With a full week to acquiesce to the idea of exhaling as a positive act, I embarked on a frenzy of research. When else did my body instinctively hold on to breath, reluctant to let it go? The answer was simple: whenever I was tense. I visualised myself opening a letter that might contain important news, watching a dramatic TV show, or listening to a loved one telling me something I didn’t want to hear. The stance was always the same: shoulders raised, lips pursed, sometimes even a hand to the mouth. A state of pause, everything frozen to cling on to that air. There is an inextricable link between our breathing and our psychological state.
Breathing, I learned, is controlled by the respiratory centre in the brain stem. It knows how to control our breathing rate and depth, according to the amount of carbon dioxide, oxygen and acidosis in our arterial blood (the blood being taken away from the heart, which is busy pumping fresh, oxygenated blood around the body). If carbon dioxide levels increase, for example because of exercise, the respiratory centre will be activated and our breathing rate will elevate to what it needs. Hence breathlessness when we break into a run, which steadies when we hit an even pace. We don’t think about this as it’s happening, though; it’s an involuntary or automatic response to the situation. The magic begins the moment our umbilical cord is cut and we take our first cry; from that breath onwards we are on our own, breathing alone and unguided. Untaught and instinctive, it happens whether we want it to or not, whether we try or not, whether we are even conscious or not.
But of course, it’s not that simple. There are stress hormones that also have an impact on our breathing. Adrenaline, and norepinephrine, the first guys on the scene in a moment of stress (cortisol tends to be released later, and at a slower pace), immediately change our heart rate – and therefore the rate at which we need to breathe in order to keep the blood oxygenated. They divert blood away from the gut and to our muscles so that we’re ready to run away from danger, come what may.
Sometimes these moments of panic can bring on hyperventilation, the act of over-breathing caused by our body’s attempts to ready itself for a danger that may never come. More often, the moment of stress can make us hold our breath. It is understood that this may be linked to our most basic responses: we hold our breath in order to be more silent, better at hiding from danger.
This instinct must have been really useful in a Game of Thrones-style duel scenario, or during the terrifying moment when a hungry dinosaur is listening for your anxious panting. But at the same time, it limits the amount of oxygen you’re taking in, and thus the amount of oxygen in your blood, which means your heart needs to work increasingly hard in order to supply your organs with oxygen.
I wasn’t convinced that learning to exhale could be achieved by the simple act of trying harder, or relaxing more, until I discovered that breathing is unique among our other visceral functions (such as digestion or endocrine) in that it can be regulated voluntarily. Our behavioural (or voluntary) control of breathing is right there in the cortex of the brain, and we can initiate it at will: for example, when we take a huge breath before singing, shouting or playing certain musical instruments. We can learn to control it consciously. Therefore, surely, I thought, we must be able to trigger the relaxation response.
And it turns out that we can. Tests have repeatedly proven that breathing exercises can have a positive impact on the blood’s pH level, and can help sufferers of asthma, heart conditions and other health issues. We can train the body’s response to stressful situations, and therefore its production of these stress hormones. The sympathetic nervous system is the part that creates the sensation of breathlessness in us, the same stress-induced giddiness that I felt as I entered the sea on that one-day course. What I know now, but didn’t know then, is that slow, deep breathing stimulates the opposing parasympathetic nervous system, controlled by the vagus nerve, which calms us down. By taking deep, steady breaths – making sure to exhale properly – we engage the nerve, which puts the brakes on the production of those hormones that are making us breathless. You can use your mind to change your body.
I had to make a conscious decision to relax in order to breathe better, and breathing better would be a conscious move towards relaxing more. It seemed too good to be true. Finally, an offhand comment that Patrick had made earlier in the course made more sense. ‘The minute you are thinking about swimming, you’re not swimming: you’re just surviving.’ At the time I thought, Christ, that sounds just like how internet dating felt, but with my new-found breathing knowledge, I saw the point he was making – to reach at least a sense of proficiency, or at best a sense of pleasure or flow, we must voluntarily create an automatic response in ourselves.
Could I actively decide to relax in the water? After all, I had decided to keep running, and all it had taken was to repeat the same small movements again and again until the magic happened and they stopped feeling like torture and began to re-emerge as solace. Or, as the acting coach Constantin Stanislavski put it: ‘Make the difficult habitual, the habitual easy, and the easy beautiful.’ Basically: fake it till you make it.
Despite my continuing lack of style and speed in the pool, there was a sense that no matter what I experienced on the way to the water, or how badly I performed in it, the everyday wobbles that I felt on land seemed to vanish. When heavy, or exhausted, the thud of a foot and leg on tarmac or concrete is unforgiving, the jiggle visible. But over time, I was learning to trust, even love, the water’s ability to hold me, making me feel weightless and streamlined, regardless of how inelegantly I moved through it.
The fact that being in water really can feel like being held reminded me of a letter I had discovered in the summer, written in the early 1760s by US founding father Benjamin Franklin to his friend Oliver Neave, who seems to have been some sort of seafaring merchant type. I hadn’t been able to find out what prompted the letter, but the contents speak of ‘dread’, suggesting that Mr Neave was terrified of swimming – not ideal if your livelihood was so ocean-bound. Franklin goes to great lengths to encourage, telling him, ‘You will be no swimmer till you can place some confidence in the power of the water to support you; I would therefore advise acquiring that confidence in the first place.’ How wise he was.
He then launches into a slightly alarming description of a trust exercise involving wading into water breast deep with an egg, then turning to face the shore and throwing the egg towards it. If you leap for the egg, he insists, you will feel the water lift your legs and support you. I never worked out why the egg was so central to Franklin’s trust games, but he did also invent my trusty ally the swim fin, without which I would never have got through those crucial first few lessons, so he definitely knew what he was talking about when it came to anxiety in the water.
Either way, the realisation that for hundreds of years men have been terrified of putting their faces in water made me smile. That loneliness, the moments you spend with it lapping at eye level while you try to calm your heart enough to do more than tread water and stare; they are not modern phenomena. For centuries we have felt it. But for centuries the lure of the water has been strong enough to keep tempting us forward.
To try hard to be relaxed is one of the most futile pursuits we can ever engage in. So I made myself two promises before the next week’s lesson: I would take Stanislavski’s advice and just keep going until the difficult was at least habitual, if not yet easy or beautiful; and I would do it visualising the most relaxing thing that I could. I would try and embody the spirit of relaxation, hoping that it would in turn convince my mind and my breathing.
Luckily for me, I saw my sister the day before that lesson. I sat with her, facing her six-month-old son as she fed him. He was without a doubt the most confident being I had ever come across. He was born sure that this was his world and we were lucky to be passing through it at the same time as him. He was, frankly, an inspiration. That week, however, he was also making the move from milk and baby rice to mashed food, and we were all invited to share his experience. Ti
me and again my sister would carefully spoon some of the mashed sweet potato into his mouth, and he would blow out with his lush, soft lips, spraying it across his high chair, and us.
He wasn’t doing it for any reason other than it felt nice. He had just discovered the different noises and vibrations of which he was master, and he was entranced by the buzzing sensation he was capable of making. As I looked at him, orange flecks in his golden-blonde eyelashes and spattered up his cheek, I realised that he was the spirit of relaxation that I needed to embody. Even his limbs were soft, floppy with contentment. Here was a guy who really knew how much fun exhaling could be: I needed to think more like Fred.
As I entered the pool the next day, I pushed my head underwater immediately and tried my soft-lipped, Fred-inspired exhale. Seconds later, I popped up smiling. It was satisfying. I felt like a child who had turned the page in a picture book and seen an image of a horse. Loose lips, relaxed exhale, I could do this. And it turned out that I could.
I started slow and steady, and kept going. Habitual, easy, beautiful, I repeated to myself, turning to breathe every four strokes. Each time I turned, I was ready to inhale: a short, sharp gasp from the side of my mouth, lips twisted like Popeye. I managed it for the entire lesson, and the next week I committed to taking it to every third breath, aiming for the holy grail of open-water swimmers: bilateral breathing. If I could master this, I would have vastly improved visibility in open water, being able to see from both sides as I took breaths, and I would be making sure that I didn’t develop uneven muscle patterns across my body from breathing to only one side.
Within a fortnight, it had clicked. In forcing myself to relax enough to breathe the way I needed to, my steady breathing was relaxing me further in the water. Slowly it dawned on me that in conquering my breath I had moved a step closer to doing something else entirely: conquering my mind. It turned out that the water, the views, the sense of achievement were not the only pleasures of swimming: it was that the act of swimming itself did not create relaxation so much as demand it of you.
As spring rolled around, I discovered that – at last – when I swam, I was no longer thinking about swimming. Instead, I was, to my immense pleasure, thinking about nothing at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
From Pier to Pier
The distance from Brighton’s derelict West Pier to its main pier – the Palace Pier – is less than one kilometre. Running, it’s two songs’ worth. Walking, it’s the length of time it takes to eat an ice cream. Swimming, it represented a distance that, by spring, I could just about do in the pool. To swim that distance, from pier to pier, was the aim of the course, and to me, it now seemed just about feasible.
But the event was only a few weeks away, and there was one major stumbling block in my progress: the weather was still not stable enough for our class to start having lessons in the sea. Each week was a waiting game. I would keep an eye on weather forecasts and try to decipher tide timetables, charts and apps referencing wave height, tide and swell. As the day went on, I would nervously check my phone, waiting for the verdict. An hour before our class, the decision would be taken regarding the sea’s suitability for an outdoor lesson.
This waiting, this weekly reminder of how unreliable the sea was in comparison to the land, drove me to despair. I would start my meteorological investigations the minute I woke up, anxiously checking on my new wetsuit and staring out of the window like King Canute. But the view never seemed to change: the seafront was relentlessly tormented by wind, the sea rendered a constant foamy menace, my mood similarly unsettled.
For four consecutive weeks, this stormy weather meant that our sea swimming lessons – intended to comprise the third of our three terms, were cancelled. If the weather is bad for a runner, we remind ourselves that skin is waterproof and carry on regardless. If it’s bad for outdoor swimmers, you have to head for chlorinated captivity. Endless drills ensued, and as each week passed, the relief at not having to confront the sea churned in the pit of my stomach together with anxiety that if I didn’t do it soon, it might be too late. Without enough practice, I wouldn’t be able to do the Pier to Pier swim. Indeed, without enough practice, I might never be able to swim in the sea at all.
Instead, and with a looming sense of dread, I focused on hitting the goal of being able to swim non-stop for an hour. This, I understood, was the longest the swim could possibly take, if the tide and wind were against us. Perhaps we would get lucky and it would take half that, but we couldn’t know until the day itself. I knew that one thing I could do to control the outcome was to get myself fit enough, so I would turn up to the pool every week and take part in drills focused on getting us ready to cope in open water. We would do batches of ten or twenty lengths concentrating on different skills – our kick, our catch, our push and our pull. We would try and use one breath for as many strokes as possible – first three, then five, then seven, and nine if we could manage it. Then there would be sprints, and recovery lengths, and more sprints.
What I hadn’t appreciated in all of this training was that every few lengths I had the chance to stand at the shallow end, adjusting my goggles and steadying my breath. This was brought to my attention a couple of weeks before the class finally moved into the sea, when we were told that instead of touching the end and kicking off each time, we had to keep swimming and turn without contact with the pool wall, treading water instead. The difference in effort required seemed huge, and once again I felt those creeping tentacles of anxiety reaching for me.
The other step I knew I could take was to try and get myself accustomed to, if not comfortable with, the sensation of cold water on my body. The air temperature itself was by now not too bad: a muggy if blustery May. As for the water, I had no idea. There was only one real solution, and it in turn led to one of my great swimming passions: the lido.
The pool where my lido love began was, strictly speaking, built too early to be deemed a lido – a term that only really caught on in the 1930s. The Pells Pool in Lewes is tucked into a hilly corner of this sleepy Sussex town, about a twenty-minute drive from Brighton. Built in 1860, it is the oldest freshwater swimming pool in the country, Grade II listed, and quite possibly heaven. When I heard whispers (via lane-end chat at the indoor pool) of a group of swimmers who had hired the Pells Pool one evening a week purely for lane swimming practice, I was consumed with jealousy. When I discovered that Alan, another beginner who I had been following up and down the pool since September, was one of them, I was most excited. And when I was invited to come along one Monday night, I may as well have been invited to join the Bilderberg Group.
We drove up on a close, sunny evening, the sort of weather where light, pollen and noise hang in the air as if waiting to be told their next move. In contrast to the seafront in Brighton, where by this time of year tourists, seagulls and crashing waves all compete for sonic supremacy, the approach to the Pells was all but silent. The seafront gusts were gone, left behind on the other side of the Sussex Downs, and the air was swollen with a slow restfulness.
The pool, fed with spring water from beneath the land, is huge – 150 feet long and half as wide. And, crucially, it’s entirely unheated. After lowering myself into the chilly but not cold water, I treated myself to a bit of breaststroke and a chance to get my bearings for the first length or so. I quickly learned that the bottom of the pool curves where it meets the ends, making if feel almost bath-like as you ready yourself to turn.
The water itself is surrounded by an expanse of grass, alongside which is a small children’s paddling pool, and the entire area is walled with Victorian red brick. The cluster of Corsican pine trees at one end, dotted with the occasionally chirruping blackbird, gives the impression that the pool might just be an oasis in the middle of a forest. At the entrance is a fabulously anachronistic kiosk, dating back to the 1961 centenary celebrations, its sky-blue, white and red frontage managing to both jar with and complement the rest of the Victorian splendour.
I put my head down and
got on with the business of some front-crawl training. At nearly fifty metres, the pool was more than twice as big as any I had trained in before. Twice the size meant half the breaks, so at first I struggled to keep myself going before at last falling into a steady rhythm. For lap upon lap I was struck by the fresh taste of the water. Filtered rather than cleaned with chlorine, it could have been poured straight from a glass bottle. After long, wintry months of chlorine making me sneeze all the way home after an indoor swim, and the still vivid memory of salt water’s abrasive drag on the back of my nose and throat, this was delicious.
The overall effect was one of taking a dip in both history and nature. I was aware that this was a pool that had served the town for over 150 years. Here, Victorian workers washed themselves before and after shifts, Second World War soldiers trained for battle, and generations of local children were taught to swim.
As I turned my head to breathe, I could see not the sides of an indoor pool, with its safety notices and harsh strip lamps, but evening sun dappling between the trees above. I could smell the freshly cut grass only metres away, I could taste the spring below me in the earth itself, and I could hear the blackbirds flitting from tree to tree over my head. If this was outdoor swimming, I was a convert for life.
Trips to the Pells became – and remain – a summertime weekly occurrence, but between those Monday evening swims I began to venture further afield. When I went to London to visit my siblings, both of whom lived in Tooting, I was introduced to the delights of Tooting Bec Lido. Ambitiously named the Tooting Bathing-Lake on being completed in 1906, it is almost double the size of the Pells Pool, and is the largest outdoor freshwater pool in the country. Truly, at nearly twice Olympic size, it is startlingly enormous. It was not until 1936 that the pool started to be referred to as a lido, five years after the segregation of the sexes ceased to be enforced (until 1931, women and girls were only permitted at the pool two mornings a week). Around this time, the iconic changing cubicles with their primary-coloured doors – now familiar from movies and photo shoots – were installed. Another tree-lined haven, it is only metres from the roar of the traffic hurtling alongside Tooting Common, but still manages to feel like a calm micro-universe tucked away from whatever else South London might be busying itself with.
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