Down My Local Pool

I’m really learning to love my local pool, and this is despite some severe provocation.

As readers of this blog will know, I have been conned into doing a Swimathon for Marie Curie, and in preparation for this I’ve been trying to go splashing as much as I can.  (Towit: once a week minimum if I can, more when inspired by my on-it teammates.)

My local pool is the same pool where, as a little kid, my school used to send me for a once-weekly ritual humiliation.  In those days all the lighting was sodium orange, and you couldn’t see the bottom of the deep end (it’s really very deep) and the water was freezing (it’s still quite cold) and our teacher would prowl up and down shouting, ‘come on, more!’ and I’d be grateful, frankly, if I had an asthma attack.  I was one of the kids at the shallow end, given a plastic lump to cling to – and more to the point, I was prone to panic.  Not panic in the water – that was fine.  But panic when under pressure from the teacher.  ‘Swim without surfacing!’ he’d say and so I’d swim without surfacing, only to come up at the other end for him to declare, ‘why the hell did you use your arms to do the stroke?  That counts as surfacing!’

‘Oh, but I thought you meant without breathing…’ were the words that would have passed my lips, were I not crippled by the laughter of my peers, the glower of my teacher and of course, instantly, he’d move on to someone less stupid.  Or doing eight lengths without stopping and I’d be wheezy and try to say, ‘I don’t think I can…’

‘Well then I can’t be bothered with you!’ he’d snap before I could finish my sentence.

Or hitting puberty before my peers, and being laughed at as my body changed; or when the headmistress stood in front of three of us, the weakest in the class, and before everyone pointed at each of us, a finger in the face and declared, ‘you, you, and you are causing me nothing but trouble!’  Or the day when, aged seven, when being told to hurry up, I put my pants on backwards and the teacher just stood there haranguing me, stupid girl, don’t you know how to put your pants on? and of course I did, but she was shouting at me, and the panic came again, which just made things worse…

… oh yeah, let’s not kid ourselves.  My local pool has a lot of primary school trauma to overcome…

Which makes it something of a miracle that despite all this, I kinda love it.

Firstly I think I love what my pool might be for the local area.  It’s not just a vain temple to healthy people striving to be sexier – sure, it has that too, but you can ignore it.  No, much more important, it has swimming lessons for children that start at around £2.50 for an hour – or roughly the price of a posh cuppa coffee.  Few causes make more sense than accessible swimming for kids.  It has women’s only nights, and whatever you may think of gendered events, a women’s only swim is a rare blessing for anyone with religious or personal reasons for wanting a bit of gender-specific privacy.  It has a wheelchair lift on the side of the pool, which I have seen in action; discounted memberships and support for the elderly and disabled – it is, in short, a place aspiring towards inclusivity, and while all fitness across the country has a long way to go, it’s not doing badly at all.

Heading down to the water’s edge, I am at my happiest when I see the old ladies doing breaststroke up and down the slow lane, or a couple of kids who don’t usually swim being helped through the first kicks.  When I grow up (unlikely to happen any time soon) I would love to be an old lady who swims, and hope that there’s still enough infrastructure left in the country to allow me to do that.  I am always pleased when I surface and see amongst the towels a prosthetic leg from the man in the medium lane who, to my shame, is still faster at front crawl than me.  And though I don’t get as excited by my teammates at the sight of parents in the learner’s pool teaching their toddlers how to love the water, I still appreciate how good it is at a very early age, to tell children that it’s okay not to be afraid.  Not just of swimming – but not to fear the scary unknown.

I like the fact that, at the pool, bodies are simply bodies and that’s all there is to say.  Old or young, skinny or muscly, flabby or skeletal, covered in tattooes or shaved to the skin, bodies are just bodies and who gives a damn?  The local pool isn’t a private gym – people who swim there tend not to be determined to become muscly models, the reasons for attendance are far too broad for vanity to get a huge look-in, particularly in the communal changing rooms.

I like the way the sunlight comes through the high windows at different times of day, and splits in the water in a way that brings out the lighting designer in me.  I will change lanes, just to enjoy the feeling of swimming through the shafts of gold and white.

I am happy to have found the two showers in the women’s changing area where the turny-button thing is broken, and which is being left broken, for the damage actually allows these showers to get much, much hotter than their neighbours, allowing you to gently steam after a swim – bliss.

I enjoy choosing my locker numbers based on Lee Colour Filters – again, the lighting designer in me.  My favourite locker, 120 (deep blue) has been out of action for several months, but I don’t mind using 156 (chocolate), 161 (arctic blue), 132 (sorta pale green) and 181 (congo blue) at a pinch.  Sometimes, on a rare occasion, someone will have left a quid in the bottom of the locker, which always feels like a very naughty kind of win.

It is lovely to observe women with babies, or women with matching swim caps, who meet each other at the pool – and only at the pool – and immediately start chatting, asking after the kids, the day, the husband, the parents, the work, the life.  I am happy to share shampoo with the woman who forgot her bottle, and see if I have change for the locker for the girl who left the right coins at home.

I am also getting good at avoiding certain times of day.

Swimming before 9 a.m., as well as being a bit pricier (40p – but that’s a tin of beans in my book) – tends to bring out scary healthy fit people who plough up and down the pool like hunting sharks.  Even in the medium lane, where I bob along in my own little world, I can feel the pressure from scary healthy people desperately looking to overtake, and frankly knowing they’re there throws off my rhythm as I try to find the most considerate speed to splash at.  Equally, at lunchtime, another burst of Men Who Do Butterfly happens, and a sudden burst of toned bodies with expensive gear disrupts the otherwise gentle calm of the swimming lanes.

I like observing the different styles of swimming.  As well as Men Who Do Butterfly (toned, big shoulders, nose clips) there are Men Who Are Very Splashy.  They tend to inhabit the fast lane, and power up and down in sets of four lengths at a time, tearing at the water like the face of an ancient enemy that stole their kingdom.  They’re impressive to watch – in their way – but not nearly as impressive as the Ninja Women of the fast lane.  These rare creatures are hard to spot, but once seen, never forgotten, they barely disturb the water as they pass, barely cause a ripple on its surface, seem to barely bother with kicking or pulling and yet somehow, move faster than anything you thought imaginable.

There are Impossibly Buoyant men and women in the slow lane, whose heads never get wet and whose arms and legs describe the smallest possible circles as they paddle along, but who you are certain will never sink.  Then there are Swimmers With A Plan, who consult a laminated plastic sheet every twelve or fourteen lengths, to see what the next recommended stroke is for their improver’s regime.

‘Warm up’ it suggests, ‘ten of your favourite stroke.  Set one: ten of your second favourite stroke as fast as you can.  Set two: eight of your third favourite stroke, normal pace.  You may use flippers if you have them for set one, but not set two.  Set three: holding a float between your thighs, work on the arm stroke of your second favourite stroke only.  Advice: exhale strongly while still underwater.  Inhale immediately on surfacing.’

Reading one of these with a teammate, I wondered what my third favourite stroke was.  Probably breaststroke, if by third favourite you mean ‘hate with a passion can barely move forward while doing it’.

Finally, there’s the ultimate in splashy awesome: the guy who’s either an ex-military aquatic assassin, or training for freediving, hard to tell which.  He’s the dude with grey hair who wears the full-body wetsuit, has a set of weights around his neck, a nose clip and flippers, who stands at the shallow end of the pool and sort of… chews the air.  He kinda inhales for a very long time, and rolls the air around his mouth and cheeks, before diving down and swimming all the way along the bottom of the pool to the other end, hugging the tiles at the bottom, and then back again.

He does this slowly – it’s breast stroke all the way – and the pool at it’s deepest is about 3.5m – but he never leaves the bottom.  Nor does he surface once, not even for the return trip, which is 61m away from where he started.  It’s hypnotic.  I hope he’s doesn’t mind my entirely awe-struck stare.

And now, I love swimming.  I have been swimming in the sea only once – my Italian friend exclaimed that she couldn’t understand this, until I pointed out that the Adriatic was a more welcoming patch of water than the North Sea in November – and it was wonderful.  If it ever gets hot again (hard to imagine now) I would like to go swimming in Hampstead ponds.  Swimming is a good kind of exercise for me – it is an exercise which is also a skill.  Like escrima, I love things which can either entirely focus my mind on the action itself, or even better, engage my mind in finding new things to do with my body, and there’s so much in swimming I can learn to do better.

More to the point, it’s something I can see myself doing when I am seventy, and have more time on my hands and bones I need to be careful to protect.  I don’t want or need to be a powerful or zippy-zoomy swimmer.  I just want to be a little old lady who is happy and relaxed whenever I reach the water.  And increasingly, I can see this being true, whenever I go down my local swimming pool.