Hooray!! (Pool #742)

30 May 2025

Never before has a flight delay brought me so much joy.

For our routing from Lilongwe to London, my wife and I had a ~13-hour layover, with our original scheduled 7:45pm Thursday landing in Nairobi followed by a 9:05am departure Friday.  We had already planned to stay at the nearest airport hotel, the Sheraton Four Points Nairobi Airport, a 5-minute shuttle ride from the international terminal.  It looked like a beautiful, relatively new hotel.  While the primary reason to stay here was proximity**, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed their rooftop pool …

… advertised as being thirty meters long and, while not an infinity pool per se, the long edge in the picture above and the other short end are at the end of the building and you can peer over the edge.

The pool looked gorgeous online and it did not disappoint in person.

However, I didn’t expect to be able to get in a swim because the pool hours were 8:00am to 8:00pm, and I would arrive closer to 9pm and need to depart around 6:30am.  I had even mailed the hotel ahead of time to see if I could swim outside of those hours, but they told me politely that the evening hours were devoted to the restaurant that abutted the pool and the morning hours were for cleaning the pool, reasons which I could appreciate (even if I didn’t like them 😉)

But, then, a beautiful email arrived from Kenya Airways as we landed in Nairobi: our flight to London was delayed by three hours!!

Not only did that delay take away the pressure to set a morning alarm and to allow enough time for Bella and I to enjoy a leisurely breakfast, it meant I could swim!

Thank you, Kenya Airways, both for the delay and, more importantly, for proactively telling us so we could maximize the value of those three hours.

With that said, I still stretched the rules a bit.  I went up to the pool area around 6:30am and found it completely devoid of any sign of life, so I came back around 15 minutes later all ready to swim … only to find two dedicated hotel staff working away, one clipping the trees/hedges around the pool, the other swabbing the deck and prepping the lounge chairs with cushions and towels. 

I need to give an even bigger thanks to these guys who, when I channeled my most aspirational Canadian politeness to ask if I could swim before 8am, graciously agreed to let me in 😊!  Another great example of how people help me along this #1001Pools journey. This is now pool #742 and my first official pool in Kenya.

Kind of like the pool at the hotel in Lilongwe, it had a submerged wall to separate the main pool from an area that looked more like a hot tub:

Click any picture to enlarge the view

I figured my "swim length" from that submerged wall to the other end was more than 20 meters but less than 25 meters : my easy stroke count was 9-10 strokes per length, whereas I’m usually 10-11 SPL at a similar speed in a 25-meter pool.  I called it 20 meters for sake of easy math and did a straight “2KM” comprised of 75% freestyle and 25% stroke kicking, drills and swimming. 

My wife took a short video to prove both how beautiful this pool and setting is ... and how lazy my swimming was!

But I wasn't a complete sloth. Because I’m hoping to race a better 200 SCM fly in three weeks, I did this set after the 2km:

• 4 x “80” – 20 strong fly, 60 easy free/back

• 4 x “60” – 20 strong fly, 40 easy free/back

• 4 x “40” – 20 strong fly, 20 easy free/back

• 4 x “20” – 20 strong fly, 60 easy free/back

Those strong efforts were more to emphasize proper form with intensity, but not sprints.  So, I finished up with another 5 x “40” where I went 20 fast/sprint fly, 20 easy backstroke.

After swimming, I had a good chat with one of the staff about the differences between Canada and Kenya, each of us proud to share stories of cool things our countries had to offer … though I don’t think he really believed me when I tried to explain the concept of people driving trucks on ice roads on lakes!

Then, it was off to breakfast for the most fitting latte art ever!

** And, as always, to earn more points ;)