Almanac Swimming: Definitely a win

 

 

There was a time – which in my mind is only yesterday but the calendar has the audacity to say was three and half decades ago – when an 800m swim was a warm-up. Those were the days when the squad coach would wheel out a big wooden-framed blackboard, with old fashioned chalk, and write up a training set that started with scribbles like 800m f/S W/U, followed by such horrors as a technique drill called ‘catch up’, and sprints to build lactic tolerance. Then I’d get on my pushbike and ride home.

 

In my teenage years I swam with the Loxton Swimming club, and three nights a week I’d pull up in the late afternoon sun and park my bike in the metal racks where no locks were necessary, just to the left of the sign that said, ‘Harry Tickle Memorial Pool’. I have no idea who Harry was, or why they named a pool after him, but they honoured him with an impressive facility. Grass lawns and big gum trees with resident cockatoos, all surrounding a baby pool, toddler pool, and pristine 50m pool with diving boards. I’d push my way through the click-clack turnstile and past the counter where if you had a spare 50c you could buy a Bush Biscuit, then onto the single room Besser-block clubhouse that was tucked up alongside the similarly constructed changerooms.

 

As was often the way in small country towns, my swimming coach was also my high school art teacher. We called him ‘Mr Uzzell’ at school, ‘Mr Uzz’ outside of school hours, or simply ‘The Uzz’ at the club. He was an enigmatic character with a full-face beard and square 1970s-style glasses, both a full decade out of date. He was a volunteer in the local St John’s, a regular at the cricket grounds, and later, a life member of the footy club. And, in the way of all teenagers I assumed everyone adult was old, including The Uzz, but now that I’m also an old-adult I realise he must have only been in his late twenties.

 

In that genetic lottery in which we all participate I won the family anatomy of a short torso with long limbs and very few fast twitch muscle fibres. Combine those long levers with a muscular capacity for sustained effort, and it meant The Uzz quickly identified me as a long distance swimmer. He insisted technique was the only thing that mattered and he was fierce about stroke efficiency, so we swam drills. Repetitively. High elbow drills, side swimming drills, rotation drills, timing drills. I remember swimming backstroke with plastic cups balanced on our foreheads. And we finished every training session with a sprint, while he walked the side of the pool with a stopwatch he never used. I found it farcical and frustrating. Wholly pointless. Why set a sprint if it’s not about the time?

 

Long levers and physical resilience, yes, but I’m also (*cough*) mildly competitive. If it’s a sprint then I’m in it. If it’s a race then I want to come first. And if it’s not a race, then I’ll bloody well make it one. This whole ‘life’ thing is a competition and I’m comparing myself to everyone else around me. Isn’t that what we are here, and in this pool, for? So, all this business with a decorative stopwatch we aren’t going to use, C’mon Mr Uzzell, like seriously…what the hell is that about?

 

In 1987 Kylie Minogue charted with ‘I should be so Lucky’, Australia got its first female High Court Justice, and Bob Hawke was re-elected for a third consecutive term. Insignificantly, in Loxton, at the end-of-season-BBQ in Harry’s honorary pool grounds, I was named Senior Girls Champion. Amidst polite applause the Uzz handed me a hollow plastic trophy, and I thought he, and the entire committee, were deluded. I’d not won a single race outside the club that year. The best I’d managed was a third, and every meet had seen me beaten by swimmers who were faster, stronger and more disciplined than me. You can only enjoy something if you win, and given a choice between doing the work to win, or avoiding the ugliness of the loss by not racing in the first place…I chose the latter. I threw the trophy into the wardrobe and gave up competitive swimming.

 

Anyway, as the calendar reminds me, all of that was a few years ago now and I’ve had a love-hate relationship with swimming ever since. I love it, then I don’t and I’ve learnt to hop on and off as the ride circles around. I left Loxton in 1988, university bound, and I’ve not swum in Harry’s pool, nor taken my place on a starting block since. I’ve swum plenty of laps in plenty of other pools, and even tried a couple of masters squads, but every time I got in the water the competition monkey came with me.

 

The Gawler Aquatic centre is now my local and it has the picnic-like grounds of my glory years, with trees and birds and facilities built out of Besser-block. But I no longer ride my bike, instead of a turnstile I swipe a card so the little glass gates flick open, and Bush Biscuits are well and truly a thing of the past. I’ve also had to accept I’m at the age where my rotator cuffs, rather than my ego, determine the intensity of the swim.

 

These days I take my time pulling on my cap and setting up my gear, watching the ducks hang around on the grass and listening to the kids shriek and splash about in the baby pool. Underwater, I love watching the bubbles rise off the teenagers who are deliberately ignoring the lifeguards and throwing themselves off the diving board. And the ladies with their dry hair piled on their heads and sunglasses on their face, while they swim very slow breaststroke.  The instinct to compare myself to the swimmers around me is still there, so it’s better if I focus on the little rainbows that dance in the water, and that continuous black line that hypnotically pulls me forward.

 

But The Uzz was right of course, because I am naturally a long-distance swimmer, and by the end of the season I can usually turn out a swim length he would approve of, with the good technique he gave me. It was about five years ago that I reintroduced the finish of every swim as a 50m sprint that has nothing to do with time but is all about how I show up for myself. A commitment to do the hard, uncomfortable things.

 

Recently I was at the pool for the season opener, the first swim of the summer. One of those rotator cuffs had been giving me months of trouble, so I was testing the rehab to see how it would hold. Indeed, it held well, and I don’t know if it was the simple enjoyment of muscle memory and repetitive, familiar, movement, or the sunshine, or the ducks, or the promise of a summer that is about to unfold, but the swim felt silky and frictionless.  They don’t often feel like that, and certainly not for a first hit-out, so, with the wisdom that comes of age, and the experience earnt through persistent injuries, I decided not to push my luck and bailed out at 800m.

 

It was a joy.

 

And most definitely a win.

 

 

 

 

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Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

 

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