Until you get your nose quite close to a fitness pursuit, you never know what kind of passion it arouses. Swimmers are like runners who’ve grown up, or cyclists who’ve found peace. They talk more about meditation than performance; they do not fixate on equipment or fancy clothes; there’s a bit of a hippy undertow about the body communing with the water. But to find all this out, you have to get in.
I’ve been to tons of lidos, but until I went to London Fields lido with Becky Horsbrugh, I’d never swum in one, for two reasons. One, when it’s warm enough, it’s always too crowded. Two, I don’t like getting wet.
Horsbrugh is a writer and swimming teacher, and also a long-distance swimmer. She’s just returned from a 16km swim in Bangladesh where she is known by the press as the Mermaid of the Bangla Channel. She has an infectious calm and radiates trustworthiness. You would not want to disappoint the Mermaid, but likewise, were you to disappoint her, she would address it with a note of encouragement.
My natural style is a stately kind of breaststroke, head out of the water, as if on red alert for predators, or trying not to mess up mascara. I had no real intention of changing it. My other objection, apart from the water, was the boredom. It turns out these things were related, who knew?
“You’ll go much faster if you put your head in to breathe out, and bring it out to breathe in,” said the Mermaid. “That’s fine,” I said. “I’m not in a rush.” She tried another tack. “It’s actually not brilliant for your spine.” OK: I tried it. Turns out the thing I hate getting wet the most is my eyeballs. The Mermaid gives me her goggles. That’s much better. That’s faster, more comfortable, more efficient, but most of all, more immersive. Once you reimagine yourself as a person whose head is meant to be underwater, just popping up for oxygen, everything changes. The world becomes the water, the non-water world fades away. The chore becomes an escape, a moment outside time.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
