Last year I tried open water swimming. According to articles in the papers and on the internet, if you hadn’t tried out this new activity, you were somehow less of a person and should be ashamed of yourself. Every man and his dog was doing it. The dogs had been doing it for hundreds of years, so all it needed was the man (or woman) to join in. Open water swimming was supposed to bring along with it a sense of calm and connection to nature. More than you’d get from swimming in your local chlorinated leisure centre pool. I was swapping the kids wee in the pool, for ducks pooing in my chosen body of water (and no Google Docs, I don’t want you to correct this word to “pooping”, I am English after all).
I bought a bright orange swim float and swim cap and Helena bought a pink one, because pink is for girls and blue is for boys, don’t you know (at least that’s what we’re led to believe when buying baby clothes/cards/paraphernalia). We opted for wetsuits, rather than smothering ourselves in goose fat. We had all the gear and no idea. All the kit, still shit. You get the idea. Actually buying all of the gear was a prerequisite at this swimming lake. In case we were to sink into the abyss, at least we’d be dangling from a float if we were to give up the ghost mid-swim. We were swimming in an old quarry, and as such, I didn’t really want to test the depths of it. I would be staying as close to the surface as possible, channeling my inner pond skater.
We thought of ourselves as pretty strong swimmers. Several rungs below Michael Phelps and Rebecca Adlington, but we’d ditched the armbands many years ago and moved on from doggy paddle. We took the plunge, and quite quickly felt like everyone was cruising past us on the lake, while we were left in the dust. Either we were really crap, or there were a lot of strong swimmers there, the kind of people who do an Ironman for “fun”. I’d rarely ever swam more than 25m without hitting the side of a pool, with the possibility of taking a breather every 30 seconds. Now we were swimming 2000m without touching the sides. And it actually felt pretty good, despite the Iron men and women leaving us in their wake.
Even in the privileged society that we live in, it’s not always the case that adults know how to swim. My housemate at Uni had never learned to swim, and yet he decided to take up rowing. I imagine there was a sign at the Freshers Fair saying something like “Can’t swim? Travel by boat! And have angry people shout at you, like the little cox that they are.” The rowing club must have seen him coming; he was a big guy and I don’t think he had anything better to do at 5am every day, than to get up early and sit in a boat. Before he was allowed in a boat, he had to pass a swimming test. Whether he was made to swim in pyjamas and fetch bricks from the bottom of the pool, I’m not sure. I hope he did have to do these skills tests, as that’s what we had to do as kids, it’s surely a rite of passage to becoming a swimmer. Why are swimming instructors such masochists, and are they still allowed to do such things to young children? Still, if my house does ever flood, I’ll be ready to evacuate in my pyjamas and confident that no brick will be left behind.
I’m not the strongest swimmer of my family. My sister used to train at Dorking Swimming club, and post-training on a Thursday night she would be taken for a KFC by my Mum. I was missing out on this fast food treat, I had to have some of this! So I joined the swim sessions and earned my Zinger burger fair and square (all the bap, still crap). In the end I got fed up with being overtaken in the pool, and decided my talents were better suited to wrestling with the dog at home.
I’ll get back to open water swimming in 2022, but for now I’m back at the local chlorinated pool to keep me ticking over. If I want a meal cooked by Colonel Sanders afterwards then so be it, but I’m pretty sure I won’t.