In the sea, the push and pull of the waves, as well as the movement of tides or currents beneath you, is always audible. In an indoor pool, the proximity of the walls to the water creates an echo effect that amplifies every splash, clang or playful shriek. In an outdoor lido, however, sounds seem to vanish. When I asked a sound engineer friend if this was actually possible, or if it was just my emotional response to calm recreational spaces, he confirmed that it was not merely my overactive imagination: the absence of close, high walls lets sound drift further and therefore seem quieter. The roar of the breath beneath the water remains the same, but the roar of nearby traffic shrinks away.
How had I been missing out on these urban oases for so long? I chose not to dwell on the answer, but to focus on the new opportunities available to me. Where once I would head to a café or amble around the shops if I had a gap between meetings in London, I started to pack a towel and swimming costume instead. For those few weeks I roamed all over the city, like a twenty-first-century version of John Cheever’s Neddy Merrill, albeit one less boozy and considerably less scornful of public pools.
Indeed, it is the very public nature of these pools and lidos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that I find so inspiring. Sure, there are some magnificent hotel pools and some truly slick private membership club pools liberally scattered across the capital, and indeed the country. But it is these lido gems that truly capture our imagination. Once liberated from the petty confines of gender segregation nearly one hundred years ago, and unencumbered by the dangerous, cloying legacy of racial segregation of so many US public pools – decades worth of black children not being allowed to swim, leading to a further generation of black children afraid of the water – our lidos are truly civic spaces. The more I saw of them that summer, the more I understood that they are not just for exercise or relaxation, but, crucially, serve as vital opportunities to witness that infinite variety and fortitude of bodies that walk – or swim – among us. To be lapped by a grandmother, to be watched by a curious child, to be asked to help at the steps by someone infirm on land and as buoyant as a baby in the water – this, I came to learn, was just as important a part of being a swimmer as training for an event ever can be.
Because however exposing the act of getting to the water in nothing but a swimming costume may be, the communities that swimmers have built truly cement my faith in human nature. In Brighton there is a group, promoted and supported by the council, for trans swimmers. In London, the Swim Dem Crew specifically tries to encourage those who would not normally get into the water to do so. All over the country there are children finding their confidence in the water thanks to swimming being part of the national curriculum.
The more I chatted to the lifeguards or my fellow swimmers, the more I realised how beloved these lidos are. When the state cannot or will not fund them, local communities rally time and time again to keep them open. Tooting Bec Lido is run by the South London Swimming Club during the winter months, when only the hardy and experienced want to swim. Brockwell Lido was closed in 1990 before a campaign was initiated to save it, reopening it in 1994. In 1999, the Pells Pool was saved under similar circumstances, and as I write, six miles away on the other side of Brighton, Saltdean Lido is being prepared for its 2017 reopening, a community interest company having bought it from the council.
We want our public pools – particularly our outdoor pools – to reflect our better, calmer nature, to encourage in wider society the sense of peace and restfulness that we experience while there. And thus far, we are doing a great job. They should be treasured, every single one.
Finally, nearly ten months after that first fateful attempt, the weather cleared, and the wind dropped: it was time to get back into the sea. I was strong enough, I was prepared enough, and I was trusted enough. But still, on the morning of that first outdoor lesson, I got myself into such a sweat that it took me nearly half an hour to yank my wetsuit on. Eventually I was in, and headed out for the only-slightly-mortifying walk to the spot on the beach where the class was due to meet.
It was exactly where the one-day course had taken place, to the east of the Palace Pier, and it was another glorious day. After a mild but grey start to the summer, the sunlight felt dazzling, as if the ceiling on the world had been lifted a few hundred feet, and with it my confidence. The sky above the clouds was revealed! And so would my new self be: a sea swimmer!
The group was gathered on the pebbles by the time I arrived, and we were given a briefing about the conditions and reminded to do our acclimatisation exercise. ‘Exhale. Get all the air out before you try and swim,’ said James, who was manning the safety kayak. Moments later, I waded confidently in; only this time I knew the value of the acclimatisation and exhalations. I happily dunked my head into the water, and despite every instinct wanting to clasp my breath within me, I breathed out. I really, really breathed out, forcing everything I could from my lungs. I felt the cold reach my hairline, and into my wetsuit, but I kept going, pushing, exhaling, until I had completed five deep breaths. So far, so good.
The three temporary swimming buoys were once again positioned about fifty metres apart in the water, and our task was to get our bearings and swim between them. For now, my breathing was calm and I was bobbing, treading water, at a depth where I could still feel the bottom. A few feet further, and I knew the pebbly shelf would give way sharply beneath me. Brighton doesn’t do slow, Caribbean plateaus of sand: there are pebbles, there is a drop, and then there is deep sea. I waded forward, ready and prepared for it. But as I pushed my feet against those last few inches and lifted my legs, I suffered a sort of terrifying vertigo.
The sea wasn’t too rough for me, and I knew I could swim, but I was utterly overwhelmed by being back in the ocean.
‘I feel … so out of my depth,’ I heard myself mutter, understanding the expression for the first time with infuriating clarity.
Away from the pools and lidos I was now so in love with, and their regular, familiar walls, the sea seemed impossibly unknowable. There was just so much of it, and I was so tiny. The panoramic view of the shoreline that had given me unparalleled delight a year ago now seemed to be rushing at me and then away, focus zooming in and out at terrifying speed, as if Hitchcock himself were directing my anxieties for maximum effect. If I turned away from shore to face the water, the same thing happened but exponentially worse. The sea went on for ever! The endless churning movement felt like the very worst of being in an angry crowd, pushed and rocked by forces way beyond my reach. This was the acute loneliness of being a tiny body submerged in an enormous stretch of water.
But of course I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by friends, classmates and properly qualified instructors. None of whom I wanted to let down. So I smiled, trod water and fiddled with my goggles, pretending that all was well. I was less able to pretend when we were instructed to start swimming, barely able to do more than five or six strokes without bobbing back up to look around me, both horrified and mesmerised by what I could see. In hindsight, the teachers had seen all this before; they knew I had a history of panic in the open water, and they were keeping an eye on me – trusty Kim and her kayak were never far away. But in those first few moments, I felt a crushing sense of defeat I had never known with running. No matter how steep a hill, how muddy a track or how long a run, I had always known I could just walk – I could walk away and survive. But that lunchtime, I felt like I was having to wrestle with mortality itself.
I kept going, though. Trying to do my six strokes at a time before looking around to check my bearings. Each time I stopped, I felt that my breath had become short and snatched, and made a conscious effort to slow it with deep exhales. I carried on, round the buoys, slower than the others but still going, still chipping away at the terrors. I swallowed gallons; my eyes stung from the salt that snuck around the sides of my goggles and splashed my face every time I adjusted them; and the fight with my breath left me as tired as if I’d taken a sprint session on a runni
ng track. At the end of the class, I fell out of the sea, thighs bruised by the pebbles I hurled myself onto, confidence bruised by not having managed to put what I knew I should do into any sort of coherent practice.
We sat drinking coffee from a flask in the sunlight. Viewed from the beach, the sea seemed slyly innocent. I let myself believe that next week it would be easier. But it wasn’t. If anything, it was harder. And the third week wasn’t much better.
It took until the fourth outdoor class for something to click, whether it was confidence or experience I’ll never truly know. I like to tell myself that it was those extra weeks of training I did, heading alone day after day to lane swimming sessions all over the south-east, swimming laps for an hour at a time, forcing my body to believe that it was doable, that I had the physical strength if not the mental grit. I suspect the truth is somewhat simpler: that fourth week, I could see the bottom.
It was now June, and Brighton was enjoying one of its magical days, where the sea is calm but visibly moving, every ripple looking like a seam of diamonds on a cape of blue velvet. And the tide was low. So low. We began the class with the usual briefing on the beach, but this time it took longer than I’d ever known to get to the water’s edge. That shelf that had unnerved me two weeks previously was now visible, metres from the shore and bone dry. We had to clamber down it, the soles of our feet pressing pebbles and feeling for flatness among them to keep ourselves upright.
Even when we hit the water, it took a further thirty metres or so of wading to get even close to chest deep, and most of that was done on cashmere-soft sand, through clear blue water. By the time we reached the buoys, I had half convinced myself I was on a summer holiday. I was giddy with joy at the conditions, actually looking forward to tipping my face in and giving it a go.
And when I did, it was heaven. My mind, clear of anxiety because I knew I could both see and touch the ocean floor, let my body do its own thing. I naturally exhaled, no part of my subconscious urging me to cling on to carbon dioxide-filled air that I didn’t need. Consequently I felt smoother in the water and moved more easily. I recognised that those first minutes of swimming were my body warming up, not an inability to swim properly. Before long, my lungs and arms were moving in synch, just as I knew they could in the pool. We were not following buoys this time, but swimming parallel to the beach. I let my eyes rest. Instead of searching for danger in the murky water, they could clearly follow the sandy floor and its hundreds of tiny shells and rivulets of water dancing around below me. I let the gentle movement of the sea rock me, able to sense for the first time when motion was incoming and where I might need to alter my head position a little to breathe. Above all, I let myself swim.
Once I was actually swimming – continuously, in the sea! – it seemed so simple. I could have been doing it for weeks, if I had only let myself believe. Instead, I had allowed my mind to squat in a mess of self-doubt and baseless anxiety. I knew enough about my own fitness levels to be aware that I wasn’t that much fitter than I had been a month ago. It wasn’t a muscle I had needed to flex, but my brain. By simply being able to see the sandy floor, I had let my mind relax, my body flood with delicious fresh oxygen, and my body follow, doing what I had now long known was within my grasp.
My instinct was to chastise myself for being the one holding back my progress. But what would that have achieved? I had swum! Exhausted, I whooped, clinked paper coffee cups with my classmates and headed home feeling infallible. By the time of my first event, I would be positively amphibian!
The truth was not quite that magnificent, but relative to my previous performances, the Pier to Pier swim was a triumph indeed. It was a calm, sunny evening, and the beach was littered with couples and gaggles of friends having barbecues, fishing for mackerel, or just enjoying a beer as they waited for sunset. Seagulls were squawking, children were prancing and music was playing. It was the sort of scene that regularly prompts D to comment how ‘Brighton is looking very “first half-hour of Jaws” tonight’. The water was dotted with jet-skiers and paddle-boarders, but mercifully no windsurfers. The conditions were good.
We met on the beach opposite the remains of the West Pier, a huddle of about twelve or fifteen of us, and had a security briefing reminding us not to let ourselves get dragged west into the rubble of rotting iron that made up the remains of the decaying structure. Similarly, we were warned against the tide dragging us towards the forest of iron supports still standing at the base of the Palace Pier. The same safety kayak that I had clung to in despair eleven months previously was launched into the sea, ready to keep an eye on us, and behind it we waded out until the water was deep enough for us to start to swim.
And, with a simple catch, pull, push, I swam. I knew that D was waiting with my towel and kit at the Palace Pier, and I knew that if I could do this swim, I would have effectively graduated from the course that had meant so much to me all year. Yet with each stroke, the idea of graduating became less and less important. As I felt the water supporting me, and saw the sun glinting benignly whenever I tipped my gaze for breath, I understood that what the course had done for me was to unlock the door to an other-worldly set of experiences. Already, for some weeks, I’d had the key; now the door was open, and I was a swimmer.
I reached the Palace Pier and was back in D’s arms within half an hour. We wandered home along the seafront together, me in a daze of satisfaction and D keeping quiet enough to suggest that he probably could have done this swim without a year of training and drama. I didn’t care how easy anyone else might have found it, though. The mission had been mine. And now it was complete. Luckily, I had another one right around the corner.
CHAPTER SIX
Down the River
What possessed me to enter an event that was four times the length of that one-kilometre swim from pier to pier, and what possessed me to do it for my first formal open-water swim remain two of my more mysterious decisions.
Perhaps it was that, when my breathing finally clicked and I could swim for stretches of about twenty minutes at a time, I had a little burst of confidence, which sent me something close to delirious when contemplating what else I could do now that I was relaxed in the water. Perhaps it was simply the excitement of getting to the Palace Pier that day. Perhaps it was just curiosity.
Either way, surviving was no longer enough; I wanted to be able to taste all that swimming had to offer me. I could handle 3.8 kilometres down a river I had never seen before in my life. But as the bubble of confidence and overexcitement popped, I realised the weight of what I had taken on. I might be able to do an hour in a lido, but I hadn’t been in the sea for more than half an hour in my life. And I had never swum in a river at all.
The event was to take place down the River Arun, in West Sussex, towards the small seaside town of Littlehampton. Several others from my course had completed it the year before and were planning to do it again. I tried to ignore the fact that they were all more experienced swimmers who had been training in different lanes to the one I had learned in over the last few months.
‘If you can swim confidently for an hour, you’ll be fine,’ they said to me at the final swimming class of the term. ‘The current will do the rest.’
I liked the sound of that, even if I wasn’t entirely sure it was true. But as the fee for entering the event was significantly less than the increasingly prohibitive cost of entering running events, I decided to buy myself a place and see how I felt nearer the time. I quietly told D that we were going to the beach in Littlehampton that day, wrote words to that effect in our shared calendar, and busied myself with my new schedule of fretting. And what a busy schedule it was.
I would think about the eerie, reedy tendrils that I’d seen on the edge of rivers, ready to brush against legs. I would wonder what river water tasted like. I would fret about what to pack for such an event. I thought about all those things constantly, and would sit up with a start in bed, muttering non sequiturs such as: ‘What if you get thirsty but can’t drink
the river water?’ just as D was falling asleep.
I would ask what I could at swimming classes, quickly, before we all had to dash back to work or children, but my questions were usually random and useless, rather than the sensible ones I would remember at three o’clock in the morning and promise myself I’d ask the next week. I tried to remember what I found useful for a half-marathon, and apply it to a swimming event. But it didn’t always work. I knew that if it was rainy before a running event, you could cover yourself in a black bin bag and the organisers would generally be prepared for those taking part to strip them off, along with some old second-hand sweats, just before the starting gun fired. But how ready were you supposed to be when you arrived for a swimming event? Surely there weren’t changing areas for all the participants? Should you wear your wetsuit there? Or be happy to put it on, over your swimsuit, in public? I was barely comfortable walking along Brighton beach with my wetsuit half on and a towel round my shoulders – how would that work out in the centre of Littlehampton?
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