CHAPTER THREE
Autumn
The evening of that one-day course, I collapsed with an exhaustion of a type I was entirely unfamiliar with. I was sleepy like I hadn’t been since childhood. After years of training for marathons, I had come to accept the aches of repeated impact on tarmac or trail. My muscles would feel tired and my feet would feel sore. The post-training buzz was accompanied by a buzzing in my joints that I recognised as miles clocked and progress made. But this … this was altogether different. There was no negative physical impact from the exercise I had done – no sore knees, no aching thighs, and no blisters from sodden socks. After over four hours in the water, I felt utterly drained, but utterly pain-free. My rage at myself and the ocean had subsided somewhat, leaving me with a strange sort of peaceful exhaustion, more akin to a post-massage sense of relaxation. If this was as bad as swimming got, maybe it was worth persevering, I thought, before falling asleep and forgetting all about that momentary glimmer of positivity.
Throughout the rest of the summer I kept an eye on the water, waiting until the weather was perfect and then running into the sea to try again. I would manage four or five strokes before panicking and flipping onto my back to let myself breathe at the sky, floating and hoping. I headed to my local pool in time for the early-morning slot, with the aim of working out a better technique, alone and unembarrassed by the presence of other swimmers. Instead, I discovered that the crack of dawn was when the most confident swimmers arrived, powering through the water unencumbered by ditherers like me.
I confided the truth about my disastrous efforts to my brother when he came to stay for the weekend, and he in turn confided that he had not enjoyed swimming until he had taken a handful of lessons to improve his stroke and discover a breathing technique he was comfortable with. I begged him to impart his wisdom, so he told me to lie face down along the back of my sofa while he manipulated my arms and legs like a marionette, trying to show me what a decent swimming stroke was. I was grateful, but the next time I got into the pool it became clear that I really wasn’t any the wiser.
Eventually, a fact I had been trying desperately to ignore was becoming unavoidable: I needed help. I was going to have to go back to swimming lessons. The prospect was appalling, reminiscent of pitiful early teen years, when the traumas of unexpected periods, shameful verruca socks and changing into swimming costumes loomed large. Taking on any sort of formal learning as an adult seemed distinctly unappealing. As a fourteen-year-old taking a life-saving course and diving for black bricks in a pair of old pyjamas, I had been sure that by my late thirties I would have been shot of such indignities. How did I still not know everything I needed to in order to live the life I wanted? It felt like weakness to require the help of teachers all over again. I was married now; I didn’t need classmates any more.
But as the summer marched on and married life settled into a routine, a sneaking suspicion crept up on me: perhaps more learning, a fresh project, in a new environment, was just what I needed. Until a month before our wedding, D had worked in London, with early starts that required him to live there for most of the week. Within weeks of our return from Paris, he had a new, significantly better job a ten-minute commute from the flat. Home went from a domain almost entirely ruled by me and my needs – from the hours I worked to the times I slept or the food I ate – to one that seemed to suddenly involve an awful lot of new-found compromise. Despite considering ourselves the very definition of a modern couple – I hadn’t even worn a white dress at our wedding! – we now found ourselves managing the same readjustments as 1950s newlyweds who had only spent snatched moments together prior to marriage. In short, I had someone under my feet so much more than I had ever been used to. Some time with my head in water, entirely alone and unable to chat with anyone, suddenly seemed like bliss.
Thus, swimming lessons were handsomely rebranded. If I weren’t borderline allergic to the term and all its connotations, I would have referred to it as ‘me time’. Instead, I chose to see it as a strength to ask for help, and committed to taking a nine-month course organised by the same Pool to Pier swimming school that had run the one-day course we had both attended. Starting in September, it promised to teach the basics of front crawl in a context working towards open-water swimming, before moving classes to the sea in early summer and finishing with a swim between the two piers in Brighton – the main Palace Pier and the now derelict West Pier. A fresh mission to undertake in the first year of marriage!
This time, however, I was without the support network I had had in the past. There were no reassuringly dark pavements to run along during quiet evenings, no kindly paternal advice, no reassuring knowledge that simply doing the training would make everything else easier. When I began running, I’d had my dad’s wealth of marathon advice to lean on. This time, there was no one in my life with the kind of experience I could have done with. This time, I had to surrender to the fact that I did not know how to do something and that I wanted to learn. And I was going to do it in a swimsuit, in front of a group of strangers.
Until recently, I had never been particularly self-conscious about being in a swimming costume. I never swam in pools unless on holiday, and only owned flattering bikinis made for sunbathing rather than doing laps. Swimwear was fun wear. There were no worries about seams that might shift if I exerted myself, or what a rubbing lining might mean for my stroke or my ability to breathe: if I were wearing swimwear, I was relaxed, warm and predisposed to have a good time. If anything, it reminded me of the freedom of childhood; bright, colourful clothing to be frolicked in. To splash and be splashed in. To create happy memories in.
As the years went by, the glee associated with wearing as little as possible was replaced by new, less appealing emotions. The first few moments of any holiday became more uncomfortable – the revelation of white flesh that first morning at the pool, an unfamiliar expanse of thigh after months of UK drizzle in opaque tights; a sensation of being emotionally vulnerable as well as almost physically naked.
And this new situation was taking these anxieties up a notch. The summer was over, the pool had horribly unflattering strip lighting, and I was there to learn. I was already in a position of vulnerability, having admitted that I simply couldn’t swim properly. I was expected to concentrate and try hard, not relax and mess about.
As I stepped from the changing room, my white thighs under the greenish lighting looked flaccid and soft to the touch, like an old peeled onion. My feet, dry from a summer in sandals, with the final millimetres of a neon pedicure clinging to the tips of the nails, resembled the onion skin itself.
From the changing room to where the instructors were gathering was not even the length of the pool, but the walk seemed endless; a distance I’d rather not cover while this, well, uncovered. No one batted an eyelid as I emerged, but it didn’t stop me from imagining saloon doors swinging closed behind me, and a Sergio Morricone refrain from whistling through my mind. Standing there, exposed and alone, I felt like the new cowboy in town, facing a bar full of hardy locals.
At one end of the pool were some wooden balance benches of the sort I had only ever seen before in school gymnasiums. I sat down, immediately locking my knees together lest, as I suspected, my bikini line were less than perfect. Sitting on a slab of wood one foot off the ground did not create the same silhouette that reclining on a sunlounger usually did. I appeared to be 85 per cent thigh, 10 per cent sweat, and a pair of swimming goggles. My stomach folded, leaving three rolls of flesh stacked neatly on top of each other, like the pale, curved loaves of French bread in my local bakery. I longed for the halcyon days when I felt self-conscious in running wear. How had that ever bothered me? It came down to my ankles! It allowed for two layers of fabric across my belly! And it did not betray visible sweat marks until I took it off.
I admonished myself for feeling embarrassed. I’d just spent a year of my life telling women to forget what they looked like when they exercised and focus instead on what they could see.
Think of the positives! I would tell them. No one is looking at you!
I tried to tell myself the same.
But as I did so, an endless carousel of swimsuit images floated across my mind. Each time I had looked at swimwear online, it had been modelled on toned, athletic twenty-two-year-old bodies. When I bought a bikini in store, the merchandising displayed Amazonian goddesses with skin as smooth and reliable as injection-moulded plastic. Every time I had looked into swimming pool membership, the promotional material had boasted youthful, glistening flesh stretched over rippling muscles. As with running gear, it was impossible not to be sold the promise of an ideal when you were so far from it. Those doing the selling seemed oblivious to the fact that when they told us, ‘This could be you!’ we could actually hear them adding, ‘But it’s not!’
The endless use of these images, as well as the pernicious, corrosive and sly term ‘bikini body’ are phenomena that I would happily see wiped from the face of humanity. Sure, I get that that phrase refers to you being your best for your two weeks in the sun each year, but the damage done by the implication that we are substandard for the remaining fifty weeks is so much greater than any fun and sunshine could repair. It doesn’t matter that most women only need to think about wearing swimwear for a fortnight per year – the language around it works on us daily as it drip drip drips on our souls like the salt water hitting Brighton’s beautiful wrought-iron seafront. Eventually we are worn down. We begin to believe that a bikini body isn’t one that is simply us, wearing a bikini, by the water, relaxed and enjoying ourselves. We begin to believe that it is an unattainable goal, available only to those who buy the right supplements, trainers and cosmetics. We begin to believe that it is a body whose secret is shared discreetly among magazine editors and Instagram superstars only. We begin to believe that it is a body that belongs to other people. It is not this shameful body, here, always here, beneath our clothes; the body whose shape we have to reveal if we want to experience the glorious freedom of running around a park on a spring day; the body whose flesh we have to expose if we want to feel the gleeful weightlessness of floating in the sea as the sun hits the water like sequins.
The enormous, unnavigable wall of advertising images and ‘helpful’ diet suggestions from wellness gurus and health magazines does little to dispel this ubiquitous decree that we should all be a little more similar, a little more manageable, if we want to enjoy our own bodies. Because these bodies actually are our own – they do not belong to the advertising executive who chooses a model pretending to run rather than an actual runner for shoe advertisements. They do not belong to the surfwear designer who will only use six-foot blondes to showcase their product. They do not belong to the men who stare as we drop our towels and walk towards the water’s edge, trembling as much at what others are thinking as at what might befall us once we leap in. These bodies are ours, and we must use them as best we can.
I sat on my bench, anxiously wondering what the others on the course might look like, how they might compare to me, and whether I had signed up for something hopelessly inappropriate for my abilities. How was it possible to feel so large and yet so small at the same time? I felt as if I were about to walk the plank rather than take a recreational swimming lesson.
The bodies that emerged from the changing room were nothing like the ones I was used to seeing selling me swimming costumes. There were shoulders wider and stronger than mine, but legs visibly weaker. There were flatter bellies, and flabbier buttocks. There were slimmer calves, smaller hips and neater toes. But there was softness, endless softness, and a variety of flesh: different colours, different textures and different degrees of muscle tone. It was as if the endless parade of orangey plastic skin that accompanied all images of swimwear and swimming was made up of fake display fruit compared to the marvels of the ripe market stall that I was now seeing.
These, my classmates, were largely women of around my age but there were some a decade younger and maybe a couple older. We all looked utterly different and yet the same. I had stepped out from beyond the mythical wall of bikini bodies. Now, I walked among humans. The relief!
We were introduced to each other by Kim, Julia and Patrick, who had taught me in the summer. They gave us each a Pool to Pier swimming hat, which immediately rendered all introductions largely useless, as without their hair I could no longer recognise anyone. (I still find it nearly impossible, and have spent hours of my life swimming with people whose names I am still not quite sure of. Facebook profile pictures rarely help.) We were divided into lanes according to ability: those who had taken the course the previous year and were using it as extra training; those who were already okay swimmers but who wanted to prepare themselves for open water; and those, like me, who could not do a single length of proper front crawl.
My classmates in the other lanes needed little instruction and busied themselves almost immediately with swimming, but four of us were told we’d be focusing on the business of deconstructing front crawl, re-understanding it and then learning it entirely from scratch. Determined not to play for time with ‘intelligent’ questions while fighting to catch my breath, I tried my utmost to clear my mind and simply do whatever was asked.
Nevertheless, I had been hoping for something a little more dynamic, something that felt more like actual swimming. For our first exercise, we were simply asked to practise breathing out. First above the water, then, pulling our knees up and exhaling deeply, letting ourselves sink to the bottom of the pool’s shallow end. The aim was to demonstrate how bodies are easier to submerge when they’re less full of air, and by the third time I felt my bum bounce off the tiles a few feet below me, I was convinced. Despite having been told it only a few weeks earlier, I now understood that our lungs were really little more than two huge sacks full of air.
Next up, we were asked to combine our new-found exhaling skills with some movement. Specifically, pushing off from the end of the pool, first with our breath held, then while giving a large exhale. The difference in the distance we could cover was extraordinary: you simply don’t get very far if your lungs are clinging desperately to air, puffing you up like a beach ball. The third time, we were asked to push off both exhaling and extending our arms in front of us with thumbs side by side. As we whooshed forward, I understood how much faster the water was able to move around me if I created a more pointed, dynamic shape.
This act of emptying our lungs in motion while reaching forward also made it easier to push our heads and chests into the water, creating what I was told was a crucial sensation of almost swimming downhill. This apparently kept our legs up, parallel to the water’s surface, in an ideal swimming position.
This was not an instruction I had ever received before regarding my body’s position in the water. At some point in the last thirty-odd years, I had most definitely missed a meeting. Somewhere in the dustier recesses of my memory, I remembered being clearly told (not long after dunking my feet in a disgusting tray of Dettol) that front-crawl swimmers should not create too much splash with their feet. In fact, I had long understood that the very best swimmers were the ones who left barely a ripple. In order to remain nice and calm when I swam, I had always made a conscious effort to keep my feet a good ten to twenty centimetres below the water. Now the breaking news seemed to be that our bodies should really lie as flat as possible on the surface, if anything with chest and shoulders slightly lower than the rest. Apparently it was perfectly possible to have your feet in this position and not create a world of splashing. I was unconvinced.
The volume of new information I was going to have to take on board – and the effort it was going to take to relearn so much muscle memory – began to dawn on me. Putting even this small new skill into practice seemed more than a little challenging. During July’s one-day course, I had relied almost entirely on my legs. Convinced that after years of running they were my only source of strength, I had tried to power up and down the pool propelled by the force of my kick alone. Now it
was slowly being revealed that trying to push my body ahead from behind was never going to be as efficient as learning to pull it elegantly forward, using my legs as mere stabilisers. In not knowing what I was meant to be doing with my arms, I had effectively been trying to shove a panicking octopus up and down a pool in front of a dense metal pole.
This was bad news. Not only were my legs my hard-earned pride and joy, they were also heavy with muscle. I had an arse built by squats, and thighs used to carrying me on four-hour runs. Dense with fibrous muscle and padded generously with the curves I’d inherited from my Latin ancestors, they were less than easy to keep high in the water – particularly given my ongoing misgivings about holding my face down, as a result of my breathing still being so erratic. Frankly, my legs were never going to make an effortless and dignified transition to back-seat passengers.
And as the lesson progressed, just how much of my front-crawl stroke I had been doing incorrectly started to become clear. As well as attempting to push myself from behind instead of pulling from in front, and keeping my legs and feet low, I had tried to lock my elbows so that my arms were entirely straight for as much of my windmilling rotations as I could manage. I had also been lifting my head up to breathe instead of tipping it sideways. The list was endless, and it was becoming apparent why I had found those few strokes I had managed so utterly exhausting: I was doing almost everything in the most difficult way possible, and on top of that, I had been trying to do it in a state of panic, with largely unoxygenated blood coursing through my system.
What was needed was for me to learn an almost completely new portfolio of muscle memory. Arms needed not to swing up and round with elbows locked, but to leave the water elbow first, high and neat. Hands needed not to meet ahead of me, barely an inch apart, but should be wide, allowing me space to get a good swing down through the water. That swing needed not to fade out limply below me, but to turn into a push back until my thumbs were almost grazing my thighs. Legs needed not to kick fiercely from the knee but to move softly, flowing from the hip, while feeling floppy and loose. My head needed to turn tightly, chin almost to shoulder, so I could find air to breathe in the tiny pocket my own head had created as it moved through the water. Oh, and I needed to develop a strong enough core to keep me rocking gently but controlled.
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