Every few years the management make ridiculous attempts to ‘rebrand’ the pool as a ‘twenty-first-century fitness experience’ or something equally absurd, but these are always doomed to fail. The pool is resolute in its scruffiness. Short of being pulled down and rebuilt, it’s completely unreformable. Occasionally the company that owns it puts up posters and signs saying things like: ‘Aqua Leisure: Excellence is the Only Option’, or other preposterous mantras. The regular swimmers just smile at these with ironic detachment, and continue their lengths. And the lengths are one of the reasons we come, because unlike most pools in inner-city London, which are usually twenty-five metres, this one is longer, eccentrically so – possibly the only pool in the city to be 33.33 metres. When I first asked one of the staff I thought they were winding me up, but since then I’ve paced it out, and it does indeed seem to be 33.33 metres. For people interested in length swimming (which seems to be most of us here), this is helpful because it means more time swimming and less time turning at the ends.
You might think the pool would be relatively quiet, considering its worn state, but you’d be wrong. At times, particularly school holidays, it becomes very busy. I’ve also learnt to avoid lunchtimes, when you get a particularly frantic type of swimmer, presumably connected to having limited time off work. My preferred time is Monday and Thursday evenings – when the pool stays open later, and the few people using it seem far more relaxed; that sense of leaving behind the stresses of the day.
After many years of going at these particular times you’d think that I’d recognise other regulars, but there are only a couple of faces I nod at. Strangely enough, you recognise people more by their (sometimes strikingly individual) ways of swimming. This is a diplomatic way of putting it. There’s an elderly man who has a habit of smacking the surface of the water with his hand, as he does his slow crawl, as if determined to displace as much of the pool as possible. If you’re swimming in the same lane this becomes infuriating, especially if you’re doing breaststroke, because every time you pass each other, you get a face full of spray. Yet, curiously, when he rests at the shallow end after a few lengths, he emanates a benevolence and calm quite at odds with his style of swimming. The pool is usually set up in four wide lanes – so that in each lane people can swim up one way, and back down the the other side of the lane. The lanes are designated ‘fast’, ‘medium’, ‘slow’ and there’s an unspecified one (generally off-limits to the public because being used for swimming lessons). Generally the fast lane is dominated by younger women and men propelling themselves, with metronomic rhythm, up and down with their crawl. There’s a more diverse demographic mix in the medium lane, mainly doing breaststroke. And then the tentative swimmers – parents with children, the elderly, people with infirmities, the overweight, the underweight – occupy the slow lane, some of them barely swimming at all, spending more time just chatting in the water. I’ve also come to recognise a group I call ‘Buddhist swimmers’, who don’t like to be hurried in any way. Though confident in the water – long, meditative strokes – they nearly always stay in the slow lane as well, swimming in their own bubble of calm. Signs by each lane, with arrows, instruct the users to swim either clockwise or anticlockwise.
I’ve always remembered reading something that an American psychologist and writer wrote, in a playful article titled ‘101 Solutions to All Your Problems’, or something like that. He said, ‘Drive for space and not speed.’ So for years I’ve adopted this approach for driving, especially on motorways, and it works – you can nearly always find a place that’s less crowded. This seems so simple, yet if more people actually drove like this the accident rate would probably be halved overnight. When I started swimming I also began to use this method. And so, when entering the pool, I never head for a specific lane, but start by looking at the traffic in all of them. Occasionally, and wonderfully, you’ll come out of the changing room and realise the whole pool is blissfully empty, only one or two swimmers in each lane. But usually you’ll need to do quite a bit of counting and lane comparison before choosing. Sometimes I’m amazed at how fixed people are about swimming in a particular lane, oblivious to the fact that a neighbouring one is far less busy. If there are six or seven swimmers in the middle lane, but only two in the fast lane, it seems obvious to me to swim in the fast lane. Or the slow lane. It doesn’t really matter, just find the place with the most space.
Swimmers divide into two categories which essentially define their swimming, and probably their attitude to life as well. There are what I call ‘free’ swimmers and ‘length counters’. It would be tempting (but wrong, I think) to divide these on gender grounds alone, i.e. men as counters, and women as freer – in my experience there are just as many the other way round. I cannot stress enough the depth of the philosophical divide between these two types. ‘Free’ swimmers perhaps sounds too positive – we could also call them ‘aimless’ swimmers. Time and distance are unimportant for these people. One day they might come for forty-five minutes, another day twenty. There’s no reason to push themselves, no point. The action of swimming is the main thing. A space for the body that essentially frees the mind. These swimmers often talk about being able to ‘lose themselves’ when they’re swimming, being able to ‘process things’ as they swim. It’s essentially the therapeutic approach to the swimming pool. Erin was very much in this category.
Though I may sound a little critical of free swimmers, this is probably because I could never be one, and perhaps am a little envious. I’m genuinely curious about what it would feel like not to care about the time or the distance you’ve swum. I suppose it could be an extraordinary liberation. The only time I’ve experienced this in any way is swimming in the sea with friends on holiday, which is lovely, but bears so little relation to ‘swimming’, as I think of it, that it seems a different activity altogether. Holiday swimming, by its very nature, is something out of the ordinary, and so any normal rules do not apply.
Sometimes (but whisper this carefully!) I wonder whether free swimmers might actually be happier people. I occasionally have fantasies about crossing over to the other side, but ever since I started swimming I have always been a ‘length counter’, and no doubt always will be. For me it’s all about time and distance, it’s about pushing yourself as hard as you can, about shaving seconds, parts of seconds, off times. I’m intensely competitive with myself. I make myself swim when it’s zero degrees outside, or in the middle of a heatwave. I swim when I’m sad or happy. Feeling a little ill is no excuse – in fact I’ve often found that a vigorous 1,200 metres is an effective way of chasing off a burgeoning cold. And the reason for all of this? Some say it’s just chemicals being released, but I think it’s more than that. It would be hard to explain to a non-swimmer, but there is an extraordinary energy that can come when your rhythm is established, and when your breathing, your arms and legs are all working in total synergy. At these moments, you seem to go into a kind of trance, it’s not about concentration any more, but letting go. (Though still remembering to count the lengths of course!) And afterwards, the sense of your whole body singing, a kind of zinging energy field around you as you emerge into the outside world again. And I know it does miraculous things for the mind as well. For people involved in any work that’s sedentary – writing being an extreme example – there are so many dangers inherent in spending most of your days seated in front of a screen. And swimming is the perfect antidote.