I hate the winter. Well, strictly speaking, I just hate the dark. I find it so hard to get up before it gets light in the morning – I feel drugged. And at the end of the day, when it’s already dark again as I leave work, I just want to scurry home and hibernate. The relentless darkness incapacitates me. I feel as though I’m in a suspended animation during the long hours of darkness. As someone who loves the outdoors, I spend a lot of my time thinking about going swimming, then not going, and then beating myself up for not going.
This year I’ve felt it particularly keenly. But it’s supposed to be a significant year for me, 2015. I’m 50 this year. That’s a milestone, apparently. Instead of feeling motivated I’ve been moping around feeling trapped and miserable and, to add insult to injury, old as well. So, I have decided that I have to kick myself into gear and do something to stop feeling sorry for myself. What I need is a 50th year challenge.
Any challenge I set myself is inevitably going to involve swimming. But what could it be? I need something to motivate me get out of bed in the morning when I don’t want to, and to go out to swim in the evening instead of moping.
I have decided that it would be a blast to swim a mile a day for 50 consecutive days in 50 different pools in and around London. Fifty consecutive days of swimming seems like a good and fairly hare-brained challenge. The thought of zipping around London on a swimming equivalent of a pub crawl tickles me.
I have quickly set myself some rules.
Rule one: A mile a day for 50 days
I’ll swim a mile a day for 50 consecutive days. It’s not a big deal for me to swim a mile. As a rule, on any average training day, I don’t swim less than two miles per session – often three miles at the weekend. But the majority of my total swimming distance is accrued in two or three long sessions per week. I’m interested to see if swimming shorter distances but much more frequently – having more consistency – will make me fitter in a different way. On top of that I cannot remember the last time I swam more than even seven days in a row. The consistency – and relentlessness – is going to be a challenge.
Rule two: I’ll only swim in public pools
I’ll make an exception for a couple of public open -water venues perhaps, but the majority of my swims will be in indoor and outdoor public pools. No private gyms or hotel pools for me. Although the thought of swimming in the luxurious pool at the top of The Shard sounds tempting, that’s definitely not in the spirit of my challenge.
Why public pools? I love the tranquility and expansiveness of open-water swimming but there is something about swimming in public pools that makes me really happy. I love the spaces. I love the draughty vaulted ceilings and the sterile tiles, I love the echoey sounds of splashing and screaming, I love the smell of chlorine. I love the sense of freedom and fun that can be found in a hot pool on a cold wet winter’s day. I love the cooperation required to effectively share the small confined space of a lane with your fellow swimmers. I love the range of ages of the participants. Swimming in a public pool stripped of all your day-to-day trappings, devoid of cultural signposts of class or social status, with complete strangers, has an equality and democratic nature that I love. We are all equal as people (although not as swimmers …) in the swimming pool.
Rule three: I’m swimming London
I quickly made a list of all the pools I know of or have heard of in London to see if it is possible. That got me to about 35 pools. Google helped me find another 15 that I haven’t been to. Some pools I haven’t even heard of, but are surprisingly close. How did I possibly miss them? Some I have discounted as too far away to be practical. I soon had a shortlist that spans the whole of London.
It’s fair to say that in my time in London I have swum in many many pools. I hadn’t really swum that much before moving here 20 years ago. But as my love affair with swimming blossomed, and I have explored and moved around London, I have visited many different pools. Architectural gems and dodgy municipal sheds, some too hot and some too cold. Some bright and gleaming and loved; some dirty and crumbling and reeking with the smell of steam and chlorine and bodies. All teeming with life, young and old.
Some of them – such as City University’s great Victorian swimming hall, which was used for the first London Olympics and was still standing and still being used 100 years later – have now long gone. And some, like Haggerston Baths in Hackney – which was never salubrious but dearly loved by its neighbourhood visitors, and always had big balls of dust rolling along the bottom of the pool like tumbleweed – had doomed campaigns fought on its behalf for years. Marshall Street baths was open, then closed down, then renovated and reopened again after a successful campaign. There is a pool in Limehouse in which I have learnt to capsize a canoe but never actually swum in. And new kids on the block such as London Fields Lido and Charlton Lido show that although some pools close and are lost, other new and exciting pools are brought back to life and pop up in their places.
So that’s it. I have my plan. It’s not the biggest swimming challenge of my life, but I have no doubt that it’s going to be hard to be motivated and organised for 50 days in a row. I’m both dreading and really looking forward to my challenge. I’ll invite swimming friends to join me along the way for some of the adventures. I have my list of 50 pools; my spreadsheet of venues and opening times is gradually taking shape; and I’ve started shopping for bananas and other vital snacks. Sunday 1 March is the first day of my challenge, and I will be updating you with my progress as the weeks, and pools, go by.
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