I am training for a triathlon. For those who do not know, triathlons consist of three sports, running, biking and swimming. When you travel, it is easy to pack running gear since it primarily includes running shoes, shorts and a top (and layers if it is cool). For biking, you need a bike, cleats, biking shorts and top and gloves. For swimming, you only need a swimsuit and goggles (possibly a swim cap) and a pool.
Running and Biking
When I travel, I regretfully pass on the biking since it is a real challenge to rent a bike for a morning workout. That leaves me with running and swimming. I primarily focus on the running as a way to explore my temporary destination. My favorite memory is watching the sun rise while running on the Cherry Creek Trail. The best part of running is that you can practically do it anywhere. Find routes is easy with various online apps. There a several hotel chains (my favorite are the Westin Hotels) that provide suggested running maps at the front desk.
Swimming
Lately, I have been trying to include swimming in my workouts on the road. My desire is two fold. First, as I age, it becomes harder and harder to do consecutive runs. My knees ache as I put on so many miles in a row. But secondly, I want to keep up my swimming fitness. Swimming is one of the sports that you really need to do it frequently or you can lose ground. This occurs regardless of you maintaining your aerobic fitness level.
The major challenge is where do you find pools that you can use when traveling. I have found that I typically choose hotels that are near my desire destination. If I am at a conference, I will choose a hotel near the conference center. What is challenging is that these hotels can not be relied upon to have a pool large enough to swim laps. Add to this fact, that the hotel pools may not open during the times I want to swim. It is not unusual for these pools to open at 9:00 am which is way to late for me.
I started to look for an online service that tracks available swimming pools. The best one I found was Places2Swim. They have a worldwide database of over 26,000 pools. The USA is the largest at 7763 pools. After the USA, the top 5 are United Kingdom (2,218), France (1,646), Germany (1,576), Spain (1,486) and Italy (1,177). Places2Swim has listings for pool in over 200 countries.
Use of the site is pretty simple. You enter the location that you want to find a pool at. Places2Swim then delivers a map of all the pools near your destination. Green pins are accessible to visitors and red pins are not. The pins typically list the length of the pools. Once you click on the pins, you can find additional information about the respective pools. The information includes pool website links, daily visitor costs and even pool temperature.
I found that some of the information needs to be updated. It seems that the information on each pool is user generated and not verified. As time passes, this information invariably may become outdated and potentially misleading. As you would expect, you will need to verify the information about particular pool options prior to your use. If you do not, you do run the risk of the an issue like the hours being off.
Now I just have to look to see if there are any options for outside biking. I do know that many hotels have some form of indoor bike like a Peloton. But I do not feel that these are the same as riding outside. They will do in a pinch.