Holding my breath

I have been swimming for almost a year, now. Well, I've been swimming since I was about eight, off and on, after a fashion, but my latest adventure in the pool has been going for round about twelve months.

About a year ago I watched my eldest daughter train with her swimming squad and, chin on my hand, I thought to myself, 'I'd have loved to do this when I was Lizzie's age.' And a small but brightly shining bullet of an idea was born.

I knew that there was a swimming squad for grown-ups, and that this squad split in two; they're called  Competitive Masters and Fitness Masters. In typical me-style it took me a week or two to ask the coach for advice - I sidled up to him as Lizzie was clambering out of the pool one day and asked nonchalantly exactly how fit did one have to be to come to the Fitness Masters?  He was encouraging, and so it took me a week or two more to find a swimsuit and turn up.

That first session was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, I think, and I'm just talking about the long walk from the changing rooms to the far end of the pool. No matter how you dress it up, I was a fat, unfit middle-aged woman and most of the other swimmers were lithe and fit; even the ones older than me were the kind of lifelong athletes who've never let their bodies get as wildly out of shape as I have.

If it hadn't been for one lady I saw in the changing rooms who walked with me and told me I'd be fine, I might have sat in a cubicle pretending I wasn't there and gone home again. Ironically, that lady doesn't come any more.

It was that hard, and it didn't get easier for a long, long time.

There were days when I lay awake worrying about the next session, days when I just couldn't face it and cried off, feeling a failure. There were days when the swimming was so hard that I thought I'd either faint or be sick, and there were days when I was hopelessly out of my depth and had to sit one or two lengths out. There were also days when I came away feeling an immense sense of achievement, when I drove home exhilarated and triumphant, when I thought that despite everything, I am going to do this.

Highs and lows. A monumental low when Lizzie's squad changed times and my session was straight after theirs; I had no choice but to come out to the Swim Club Mums that I climb into my own cossie and have a go twice a week. I had so dreaded anyone knowing about me; it had been my secret. The night before that first session at the new time I couldn't sleep for worry. I dreamed that God would take care of it, and He did. Not by changing the fabric of the building so that nobody could see me, sadly, because see me they did.

They saw me and they were amazed. Some of them were impressed and encouraging, and a couple of them weren't. Reactions ranged from mild hostility to a little snigger at my expense. I felt exposed and vulnerable; the worst had happened and yet.... I was still alive. I turned up the next time, and the next, and the world, strangely, didn't end.

These days I refer to swimming occasionally in conversation with these same Swim Club Mums - even those who were a little scathing. I've even started going for an occasional gentle swim with another Mum who wants to be more in shape and a number of them have asked me about it, saying that they wish they could do something like it too. I wave to them from the poolside these days, instead of hugging the wall like Spiderman in the hope I might get there unnoticed, and although I still drape my towel round me, I feel less desperate about dropping it and diving in than I used to. I don't care if they see me in a swim cap and goggles, and if I look like a raccoon afterwards, then so what? Everyone does.

Just before Christmas I went out for a meal with some of the other Masters Swimmers. My husband came too, and we had a lovely night. They are a really nice bunch of people. Former competitive athletes, open water swimmers, a cross-channel swimmer, people like me who wanted to get in shape, people who come for the companionship and the laughs as well as the cardiovascular workout.

They are very special people who have not the remotest idea of the huge and important part they have played in my life. If you've never been consumed by self-loathing, if you've never been crippled by body image and acute self-consciousness I don't think you can begin to imagine the feeling when you start to find a way out from under those things; a glimpse that things might one day be different.

It's still a bit hard to motivate myself to get to swimming; especially on these dark, cold nights when bed beckons instead of a cold pool, but more often than not I go twice a week and I am seeing changes in myself.

Physically, I've lost a little weight, but not as much as I need to. It's a slow process, and I'm sure that I need to make more changes in my diet as well. I am changing shape, however, and I feel happier in my clothes, even though they're pretty much the same size.

My muscles are more developed, and my heart and lungs are much healthier, even though once again, there's a long way to go. I don't get as out of breath, I can swim for longer without a rest, and the rests are shorter. This is huge progress.

I am swimming better. I can swim 200m backstroke with a cup of water balanced on my forehead and it doesn't fall off (yes, really, we do that). My technique for front crawl is sleeker and faster than before, and I can swim 25m in eighteen and a half seconds. This is not particularly fast, (my nine-year old daughter can do it in less than that) but for me it's warp speed. I can swim a length under water and 50m on four breaths. My breaststroke has been taken apart and put back together again and it's loads better than it was, but the piece de resistance is that I can now, finally, swim a slow, clunky, unwieldy sort of butterfly after a year of looking as if I needed someone to throw me a lifebelt.

The fact that I can be forty-four years old, and still learn these things from someone who is willing to teach me with patience and good humour, among people who are warm, welcoming and encouraging amazes me. Who knew that such things happened?

However, I think the biggest change hasn't been physical at all. It's been emotional on the deepest level - I'd go so far as to say that it has changed my life. I'm not over-dramatising. People who know me well have said that I've changed enormously.

Take this for an example:

The last session before Christmas, I walked onto the poolside to find the coach waiting for us with a camera. The Competitive Masters squad had met with considerable success at a recent meet (medals, British and European records!) and the club had asked for a photo for the website, or possibly for a local paper. I hung back, since I was not among those competing, but he was adamant that he wanted the whole squad in the picture. Can you imagine how I might have reacted a year ago to the idea that anyone would try to take a photograph of me in my swimsuit, alongside these people with firm thighs, sporty bodies and medals hanging round their necks? Seriously?!

I can; I remember it well. All I can say is that I made sure I was on the back row (people in front of me) and I grinned broadly, swimsuit, no make up, hair that needed washing, eyes slightly out of focus as I'd taken out my contact lenses.  Say cheese.... click. I even forgot to hold my breath.

So that's why I have an affection for 2014. Things about me are only subtly different at a glance, but inside everything has changed. Early last year I was worrying aloud to a friend about the idea of joining the swimming and saying how hard it was, how awful it was, and she asked me why I was contemplating doing it at all. I said that it seemed right; it seemed as if God was in it.

Oh, how He has was; He has been. He is. He's been in the water right alongside me, and he didn't let me sink.

I am so grateful.

The devil in the deep end

The wheels came off my swimming programme last week.

I have been plodding along, or trawling along, for weeks and months, feeling a bit better about things; about the shape of my body (if not its weight) and about the undeniable improvements in my stamina, lung power and recovery times. I find that in my lane of fitness swimmers (as opposed to the competitive swimmers in the other lanes that often leave us floundering in their wake), I can keep up pretty well, most of the time. We get out of breath, we have a laugh. 

It's been good. 

Then, last Monday, this happened. 

1.  I had a great 50m sprint. Personal best, everything went well. 

2.  I had an appalling 50m sprint where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and, blimey, has it cast a long shadow. 

So, in order to explain, I need to dwell for a few precious moments on 1. 

We swim from 8pm until 9.30pm on a Monday night and a Thursday night (others do a third night as well, but that's a step too far for me!). Usually for the last half an hour we practice timed sprints where the coach sets us off from the blocks in batches of four to six and calls out times as we touch the wall, and then do it all over again a few times. 

It's taken me some considerable time to feel halfway comfortable with this last half an hour, because after an hour's strenuous swimming I rarely have another gear to change up to. Still, I have a go. 

Have a go I did. Four of us dived off the blocks, and I got it right, for once. The right height, the right depth, the right glide, perfectly timed breakout, great! Swam well, turned well, swam some more and hit the side ahead of two out of three of the other swimmers. A friend even called out from the other side of the pool how well I'd done. Hooray! 

And then. Round two. Dived in, goggles came off. Or they didn't actually come off, just slid low enough to be a complete nuisance. No idea how the dive went as couldn't see anything and so mistimed everything. Turned too far from the wall so lost all my momentum and had no push off, then ended up veering slightly off course and finished the fifty half way under a lane line which forced my head down when I tried to take a breath, and so inadvertently inhaled a load of water. 

Cough.

Pride comes before a fall, hey?

I felt so odd. No idea what happened, really, except I was thoroughly disorientated and felt terrible. People's voices were coming from a long way away and my head hurt with one of those vicious chlorine headaches that you get momentarily when you inhale water. No fun. I suppose the only up-side is that feeling appalling took my mind off having made a total mess of it all in front of twenty onlookers. 

We switched to 25m sprints and I managed the 25m but not the sprint part. I then climbed out of the pool on wobbly legs and called it a day. I had to stand and watch for the last five minutes as I couldn't rely on walking the length of the pool without falling over, feeling so woozy. 

Twenty minutes later I stood outside the sports centre leaning against the car wondering if I was going to be sick, but the nausea ebbed and I managed to get home to my bed without incident, and lay before sleep reflecting on the evening's sublime-to-ridiculous experiences. That was that, I thought. 

Let's draw a line under it. 

Sadly, no. 

I woke up on Tuesday morning with my face on fire. Pounding headache, painful jaw, eyes as if they might explode. Dramatically runny nose, sneezes, coughing. This was my sinuses' way of telling me that they were Not Happy at being swilled out with chlorinated water the evening before.

It took me a while to work this out, of course, and I marvelled at the sudden onset of such a powerful cold. I felt fine on Monday! Nary a sniffle, and yet Tuesday, there weren't enough tissues in the northern hemisphere. It was only when I was feeling grim still by Wednesday that my acute powers of deduction belatedly kicked in. The GP agreed with me and I have precious antibiotics. 

I've had to cancel a week's worth of everything. Sent my apologies that I would't be swimming on Thursday, though I didn't explain why; didn't think anyone else needed to know. Ahem.

So what I have I learned this last week? 

1. I can have great triumph and unmitigated disaster within the same five minutes.
2. Triumph and disaster may both be impostors but it is very hard to treat them the same.
3. Chlorine is not my friend.
4. Don't underestimate my sinuses' power to make me miserable. 
5. I am so, so fortunate to have antibiotic medication available for occasions when my co-ordination deserts me and results in snorting half a swimming pool. 

Talk about first world problems.

Well, if anyone reading this was looking for spiritual truths, or uplifting devotions, sorry 'bout that. I was just writing about the main event this week.  It does feel sort of significant for me, in a way, as my pursuit of better fitness with my swimming has long been part of my struggle with self-esteem and body-image problems, and it feels as if this is yet another excruciating twist in the tale. On the other hand, I have got this far and in a way it's amazing that I could contemplate messing up publicly in the pool and yet I will go back there next week (I hope) and risk doing it all again. 

Maybe the devil is finding new ways to try to derail me; a new way to stick a spanner in the works. First the huge challenge of going to the swimming club at all, getting into a swimsuit, trying to keep up with those much fitter and more streamlined than me, the fear of people seeing me, then the certainty that everyone would, and then they did - I survived all that. So this is a reminder that no matter how far I've come, I still have the ability to get lost following a straight black line.

You couldn't make it up, could you? 

Listen, I'll be back. I've ordered new goggles. They'll solve all my problems. 

Won't they? 

Seemed like a Good Idea...

If I ever write an autobiography, it's going to be called 'Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time'. 

It's the story of my life. 

A few weeks ago, I was sitting thoughtfully by the side of a swimming pool watching my athletic older daughter at her swimming training. She switched between freestyle and breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly as the coach instructed, and he walked up and down the poolside as they all swam, calling corrections to their technique, monitoring times and chivvying when necessary, by turns stern and encouraging. 

Leaning forwards, elbows on knees, chin cradled in my hand, I reflected, 'I would have loved this when I was Lizzie's age.' 

Just think. You're young and fit and all the bits of your body do what they're supposed to do without hurting. Nothing is stiff, nothing creaks when you bend or straighten it. You can leap out of bed in a morning and jump back in it at night. You don't have to monitor how many painkillers you've had in a day to decide if you can treat yourself to two more at bedtime. You can spend a day at a gymnastics class, swimming training, bouncing on a trampoline and riding your bike and still have the energy to splash too much in the bath and resist bedtime. 

You can get out of breath without your throat hurting and starting to cough. You can break into an unexpected run without pulling up suddenly and limping. You are lithe, light and bendy. And swimming is your thing. So you're at a club where someone else takes charge of your fitness. Warm ups, intense training, cardiovascular workouts and muscle building is all thought out for you and someone else guides you through it. They watch that you're doing it right and correct you if not. They monitor how tired and out of breath you get and adjust the workout so that you're challenged but not stretched too far. 

She's eight years old, and she takes all this for granted. Two or three times a week, in a pretty swimsuit, matching hat and goggles, she is a fish. 

And I watch. 

And that fateful evening, I did more than watch. I thought to myself, 'I can do that, too.'

Where did that come from, God? Did you mischievously plant a rogue thought in my head, just to be funny? Or was it from the other guy? Because I sat there, clearly high on chlorine fumes, and at that moment, and for some time afterwards, it seemed like a Good Idea to join the adult swimming sessions that take place two or three times a week with the same coach. 

On my way out, I casually asked him exactly how fit you had to be to come along, and he waved the question away and suggested I come along on Monday. And my fate was sealed. 

The thing is, if I chicken out, I still see him three times a week as he coaches Lizzie and is teaching Katy too, and I haven't a clue why, but he's one of those guys that you want to please. A word of encouragement from him is a precious thing, and I've seen both my daughters blossom in delight at a compliment from the coach. So why on earth would I want to put on my swimsuit and climb into the water in front of him? 

It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

So, to bring you up to date, I'm swimming two evenings a week for an hour and a half each time. Yes, an hour and a half. Ninety minutes. I usually glance at the clock after about 20 minutes, which shows pretty much when I start longing for my bed. The first time I was there I noticed that it was 25 past the hour and congratulated myself on getting through the session, only then realising that it was twenty-five past eight, not twenty-five past nine. The horror. 

And yet, there have been moments of joy. One session each week we have some coaching on our technique, which is brilliant as I taught myself to swim aged about ten with no regard for conventional wisdom on how it's done. I have learned so much, and not just the true picture of how unfit I've become. I am improving. I can do a tumble turn (and even face the right way when I surface - how's that?) 

I've got a kick board borrowed from my daughter (and noticed that she's BITTEN it - why on earth would you BITE it? Must have a word but strangely it keeps going out of my mind) and a pull buoy and fins. A pull buoy is this devilish lump of foam that you place between your thighs to prevent you from using your legs when swimming, thus building up strength in the arms. Hmm. The fins, or flippers to you and me, are designed to make your legs work harder as you kick. I dislike the pull buoy with a vengeance but quite like the fins, because I hate my legs, and it feels like hard work when I've got the fins on. On the other hand, at least when I'm wearing them I can zoom through the water as if I know what I'm doing.

Feel a bit like Jacques Cousteau. 

So, splish splash. Got all the kit. Even a water bottle, so I must really be a sportswoman, mustn't I? 

Then, the icing on the cake. The other week, the coach said, 'Well done. Looking good.' 

Ahhh. 

It happened, it really did. I know because I checked with one of the other adult fitness people trawling up and down in my lane. She heard. He really did say, 'Well done. Looking good.'

She understood the magnitude of this incident. She quickly told me of an occasion when she had received a similar compliment. 'It kept me going for weeks!' she confided, and I know what she meant. I am still basking in that moment. 

Of course, it has to be said, I am not actually looking good, but you have to start somewhere. Me doing a tumble turn in my black cossie and black hat is reminiscent of a whale breaching. (NO! I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I am. Even me.'

Even me. 

I have come a long way from the first session where I was so self-conscious that I pushed myself so hard that I thought I might either die or throw up, and now I know when to say, 'No, I'm having a rest.' and stare assertively through my goggles when the coach does that excruciating drill sergeant whistle-through-his-teeth that indicates we're supposed to be setting off from the deep end again. 

I have come a long way. That first evening, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life simply to walk out from the changing rooms to the far end of the pool in front of twenty odd fit and athletic-looking men and women. I really thought that someone might tell me I shouldn't be there, and my humiliation would have been complete. Actually, everyone is very friendly (even when I'm getting in their way) and yet there's no getting away from the fact that I am the most overweight and least fit of all of them. There are a couple of people older than me, but they are in breathtakingly good shape, and one lady of sixty still competes at county level.  I always let her go in front of me.

Actually, I let everyone go in front of me. 

It gets to half past seven in the evening on Mondays and Thursdays and I can honestly say that at that point I would rather eat my own feet than get in the car and drive myself to the pool. It's the time of day when the kids are nearly in bed, nearly settled, the end is in sight, coffee and a good book and an early night, and here am I preparing for ninety minutes boot camp. 

What on earth was I thinking? 

I was thinking that I need to get fit. I need to lose some weight, ease the old joints a little and try to get my heart doing its thing so that it can go on doing its thing well into the future. I think it's a good idea despite the trauma of changing rooms, swimsuits and fighting for breath amid gods and goddesses who don't seem to break a sweat or ever run out of breath. It feels right, even at the points when it feels so wrong, and I am feeling better for it, even if, inexplicably, the scales haven't yet registered the monumental effort that I'm making. 

But onward I go. Breathing a sigh of relief after each session that it's a few days until the next one. Wondering if my trousers are a little looser, and trying not to compensate with cake. Using up an inordinate amount of shampoo so that my hair doesn't fall out. 

I will carry on because I need to do something, and I like swimming, but if left to myself, I would make excuses and not bother;  I know this, because it's happened often. So, because I have a time and place that I'm expected, I feel more obligation to go. I'll keep going, because every time I've been, I've been glad I did. And I'll keep going, because I think it's right. Once I'd had the idea, it stuck in my head and kept coming back in a way that reminded me of the times when God has spoken to me. I'm not saying that my latest fitness campaign is sponsored by the Almighty, but I think He's smiling. 

Then today, I saw this, and it had new meaning for me.

'When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.'
Isaiah 43:2

He won't let me sink.

Thank you, God.