I love swimming. I love swimming for fun and I love swimming for exercise because the boundary between “it’s good for you!” and “it’s fun!” is so fine. At the moment, I’m not willing to go to one of my local indoor pools because plague but my favourite outdoor pool has just opened and I’ve bought a prepaid card that gives me twelve swims for the price of ten, booked my first four sessions of the year, got my swimming goals in place and I’m ready to go!
I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of exercise. I walk my 2km a day and some days I hate it and most days I like to look at the seasons change around me. I have a kettlebell that I wave around three times a week and I enjoy noticing which moves feel easier each time. And now I swim. I do tend to swim now rather than bob around in the pool but it still has the same feeling it did when I was five and we used to go to that pool in Bournemouth. It’s low impact so although my legs feel wobbly if I push myself, nothing ever feels sore or overdone, and it doesn’t feel like I’m working out. On the other hand, over my six week swimming career last summer, where I literally saw myself improving in speed and stamina, it would be nice if anything changed on the outside. At the moment I’m a harbour seal. Not an lithe gleaming otter, but I’ll settle for harbour seal. However, this year I should have 18-21 weeks of swimming a solid hour twice a week and I’m hoping that something will change.
Last year I swam 21.63km over six weeks and averaged 70 lengths a session. After not swimming since September, I don’t expect to hit 70 lengths my first session, or even my second but we’ll see how I go. I’m thinking of doing a supersprint triathlon next summer. I think it’s only the equivalent of about 15 lengths so one of my goals for 2021 is to be able to swim 20 lengths non-stop, without even pausing to wipe my goggles unless I do it in the middle of the pool. My second goal is to swim 80 lengths in a session more comfortably than I do right now. I managed it twice last year but it was a bit exhausting and I’ll need to up my speed to get it into the hour. I’d like to hit 90 this year at least twice, so that’s my third goal. Will I make it? I’ll let you know at the end of September.
And now let’s get onto my first swimming session of 2021 and how it went and how I think my goals are going to go in light of it.
First, here’s my swimming stuff laid out on the morning of my first swim of 2021:
- On the bottom is my changing robe/going home dress. I have a very stretchy beach dress from M&S that I used last year but it’s got a big tear in it from catching on a drawer handle and I had this one for Christmas. We’ll see how easy it is to change under it tonight… I’ll go in shorts & a t-shirt over my swimsuit and I’ll put the shorts back on under the robe afterwards.
- Then there’s my swimsuit. Enough said, except it has little legs and is probably going to be a tighter fit than I’d like.
- Goggles – prescription goggles! Last year I managed to miss that there’s a different prescription for each eye, even though I know my eyes aren’t the same and I knew it when I ordered them. Must make sure I put them on the right way round.
- My neoprene training gloves – my hands just feel like weedy little nothings without them. It’s like flippers for the hands, only without the hard plastic to injure other swimmers.
- A travel towel. Actually, I have two. One for hair, one for body. They’re easy to put in a drybag and bring home, although real towels dry better.
- Speaking of drybags, I have a big blue-grey one for all the wet stuff afterwards and a little grey one for my phone and keys. Better safe than sorry.
- And finally, there’s a kickboard out in the car, or as we called it when I was a child, a float. It forces my legs to do some work occasionally, My legs, you see, are not as good at swimming as my arms.
- Oh, and a pound coin for the locker, although they’re such small sessions that plenty of people don’t bother locking them and some don’t even bother using them. I favour yellow locker 24 and I will be mildly but definitely annoyed if someone else gets it first.
- I’m wearing my Fitbit. It’s a Flex 2 I bought in 2017, it’s the absolute beginner baby Fitbit but it’s waterproof and will kind of track my lengths. It’s not as accurate as counting but I hold out hope that one day it’ll figure it out. I’ll also be wearing my watch and my locker key and I’ll take a drink.
And so to the real thing at last. 8pm adult-only lane swim!
So, how did it go? Well, I’m glad I planned this for Monday, which meant I had two swims before this was published and the reason I’m glad for that is that my first swim, on Tuesday, kind of sent me spiralling into a what-is-the-point-of-anything that lasted for 642 words.
I swam 60 lengths at both swims. Now, I’m going to consistently be really inconsistent when talking about numbers of lengths because this is a non-standard size pool; it’s 25 yards, not 25 metres, so my 60 lengths would normally be about 54 lengths. I’ve taken long breaks from swimming before and when I go back, I’m often quite impressed to do twenty or thirty lengths. Fifty is something to build up to and be proud of and I should be so happy to have done fifty-four after a seven month break.
And if I’d been alone, I would have been. But my sister decided she wanted to try out the nice pool and so she came, both times. Now, a bit of healthy competition is good but it turns out I’m the sort of person who only appreciates competition if I’m winning. She got two lengths ahead of me very early on on Tuesday and remained two lengths ahead for most of the hour and I… I was not amused. I swam twice a week every week last summer! I swam consistently throughout 2019, even if it was mostly only ever other week. I’ve walked at least 2km a day every day for over a year now. I have a kettlebell and I use it! What’s the point in exercising if a person who doesn’t exercise ever is better at it than you are?
But then we went again on Friday and I got four lengths ahead and stayed four lengths ahead. I even got out of the pool four lengths ahead, when I reached sixty. I gained one length by being braver about getting into the chilly water and I gained two lengths while she rested at twenty or forty and I guess I gained the last by being a little faster.
I did struggle on Tuesday. It was cold and I went in my post-swim outfit of a t-shirt, shorts & sandals, which are very easy to put on when you’re a little more damp than is ideal. It meant I was freezing when I went in and Tuesday was windy and cold and the water wasn’t as warm as it will be later in the year, particularly as it’s an 8pm session. So it took a while to warm up and get much speed up. My swimming muscles had shriveled up and died since September and I had to persuade them to uncurl and come back to life. I had time to swim 60 lengths so I did (I’m back to using the non-standard actual lengths of this specific pool). I got into the swing of it in the 40s but the 50s were hard! I have a kind of doggy paddle that I use sometimes because I like it and it feels like it’s doing good things to my arms and shoulders but this was not that. This was “I have to get back to the other end of the pool somehow” and it was the struggle of the drowning person. My arms hurt. They would spring back to life if I rested them for a few minutes but they got tired and achy quicker and quicker.
On Friday, it was as if I’d woken those muscles up again. I’d gone in leggings and the day had been sunny so the water was a little warmer and getting started was less painful. Another sixty lengths wasn’t easy but I never reached the point of actually struggling and my last few lengths were no harder than my first few. Later on in the year, I’ll be doing this much faster. One day I’ll get to sixty lengths with ten minutes still to go and decide to do another ten lengths but it’s a bit early for that at the moment. As I mentioned, I plan to be doing 90 twice before the end of the season and the challenge isn’t doing ninety in itself, it’s doing it in this hour-long session, which means I need to up my speed as well as my stamina. But I’m very pleased to have managed sixty lengths without struggling too much second swim back and I’m feeling a lot more positive than I was when I wrote the first version of this last Wednesday.
I’ve made tick lists to work my way up to my three goals – they go on but that’s all I could fit on a single page – and on Tuesday, it didn’t feel possible to even tick off “swim 4 lengths non-stop” this summer. On Friday I realised I’d done at least 8 non-stop and so I’m going to start doing those boxes over the next couple of weeks. I’m tempted to put some approximate dates by the 80/90 lengths tickboxes but the 90s in particular I’m not expecting until August or even September so I may sit and look sadly at those unticked boxes as the summer ticks on.
I’ll let you know how it’s all gone after the last swim of the season – although by then, maybe I’ll be ready to go back to the indoor pools. But I still want to spend the summer in the lovely outdoor pool so I’ll be there until it closes, and so these aren’t necessarily my 2021 swimming goals, they’re my summer 2021 outdoor pool swimming goals. Watch this harbour seal go!