A long overdue blog post and my first for 2013, but I’m not yet ready to say much about gardening. I have been a bit distracted. I used to worry each November when my interest in things horticultural waned towards complete disinterest. What if it was gone for good?  I know now to be patient and trust myself. The turning point for my winter cool-off is the solstice of course, but Christmas consumes the days afterwards, delaying the opportunity to sniff the air and see if I feel like doing any gardening yet. The short wait won’t hurt, there is time yet. I know that the pull of the soil will return when I start the apple tree pruning in the new year.


Far from being a source of worry, I’ve started to use the mental space that my winter gardening hiatus offers me to try doing something new.  This winter I decided to learn to swim. Swim properly that is. Proper grown up, face-in-the-water, smooth and easy front crawl. 

I have always been a poor swimmer. Like too many children, I was bussed from junior school to the local authority pool once a week and was shouted at until I managed to splutter my way across a width. The pool was a classic of its time – barely heated, the chilly air sharp with the tang of chlorine. Flakes of pale blue shiny paint drifted down from the rusting ornate Victorian ironwork overhead. I was slow to learn, hated the water pushing into my nose and ears, the prickly, reddened eyes afterwords. Mostly I hated trying to get my school uniform back on over damp, clammy skin. I was the last to get dressed every week, emerging from the cubicles to the impatient scorn of the teacher and a line of dry, smirking classmates. I never did learn to swim in that pool. I learnt to swim in a little outdoor pool near Arundel, on a side trip from a Brownie camp week. Oblivious to the fact that my life-saving armbands were still in the camp tent I swam across the pool before I realised what I’d done.

Let’s fast forward more than 40 years to the Olympic summer of 2012. By now I could swim a few slow lengths of breaststroke but rarely swam at all, except when on holiday. I watched some of the Olympic swimming events when a British medal contender was involved, mentally confirming to myself that good swimmers plainly had lighter bones than me and were thus more naturally buoyant (I can sink with ease). They also had longer limbs, larger hands and surely bigger lungs. My sense of exception was crystal clear.

The Olympics finished and the Paralympics began. I wandered in from the nursery one afternoon, switched on the TV and watched open mouthed as a man with no arms at all won a silver medal in the backstroke. I remember standing there, tears of admiration welling up, murmuring ‘No way… how did he do that?’ As far as I was concerned arms were absolutely vital when swimming, mostly to stop you from drowning. How could he stay afloat and swim – at world class level – without arms? If you haven’t seen the race – here it is. It’s less than a minute of pure inspiration.



From that first day I watched as much of the swimming as I could. No prosthetics are used in Paralympic swimming – you swim with what you have. And yes, I was absolutely fascinated to see the range of body shapes and limb combinations on the starting blocks and quickly discovered that it was impossible to predict who would do best based on a quick count of body parts. On day 3 I watched, transfixed again as 4 foot tall Ellie Simmonds raced in the 400m freestyle final against 5’7′ Victoria Arlen. Ellie has dwarfism and Victoria emerged from a vegetative state in 2006 without the use of her legs. This race was one of the titanic battles of the Olympics and I watched it over and over again. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth 5 minutes of your life.



A seed was sown. How could I honestly claim that my inability to swim was based on any physical limitation? I had seen men and women in all combinations of limblessness, athletes with cystic fibrosis and with cerebral palsy (notably the charismatic Sophie Christiansen in the dressage) run, jump, wheel, ride and especially swim way beyond my capabilities. I could not stop thinking that if I only gave it a proper shot…

Dave is a member at a very smart gym with a 25m pool, but it’s half an hour from home and I won’t join because I know I won’t go. Pushing aside four decades of antipathy, I fished a ten year old swimming costume out from the back of a drawer and drove five minutes to Brookvale Leisure Centre, a local authority owned pool and gym in the centre of a dense housing estate on the edge of Runcorn. I was expecting the worst.  But the changing rooms were warm, the shower was hot and my hopes inched up a little. A glance at the depth labels above the pool showed that I would be just able to touch the bottom at the deep end and I relaxed a little more. I dipped one foot into the water, breathed a sigh of relief and slid in. I had presumed that the information dial in reception showing the pool water at 30C was faulty….

That was the 30th September 2012. After that first tentative visit I booked a couple of lessons, and then just kept going twice a week, reading blogs, watching youtube videos, trying out breathing patterns, drills to help me rotate, to cut down the drag from my legs. On that first visit I swam a few lengths of breaststroke and half a length of spluttering front crawl. A week later I swam a full length of crawl for the first time and clung desperately to the pool end, my chest heaving with pain as if I’d just sprinted half a mile.

I’m not a good swimmer yet. Good swimmers tell me how relaxing swimming is. For me, it’s anything but relaxing. I’m still thinking hard about everything I’m doing, all the time. But I can swim 20 lengths of front crawl in a session now, though only about four lengths consecutively. My times are dropping fast too – 38 seconds for 25m two weeks ago, 32 seconds this week. Rests between lengths when I lose my rhythm are down to a few seconds. I know I can get better, for which obviously I need a goal…

So, I’ve booked myself a place in a sprint triathlon in Nantwich in June. It’s a 400m pool swim, 25k bike ride, 5k run. But Nantwich is really the practice run for the Chester Deva sprint triathlon in July – the same bike and run distance but the swim is 750m in the River Dee. I have never swum in a flowing river. I have never swum in water that I can’t see the bottom of. I have never put my face in river water. The thought is terrifying.We walked along the River Weaver today, swathed in down jackets and scarves, and I kept glancing at the murky water, thinking about swimming in something like that in six months time.  I can’t imagine it.

Mostly I’m trying not to imagine it at all. I’ve just knuckled down and joined Warrington Triathlon Club and have been going to their Saturday swim coaching sessions at Lymm High School. I’m in the beginner’s lane, of course, and am still the slowest swimmer. My bike – a lovely silver Scott hybrid that I bought about 10 years ago for mooching around the lanes near our old house on a Sunday afternoon – is at Ron Spencer’s in Warrington for a check and a service after five years mouldering in the garage. As for the running, I can only guess that swimming – and Karl’s Thursday night circuits class – are doing me more good than I thought. I’ve been out for two 5k runs and almost broke 30 minutes on Saturday. I haven’t run that pace since I ran the New York marathon almost 30 years ago. And I have hardly run at all since then.

So, if anyone says the Olympics and Paralympics don’t actually change anything for ordinary people, here’s at least one person who has genuinely been inspired to try something new as a direct result. I hope I’m not the only one.
January 1, 2013