6 February 2025
I recall traipsing around Slough about twenty years ago and not being impressed. I was managing my company's global work in those days and we had had enough success in Europe to need an HQ office ... but we were still a scrappy startup that couldn't afford London prices.
With our clients' offices (in those days**) mainly in the suburbs west of Heathrow, Slough appeared, on paper, to be an economically wise choice. On economics only, it was a good candidate location, but we got turned off by:
the general run-down-ness of the town, and
my first two English employees were ... let's shall we say ... wholly unenthusiastic about the location.
We went further west to Reading and that turned out to be a good choice.
So, I wasn't expecting much from The Centre. a leisure centre conveniently located less than a twenty minute walk from a client's office. I arrived there a few minutes ahead of the 6:30am opening to grab a quick swim (I only managed 35 minutes of pool time) before meeting my colleague at a Costa to prep for the morning client discussion. I knew it was a relatively new 8 lane, 25-metre pool, and was mostly happily impressed with the entire facility:
Things I liked:
They didn't "double-wide" lane rope the two fast lanes.
The steam room on the deck was worth the 10 minute excursion pre-workout to wake me up further (4:42am alarm) and loosen me up. Yeah, I might have gotten in another 500-600 meters had I used that time to swim, but this was a good & hot way to start the "workout."
It's amazing what a difference eight lanes versus six lanes means for aquatic programming diversity - they were able to support two lanes each for fast, medium and slow proper lap swimming while also having two lanes for water-walking, floating and what not.
The changing stalls in the unisex changing village were spacious; very often I feel like I have to be a contortionist to get changed in some of these tiny stalls, but these were sized for a proper grown adult.
What I loved most was something that I've been surprised to find lacking most often - the use of a digital scoreboard as a pace clock:
Analog pace clocks are the default here in England*** (as far as I've seen) and this remains a source of frustration for my swimming self. Not only do you lose accuracy with analog, but the visibility is generally worse, especially for someone like me who has less than 20/20 vision. I kind of wished I was doing a hard workout just to have taken advantage of that clock ... but my swim was just my 1,750-meter standard warmup sets.
Finally, as I departed, I also found something curious, something I'd never seen before ...
People are strange.
** By 2025, though, many of our customers have moved into central London.
*** Including the London Aquatic Centre running its two large scoreboards as digital replicas of an analog clock
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