Oak Park Active Living Centre

Typical UK weather, shorts and t-shirt yesterday, miserable, wet and grey today! (and now sunny again as I write this, four hours later).

Would usually head to my regular Wyndley swimming pool today for a Friday morning swim, but as I'm on a mission to add two pools per week at the moment, I'll make the 20-minute drive to what I initially thought was a brand new pool - which happens to be not too far from my local saltwater fish store where I but frozen food for my fish!

The pool was split into three lap swim lanes, divided by speed, with a public swim session in the other half.

The pool deck is surprisingly large and well-lit. Still, it would benefit from some natural light through the large windows surrounding the pool, each heavily tinted to the point that it looked like a cold winter evening outside, not a (cloudy) Spring mid-morning!

The water has a slightly weird, saline taste and is quite 'murky' below the surface. I don't actively drink the pool water, but this was the sort of dry-your-mouth-out water!

Completed an initial 1km at what I thought was a decent pace, but the watch clocked in at 15:04, which isn't great - it makes me wonder if my usual Wyndley swimming pool (my benchmark for swim times) is actually shorter than we think!

Finish up a total of 3.2km, then head to pick up some food for the fish on the way home.

The pool and facilities were great, however (unless I got the wrong end of the stick), an older lady in the slow lane was moaning about me having a fast lane all to myself whilst she had to make 5-minute there-and-back-head-up breaststroke trips with two other people in her lane! She was still going on about it after I finished another 300m.

The car park features a coal mine headstock monument, I beleive the centre is built on the site of the once Walsall Wood Colliery, a coal mine that closed in 1964.