Crawling

I'm a strong swimmer, in that I have stamina: I keep going and going. However I am not fast. If I were to compete in a race, I'd cut a woeful figure. Primarily this is because I only do breast stroke. I love breast stroke. Though I've changed my technique over the last few months - improving it, finessing - my love for the essential way my body moves through the water remains the same. Slow and smooth, it allows me space and time to bring my mind into regulation with my body. Dare I say it, it is meditative. 

     Lately, however, I've had to face a fact - I can't get by anymore without a good front crawl technique. Recently I was reminded of this when I rang up Brighton Swimming Club to join their sea-swimming group. Talking to their head, Fiona, about my swimming abilities, everything was going  well - she even proposed we 'test the waters' together with a swim around Brighton Pier.  A couple of months ago I swam easily the around the West Pier so I knew this would be no problem. But then I told her that I don't do front crawl. Silence. We can't accept you unless you can do, well, at least sixty lengths of it. 
     So there it was - my dreams of sea swimming daily, pier to pier, dashed.  I know it makes sense. Any sea swimming club needs its members to be able to shift into front crawl when waves become unruly, when the current tugs in unfavourable directions. Breast stroke is never going to get you to shore in a storm. Sometimes it's wild out there, and Brighton Swimming Club swims every day, all weathers. How naive could I be? Perhaps it can be your winter project? Fiona suggested tentatively. I'm sure you'll be up to sixty by new year. 

     Fiona hasn't seen my front crawl. Essentially, it resembles someone drowning. However I took  the bull by the horns and two weeks ago I had my first swimming lesson. James, a young instructor,  began the lesson by saying, Let's see what you can do - go on, do a length, any stroke. I breast stroked up and down the end lane of Kind Alfred's, calm and swift. Then he asked me to show him my front crawl. I managed quarter of a length before sinking -  mouth full of chlorine, lungs full of water. We tried me using a float. Then turning just to one side. Half an hour sped by. What I learnt is that I know virtually nothing about how to do the front crawl and that learning in the King Alfred pool is a horrible, humiliating experience - lifeguards gathering at the poolside to witness my failure. 

     So I've taken to teaching myself, with a little help from a friend. I do my regular sixty lengths of breast stroke, and then try out half a length here, quarter of a length there. I've even tried in the sea. It's hard. My body is a jingle jangle of movements, desperate to come together: feet, behind, head, mouth, elbow, fingers. Sometimes one or more of them does, and then I'm off, tasting the freedom of what it might be like to really be able to swim this way. However mainly I thrash about in the water, swallowing too much of it - panicking, exhausted. 

     But I'm determined. I will learn. I have until April. I taste the desire for it, to change my stroke and experience the water in a different way - to speed gracefully through open water. 

Sexy Goggles

I see it all around me in the dull splash, the curved arm, the pointed toe. Amidst black, insect-eye goggles and red rubber cap (talcummed and pulled apart, ready for the swim). Amongst those in and out breathes, plunging hands; knees raised towards chests. Amidst all this oh-so-god-forsaken unsexy behaviour, underneath that water: wet tongues of desire, the cuff of repulsion.
     Two teenage boys, willow-thin, chase each other up and down the Medium Lane. I wonder if they are considering the twenty-year-old woman in front of me; if they swim behind her just so they can watch her part her legs as she breast-strokes towards the deep-end. Glimpsing the soft inner flesh of her thighs, a ripple of buttocks in the water.

     A man with curly, silver hair and a lard fat belly sits alone in the kiddie's pool. The children have all gone. I noticed him earlier, watching me as I stood up in the shallow end to adjust my bikini top. I note his saggy, checked pants; surrounded by blue mist and1970's orange tiles. A water slide, in chipped turquoise, looms behind him. Is it hard to be a sixty-something-year-old man amongst the young, and occasionally, beautiful? Watching bits and pieces wobbling, opening and closing? I shiver as another man glides past me, his arm raised into a perfect arc, his fingers piercing the water's surface like an arrow. I chug along beside him, feeling blessed by the elegance of his movements. He is a perfect machine.

     Sixty-something and saggy - that's no perfect machine. I wonder if I've got this old man all wrong. If I project my own sexual predatoriness onto his pink, spreading body. Teenage girls, limbs like HB pencils, breasts almost alive in their bikinis, run along the poolside. Do we all cruise youth and beauty, if only for a few seconds? For enough time for us to get our hit?

   In the Slow Lane, an old lady sails past me like a sack of flour. I see plump thighs, fat breasts floating on the water as she feigns backstroke. She's hardly moving. Her white hair is scraped back under a rose-studded rubber cap. Fat hands; rouged cheeks. She lifts her hand up in the air and it sails backwards. She is a Queen greeting her subjects.

     Above me, a high ceiling is intersected with gleaming orange tiles, and all around, potted palms. Below I think I see something floating - some object I don't recognise: white and puffy. I try to wipe the image from my mind. Instead, I survey a clutch of thirty-something men in the shallow end, and wonder who they are behind their dark goggles. They all look so serious - like they mean business. It's hard not to look that way in goggles. Do I look like I mean business? Do I mean business? My arms already ache and I've only done twenty lengths. This isn't like me. I have a tenth of my usual strength. Is it because I had a hard day at work, or have I lost 'it'? Six months ago I'd have swum twice this and not given it a second thought. Tonight my breathing resembles a pensioner's, and I have to pause at the side of the pool after every six or so lengths.
     But I am happy. I am back where I belong. Public swimming pools are wonderful places; I cannot escape humanity here. Intimacy is foisted upon me even as I try to maintain my own space, and my own schedule. A man's hand strokes my leg as he passes by me the other way. I realise that I like some men looking at me. With others I try to make my goggles as intimidating as possible. Oh, the harshness of it all.

     Now I'm home. My skin is hot. I'm bundled in my pink towel robe, knees up in bed, notebook on knees, writing this. My eyes hurt; I cannot write anymore. So tired. My body is happy for me; it says "I knew the water would save you from yourself". I need saving from myself sometimes. 
      So tired. Words drift off like old pensioners on their backs, their red lipsticked mouths catching the electric light on the water. Floating sacks of flour, drifting down the Slow Lane.

The Idea

The idea for this blog came to me whilst breast-stroking up and down my friend's pool (the one in photos in another post) - condensation dripping onto my nose from the plastic roof, my goggles making frightening white marks in the skin around my eyes. 
     I wanted to keep a record of my swimming experiences and more importantly, write my thoughts and feelings around them. A few weeks before, I'd decided (this time in the slow lane of Hove's King Alfred Centre pool) to write a memoir about my mother, told through my love for swimming. Though this has changed a little recently, it struck me that by keeping a swimming blog, I could keep ideas for the book bubbling away. Also, frankly, it would be pleasurable to write.

     Though as a child I loved swimming, spending countless holidays running in and out of the sea, jumping off concrete into emerald pools and rolling in sand on foreign beaches, between the ages of fifteen and thirty-three I swam only two or three times, tops. Yet only weeks after Mum's final stroke, in that hot traumatic summer of '06, I found myself regularly splashing about in the sea off the coast of Brighton. 

     I love swimming in wild places – lakes and rivers – but I also love the tang of chlorine and rubber flip flops in the air at swimming pools. I like simply being near water - on cliff tops, peering over the edge to the drop below. However, my favourite place to be is the sea. Nowhere calms and exhilarates me as sea-swimming does. There is no high like that of breast-stroking towards an infinite horizon. I fantasise of one day swimming the Channel. 
     So I want you to come with me as I delve deeper into myths and dreams of the sea, of swimming and of swimmers, and as I explore new swimming holes, and marvel at the creatures under the water we so rarely pay attention to.

      We all deal with grief differently, but I never expected swimming to have such soul-soothing powers. These days I believe in the redemptive power of water (after all we use it to bless and baptise). Though I do like swimming out to where the water is deep, I don't have a death wish. In fact I have a life wish. Putting it simply, I love being in water. I'd like to share this love with you.

Photo: courtesy Bob Dickinson