Pool Review: Killing it at Kildeskovshallen (#729)

13 March 2025

OK. I realize that Kildeskovshallen translates to something like the Spring Forest Pool, but the fine people of Gentofte outside of Copenhagen are killing it with this great aqua complex, which features multiple pools, the centrepiece of which is a light-soaked six lane, 50 meter pool:

I had to take this picture from outside of the pool as I didn't think to bring my phone onto the pool deck. What's not fully apparent in my photo is that there is a skylight that runs the entire width and length of the pool, so I was swimming under the rising sun and light, fluffy clouds. Just dazzling.

There were some other interesting design components.  It was 2 meters deep at both ends, but then at one half of the pool (the far side in the picture above), the bottom sloped up to probably about one meter.  It appeared they had a moveable bulkhead that came up from the bottom of the pool to create one “all-deep” 25-meter course. It also had one thing that I have found to be more rare here in the UK & EU - synchronized digital pace clocks at each end of the pool. Maybe it's just me because I'm both a tad OCD when it comes to knowing my times during training and because my eyesight is not perfect (but not so bad I need to wear contacts while swimming), but I'm not a fan of the old school analog sweep pace clock.

While they only had two lanes reserved for lane swimming when I arrived (lanes 3 and 4) as the other four lanes were filled with a kids swim team, the odd thing was that at 7:30am, the two lap lanes became lanes 1 and 2, with the swim team still occupying the four other lanes.  It was a different, older teenager group that jumped in at 7:30am, but I was a bit puzzled as to why they just didn’t have lanes 1 and 2 set for public swimming the whole time.  I was still able to enjoy about 50 minutes swimming, enough time for 3,000 meters including a main set of 200s, sharing the lane with 2-3 other quite competent swimmers, a delightful experience. Part of what undoubtedly made the long course pool relatively uncrowded was the fact they had another 25 meter pool also setup for lane swimming, and a few other smaller tanks of water in the complex that I'll have to investigate the next time I'm here:

Now, in keeping with the tracking of different pool entry systems, this facility featured a live attendant who sold me an entry ticket, the ticket which then doubled as my 'key card' for the locker, which is a decent enough system. I still prefer just being able to bring my own lock, but this is certainly better than having to have random coins from each country on hand. And, because this was my first time ever in Denmark and I didn't realize that, while part of the European Union, they had opted out of the euro under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, I wouldn't have had krone had the lockers required them!

And, finally, you can understand a lot about a country's culture by taking their public transit. Like in Amsterdam, Copenhagen boasted a lot of cyclists zipping around this flat city. That Danish trains have whole sections devoted to bikes just emphasizes their commitment to two wheel travel: