Life

Claire Simpson: When everything settles into a proper rhythm, swimming feels like pure freedom

Sometimes I have to stop half-way along the pool, breathe, and start again. But when everything settles into a proper rhythm it feels like pure freedom

The tiled bottom of my gym's pool is surprisingly free of the used plasters, bobbles and hair grips I remember from childhood
The tiled bottom of my gym's pool is surprisingly free of the used plasters, bobbles and hair grips I remember from childhood The tiled bottom of my gym's pool is surprisingly free of the used plasters, bobbles and hair grips I remember from childhood

BEFORE bed, I check the two weather apps on my phone. Big yellow symbols appear: more sun tomorrow and the day after and the day after that until no-one can remember the joy of squelching around in the rain and hiding under umbrellas.

I don’t mind the sun really, so long as a hat, scarf and bottle of factor 50 is close at hand. But it’s the relentlessness of it all, like that fella in every workplace who tells the same stories over and over or the fellas on Love Island who seem to have substituted their personalities for exercise regimes.

After a day battling with The Irish News’s temperamental air conditioning system, early evening finds me sweating on the upper deck of a Metro bus. It’s then that I think of what passes for my own exercise regime – doing a few laps in the cool water of a nearly empty swimming pool.

I joined a gym earlier this year purely because it had a lovely, and seemingly under-used, pool. It was the steam and the smell of chlorine that did it really. One whiff and I was back in the council-owned Co Antrim leisure centre of my childhood, complete with dodgy showers, a tiny ‘disinfectant pool’ which was supposed to prevent swimmers from getting verrucas, and the thrilling ‘big pool’ with a two-metre deep end.

The gym in Belfast is a verruca-free zone. It’s full of terrifyingly glossy young mothers with sons named after Biblical prophets (Come back here, Abraham) and daughters called after Victorian parlour-maids (You haven’t finished your avocado, Tilly). It has pristine tennis and squash courts and a cafe that sells smoothies and healthy burgers and expensive protein shakes in glass bottles.

’Tis far from protein shakes you were reared, I sometimes mutter to myself while scuttling through the cafe on the way to the women’s changing rooms.

There are two pools: a little outdoor one with sun loungers around the sides. The outdoor pool has notions. It thinks it should be in Mykonos or Sorrento and attracts young sunbathers who scroll through their phones or check each other out. It’s the proper indoor pool that I love, with its floats and screaming children and three lanes: fast, medium and slow. I’m always the slow lane. My swimming technique could be best described as inefficient but I’m never in any hurry.

That first contact with the water is always a joy. Every time, I spend a few minutes floating in the quietest part of the pool until my goggles clear. The tiled bottom is surprisingly free of the used plasters, bobbles and hair grips I remember from that childhood pool.

I rather miss the litter. When I was first learning to swim in primary school, finding a sparkly hair grip felt terribly exciting, although I was sensible enough not to touch the dirty plasters. Those first few trips had their own soundtrack too – songs 20 years out of date that were piped through speakers and echoed around that big room. Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band was a particular favourite – in retrospect a bad choice for a pool of young children.

Swimming as an adult feels little different to swimming as a child. All I have to do is move my arms and legs in a vaguely synchronised way while remembering to breathe. It’s the breaths that are the hardest part: a quick loss of concentration and I realise I haven’t taken in enough air, then try and compensate on the next stroke.

Sometimes I have to stop half-way along the pool, breathe, and start again. But when everything settles into a proper rhythm it feels like pure freedom. It’s in these moments I feel like I could swim for hours and never get tired. Soon I’ve lost count of the number of laps and just swim for the feel of it. For an hour at least the stresses of the day fall away: no texts, no emails; I am blissfully uncontactable.

You have to take your small pleasures when you find them. I don’t swim to lose weight or win races. I couldn’t tell you how long it takes me to complete a lap, only that once it’s done I want to do another one. So I swim on until my arms ache. Under the water, I’m in my own blue world.

:: Lynette Fay is away.