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swimming.

(Feb 2006 : this page is now part of an archived web site. I have been unable, or too lazy, to update this web site for 18 months)

May 2004: lessons

At the weekend I had my first swimming lesson. It felt like a natural progression to take one or two lessons. After swimming regularly for 7 months I felt I wanted someone to look at me swim and tell me how to do it properly. It was hard work. The lesson was only half an hour long and I only swam a few lengths, but at a far greater intensity than I normally do. We looked only at front crawl. I have to start 'kicking' and during the lesson that is all I did. By the end of the lesson I was swimming significantly faster than before, but it was more tiring, and I didn't feel I could keep up that pace for long. This week I have been in the pool to practice and do some drills. Now I have been taught about 'technique' I feel like I am starting afresh, and hope that the learning curve will be as steep as it was when I started swimming last November. Today I did a couple of lengths flat out. For a few seconds, maybe 10 metres or so, I felt that everything - legs, arms, breathing - was in perfect synch, and I was gliding through the water. It was a great feeling. Now I have to work on maintaining that feeling, that balance and ease, for longer. Then I will really feel like a swimmer.

5th April 2004 : the start

I've been swimming 'seriously' - by which I mean going to a swimming pool two or three times a week to swim lengths - since November 2003. My motive was to find a physical exercise that I could do regularly without aggravating a decaying knee. I wanted to continue playing football, but could no longer go running in between games. Six months on I am surprised with how dedicated I have become to my new swimming regime. My knee is holding out - just - and allowing me to continue the football, but the day will come when I am to slow to get a game anymore, and then I will have no choice but to find an alternative exercise. Maybe swimming will have to substitute for the game?

My other motive for swimming regularly is to be able to enjoy sea swimming much more in the summer. We go to Cornwall two or three times a year; I like to swim but I find myself breathless after fifty metres in a choppy Atlantic sea. When we next go to Cornwall for a week in June, I want to be able to go for longer swims: I'd love to swim around the cove in Porthcurno, and be more confident to swim and snorkel off Godrevy Head.

As a child I learnt to swim early. I was born in Malaysia and before I was four we lived in Saudi Arabia for close to a year, where a regular weekend activity was to swim in the Red Sea. Jane, my elder sister, was a prodigious swimmer - she could , allegedly, 'swim before she could walk'. Swimming in England, was of course, a different matter, and our school pool was often murky and very cold: swimming in March or April was no fun. But summers were different, and on our camping holidays in France we were always in the sea.

In my adult life I have swum intermittently, but the dreariness of indoor pools and the general discomfort of the whole experience never instilled in me the drive to keep going. In the decade that was my 20s I spent too much time indoors (in office, gardenless homes, pub, cinema, gym: a distinctly urban lifestyle) and gradually 'forgot' my love of the outdoors and of the sea. Swimming was something done by amputees, old people, and hideous, shouty children in over heated municipal pools.

So, I guess I have been relearning to swim. A few years ago I read Roger Deakins 'Waterlog', an eccentric and wonderful account of the authors quest to swim across the British Isles. This sowed the seed of a renewed interest in swimming; I began taking holidays to coastal areas and would swim. I fell in love with the seas of Cornwall, cold as they may be.

Now I'm swimming regularly. This morning I swam 2000 metres, my longest distance so far, although I have swum the mile a few times. The feeling that I get after the swim is a mixture of tiredness and relaxation; the post exercise endorphin rush is mild, but calming, and the overall feeling is of well-being. Which is just as well, for however much I like to romanticise swimming (a la Shelley, Byron, Sprawson et al), the prosaic truth is that the endless swimming of indoor lengths can be boring. This mornings swim is a good example: for the first 600 meters I was following another swimmer and I swam with an easy rhythm. But when he left the pool I was alone, and the next 500 metres were quite hard; it was only when I was well into the second half of my swim that I found a rhythm again.

I'm gradually increasing the number of lengths of front crawl that I do. When I started swimming last autumn, I would do 20 odd lengths of a 25 metre pool, with only a few of front crawl. Now, in the same 25 metre pool I might do 20 lengths of front crawl in a quick, 40 length lunchtime swim. In the 50 metre pool I can do one length crawl and alternate this with a slow length of breaststroke Ultimately I'd like to be able to do several hundred metres of front crawl without stopping; this, I think, would give me the strength and stamina to achieve longer seas swims.

Swimming is inherently lonely; as a solitary person, it sits well with my temperament,a nd complements my love of walking alone. In those periods in the water when I feel a limpid ease, my mind feels free of the stresses of contemporary life. 'The Swimmer as Hero'?

swimming in cornwall / the penzance lido >>

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