venta

Swimming adventures...

My physio's best advice to me was to do as much aqua-walking as possible. That is, wading around in a swimming pool.

Sadly, this is less easy than you might imagine. The actual walking is easy, but finding a venue is hard. Ideally, I'd find a pool, find my depth, and walk widths. But pools in London are mostly either (a) roped off into swimming lanes which go lengthways or (b) packed full of kids. Pools full of kids are a nightmare... The smaller kids are basically oblivious and will cannon into you (I'm not good at moving quickly to avoid incoming strikes at present) and teenagers seem, largely, to be arses.

So mostly I get myself in the slow lane, and walk at the shallow end and swim (by which I mean hold a float and kick my legs) when it gets too deep.

The two gyms I go to both have capricious opening times for their pools. Work-gym has indoor and outdoor pools, but the indoor one is frequently closed for various lessons or clubs. The outdoor one shelves steeply (it's a diving-depth pool at one end) so I get only a few steps before the water is up to my chest.

The indoor one, when open, is fine - I walk/swim about half and half. Due to a weirdity of design, the "near" end of the pool as you arrive is the deep end, a counter-intuitive fact my brain persistently refuses to accept. Accordingly, I nearly drown approximately every other length when I try to put my feet down at the deep end.

Home-gym claims to have two 25m pools, which they refer to as the shallow and deep pools. In reality, they have one 50m pool with a removable dividing wall. The shallow half also has an extra bite out one side, where it shelves very gradually. On Thursday evenings, the divider comes out, the whole pool is adults only, and I cheerfully wade around in the shallow cut-out while everyone else does serious lengths.

Which is great, although I do look like a massive idiot. Walking-in-water is not something in the national consciousness, thus people look at me and wonder what on earth I'm up to. I've been asked several times if I'm just learning to swim.

On Saturday, I failed to read the cryptic timetable properly, and turned up when the shallow pool was having "junior fun swim" (it involves a lot of inflatables and does look like fun). The deep pool was adults only, but since I can't reach the bottom at either end, no good for walking.

So instead I experimented with the rec pool, the hip-deep warm pool full of parents and toddlers. This is ideal for walking, with only the mild side effect of looking massively sinister as you walk round and round, the lone adult among families of small children splashing about.

I don't think I'd previously been to a pool in London, it's a much more multi-cultural affair than I'm used to. Near home, the pool is often full of Asian women swimming almost fully dressed. The lifeguards occasionally switch into Polish to keep order. Near work, I saw a Chinese girl doing dolphin stroke, which I've never seen before. Once I can swim again, I might even enjoy this swimming lark... I can currently manage around ten metres, which is a huge improvement over "acute agony for some minutes after any hint of frog-kicking".