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[citiusaltiusfraughtius-blog]

SWIMMING

Swimming is the worst, and I’m so annoyed that it makes me feel so amazing.

My poor boyfriend bears the brunt of this strange transfiguration by chlorine. I basically have to be peeled off the sofa and pushed into the pool. I complain constantly. I’m like a cat. I like sleeping and I don’t like being immersed in water. 

My brother was a national level swimmer. I was not a national level swimmer. I was a national level nerd, and moving was not my forte. I have strong memories of squinting up at swimming teachers who stared at me with a kind of horrified amazement, unable to comprehend how I could demonstrate textbook perfect technique but not manage to actually move. It was like I was on an underwater treadmill. I just stayed in the same spot. It was actually impressive, in a way.

Over the years, I’ve become no better at swimming, just more stubborn and resentful. I walk into the pool as a human thundercloud – grumpy, anxious, deeply uninterested in flailing down a length of water and back again, dozens of times. And for good reason. Swimming is profoundly, almost hysterically uninteresting.  There is nothing to look at in a pool. The landscape never changes. There never seems to be quite enough light in any swimming complex, so the place has this horrible drab mouldy energy. The upshot is that the whole session becomes an exercise in directionless hatred.

But in the same way that bellowing invectives at the four wheel drive that cuts you off at the traffic lights is sometimes quite invigorating, swimming provides ample opportunity to work through your stores of built-up resentment. For one thing, freeway rules apply to each lane. This means that anyone going slower than you is a somnolent drain on society and anyone going faster is a dangerous hoon. If anyone causes you to have to overtake them or overtakes you in turn, you get to loathe them, passionately and profoundly, for as long as they’re in your lane. It’s glorious. It’s energising. You usually can’t see their face, so you don’t ever have to feel guilty about hoping they drown. Same goes for children who bring their horseplay into the lap lanes, or old people who insist on walking in the lanes designated for swimming. The people one normally feels a social impulse to protect become detested enemies. It’s wonderful.  

It also works in the other direction – sometimes it feels really good to be enormously passive aggressive and have everyone turn against you. In a world where so many of us are terrified that we’re somehow upsetting people while trying to do good, it feels good to know that you’re being a jerk. Recently, I swam with my brother in a crowded 25 metre pool, and he totally cleared the lane of its six inhabitants with one Olympic-speed lap. It was majestic. Everyone hated him. They all stood together up one end of the lane and bitched about him swimming too fast. It was legitimately inspiring.  

If ruining other people’s days brings you joy, I particularly recommend swimming at the Northcote outdoor pool at around 9 pm on a cold, rainy night. Getting out there is hell, but once you’re in you don’t mind that it’s raining, and there’s always one lifeguard standing shivering in a puffy jacket just boring holes into your skull because you’re forcing them to be out in the cold. The power! Plus, sometimes there are ducks in the pool, so everyone wins.

Aside from befriending ducks, swimming is inherently a lonely activity – it’s hard to connect emotionally with someone with both of your faces underwater. And something about that means that small moments of human connection take on strange significance when they happen between the pool ropes. When you stop at the end of a lap to breathe, and someone pops their head up to see whether you’re about to start another one, there’s often a sweet little ‘Oh no, you go’ pantomime that feels very British and proper. People in a cold swimming pool immediately bond out of a shared suffering. And now and then, you end up inadvertently touching people as they pass, and it’s quite startlingly intimate. Once, late at night at Collingwood pool, I was doing breaststroke, and somehow managed to accidentally hold hands for a second with a woman going in the other direction. I was single at the time, and the suddenness of that touch actually made me tear up. So there’s an image for you. A woman crying into her goggles because she accidentally brushed hands with the old woman breaststroking opposite. Now that I think of it, I also once managed to accidentally grope a friend’s penis while breaststroking, so I think it’s safer for everybody that I stick to freestyle now.  

I know several people who claim to find swimming meditative. I don’t. Or actually, I do, but I find it very similar to trying to meditate when your brain is more interested in yelling at you. My internal monologue while swimming usually goes something like: ‘1. HEY REMEMBER THIS SONG LET’S TRY TO REMEMBER ALL THE LYRICS. I DON’T KNOW YOU BUT I WANT YOU – 2. OH WAIT WE GOT INTERRUPTED BY COUNTING THE LAP NUMBER LET’S START AGAIN. I DON’T KNOW YOU BUT I WANT YOU ALL THE – 3. OH NO WE GOT INTERRUPTED LET’S START AGAIN.’ It’s nightmarish. I also have this inability not to inhale water every time I breathe, so I usually end up swallowing litres of chlorinated peed-in water. I’m sure this is excellent for my health.

If this sounds like total unmitigated torture, it is. But there are benefits even to this. Because you have nothing to do except keep moving, swimming becomes a rather elegant testing ground for more general life skills. Such that when you fuck up a tumble turn and flood your sinuses with water (that particular red nose-eye-face pain that feels like an imminent nosebleed and that so strongly characterised my youthful swimming efforts), as it turns out, if you just breathe out through your nose and keep going, the pain recedes and is quickly forgotten. If you breathe in just as someone passes you and a wave flops into your lungs, you can actually cough it out while still maintaining a passable freestyle. The takeaway being that it is possible to cope with crisis while still maintaining a semblance of serenity. That pain is temporary, and that most things can be cured with some good quality breathing. That most people can’t tell them you’re hacking up phlegm underwater. I’m not sure if that last one is super applicable to the office, but hey, I’m not one to judge.

Even so, I know that this doesn’t seem like a recipe for a good time. And for the first thirty laps (fifteen in a 50 metre pool, but anyone who tells you they prefer 50 m pools to 25 m pools is lying to you and is not to be trusted), it’s not. It feels like those agonising nightmares where you’re trying to run but you look down and realise that you’re not moving. But – and finally! The but! – at around the 750 metre mark, your body suddenly remembers that somewhere back in its evolutionary chain, it was a fish. It’s as though you have to clear out the old oil in the engine by churning through 30 horrible laps where you feel like you’re not moving at all, and then suddenly, you are. Suddenly, you get a grip on the water. And then you’re not a human trying not to drown accidentally, or trying not to drown on purpose out of boredom. Suddenly, you’re just swimming. Your brain shuts up. Your body clicks over into autopilot. And you just cruise.

And then you get out, and go through the interminable effort of trying to comb chlorinated knots out of hair, and have the inevitable naked chats with similarly naked, gloriously fat women in their 60s. I’ve had some excellent naked conversations with women in changerooms, all of whom don’t seem to give a single fuck about what their bodies look like, which is an inspiring energy to be around. I’ve befriended stressed mothers and joined gossip circles and learned about how border security works, all from wobbly nude ladies. I understand that the male changerooms at pools lack this kind of joyous camaraderie. My boyfriend once saw a man at the Coburg pool placidly drying his pubes with the wall-mounted hairdryer once, though, so there’s something to be said for that.

And then you’re outside and then – suddenly, finally, it hits you. The calm. The calm. The blissful, blissful calm. After an hour of deafening pool-amplified echoes and bubbles and water and children shouting and shower noise and hairdryers – suddenly, the silence. Your body feels like setting jelly and your head feels like it’s been pressure-hosed and the serenity is like nothing else. It’s like a drug. It’s the only reason I ever go back, and by god, it’s a good reason.

Swimming. Boring as fuck, feels awful – until suddenly, it really doesn’t.