09 July 2024
I had an exceedingly busy three-day business trip up to Brussels this past week that left very little time to do much in the way of exercise, but I did manage to squeeze in 4,500 meters one day at the Piscine du Centre, a beautiful, 71 year old facility located about a 10 minute walk from the Midi/Suid train station (where I was staying).
Walking up a small side street, it's an easy place to miss as there's very little indication from the outside that this relatively skinny, multi-storey marble facade contains a complete fitness centre inside. After paying a very reasonable €4.50, I was directed up to the third floor where I found a new kind of unisex changing + locker system. As I've seen elsewhere in Europe, they had separate women's and men's changing stalls - women's individual stalls on the left and men's individual stalls on the right. In other places, you walk into the stall, change and then exit to find lockers. In this facility, once you enter the stall, the door you entered is locked. After changing, you leave your stuff in the stall itself, exit and both doors are locked, the stall itself becoming your locker. All you have to do is remember your stall number and then find the locker room attendant after your swim to unlock it. There's a different level of trust with this system, but it worked well.
I had a beautiful swim in this architectural gem where my fellow swimmers were few (I shared the fast lane with 1 or 2 people over the ~70 minutes I was there) and (generally) knew how to share a lane. The water was crisp, probably very close to the 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit that I prefer. I did my basic 400 IM kick-drill by 25s for warmup and then launched into a straight 4,000. As I'm training for the Lake Windermere Chillswim, I am just doing repetitions of this simple 1-1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1 pattern by length, where the 1-2-3-4-5 lengths are freestyle and the 1 lengths are backstroke. In a 25 meter pool, each round is 500 meters, so I just did 8 rounds straight. I was generally trying to descend the 1000s, but my times, according to my Suunto watch, were 14:03, 13:56, 15:13, 13:55. I can't recall what happened on that third 1,000, but there you have it.
The one odd, structural component of this pool was the positioning of the lane ropes. The water level at each end was far below the deck level, maybe about one meter or more from deck to water level. But, the lane ropes, instead of being connected to the wall at the water leve, were attached to the top of the deck. This meant that the lane ropes were U-shaped, taking about three meters in length to reach the water as they sloped down from the deck at each end. This made for an extra wavy pool, all the better for training for open water swimming ;)
The only bummer about the facility for my 1001 Pools quest was their strict adherence to the no pictures rule and absolutely no secluded vantage point from which to take a picture either pre- or post-swim; I had to suffice with a picture of a picture, taken from the lobby:
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