Splashpath Tracks Your Swimming, Finds Local Pools [Review]

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Swimmers of Britain, stock up on small change! You’re going to need it to pay for a locker to put your iPhone into every time you go to the pool.

And why will you be taking your iPhone to the pool? Because, damp exercise addicts, you’ll have installed Splashpath.

Splashpath is a neat little free gizmo from a London-based duo of swimming-obsessed geeks, designed and built with a single purpose: to get people into pools.

At a time when public pools (indeed, public services of all kinds) are under threat due to drastic cuts in government spending, an app like Splashpath is a particularly good way to encourage more people to use them.

It has a lot of functionality built into a small package. First there’s the pool finder; you can locate nearby pools and in some cases, see instantly when they’re open and what sort of timetable they operate.

Having found a pool for you, Splashpath encourages you to get in by setting challenges. Complete the Nessy Swim (600m, equivalent to swimming across the narrowest part of Loch Ness), or Escape from Alcatraz (over 4,800m, or nearly 196 lengths of a 25m pool). Record your swims as you go, and join an online network of co-swimmers.

Splashpath’s aim is to make swimming pool data an industry-wide standard, just like flight data from airlines. Pool operators, whether public or private, can add their timetable info at the Splashpath website and they get something in return – a free embeddable web widget that they can use on their own website, instead of clunky PDFs and Word documents.

So put your iPhone in a locker, get your goggles on, and dive in. Happy swimming.

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