How big is the Pool?

This spring I started swimming again. At first it was difficult to swim for even 10 minutes. Now I swim 4 to 5 days  a week. I like the peacefulness of swimming, once I get going, I get in a zone. Everything goes into autopilot. Each stroke follows the last. Rolling from side to side, I hardly even notice when I take a breath. The pool I normally swim in has windows on one side and I love swimming from the shade into the light and back.

In addition to being a great workout, swimming allows me to think. With my stroke on automatic, I am free to contemplate projects I am working on or things that I have read.  I hope to add a treadmill, stationary bicycle and weightlifting to my workout routine.

As a business traveler it is difficult to swim on the road. I am a YMCA member so I try to swim at Y's whenever I can. The ideal situation is to find a hotel that has a pool designed for lap swimming. As much as I love swimming, it is also the cause of one of my pet peeves.

Does any hotel employee in the world know how big the hotel pool is?

Finding a hotel pool big enough to swim laps in is a chore. The very best resource is  The Swimmers Guide.  The Swimmers Guide is a list of pools available to the traveling public worldwide. To use the swimmers guide, you select a country and then a state and a city. The guide lists pools available to travelers in YMCAs, schools, community centers, health clubs and hotels.

The swimmers guide lists pools that are a minimum of 18 meters long. In some cases they will list hotel pools as short as 50 feet. The rationale is that business travelers often cannot get to longer pools and may choose a hotel based on the pool. Even thought these shorter pools are not ideal — they are better than nothing. I am writing this post from the Marriott Courtyard  in Chicago's River North neighborhood. The Swimmers Guide lists the pool as 20 yards long. I have been swimming laps each evening.

One truth I have discovered is that nobody who works in a hotel ever knows how big the hotel pool is.  In California recently it took four different people to finally get me an answer (at least they found the answer) the pool at the Marriott Manhattan Beach is 20 yards long.

But when I called the Courtyard in Emeryville (an Oakland Ca.) suburb I was told that the pool was 100 yards long! By comparison, Olympic pools are 50 meters long. I told the hotel employee on the phone that a 100 yard long hotel pool would be the biggest pool she had ever seen — she said it was big.

Most employees don't know and aren't afraid to admit it. Today I called the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott and asked how long the pool was. The clerk on duty didn't understand so I said, "You know, how many yards long is the pool?"

He said that the pool was about a yard long! I asked if he could check with someone else, he came back on and said that the hotel engineer told him the pool was actually half a yard long and four inches deep!

I informed the clerk that in the US a yard is three feet long and four inches is less than the length of a man's hand — before I hung up.