Walking on sunshine

[venta]

Swimming adventures...

My physio's best advice to me was to do as much aqua-walking as possible. That is, wading around in a swimming pool.

Sadly, this is less easy than you might imagine. The actual walking is easy, but finding a venue is hard. Ideally, I'd find a pool, find my depth, and walk widths. But pools in London are mostly either (a) roped off into swimming lanes which go lengthways or (b) packed full of kids. Pools full of kids are a nightmare... The smaller kids are basically oblivious and will cannon into you (I'm not good at moving quickly to avoid incoming strikes at present) and teenagers seem, largely, to be arses.

So mostly I get myself in the slow lane, and walk at the shallow end and swim (by which I mean hold a float and kick my legs) when it gets too deep.

The two gyms I go to both have capricious opening times for their pools. Work-gym has indoor and outdoor pools, but the indoor one is frequently closed for various lessons or clubs. The outdoor one shelves steeply (it's a diving-depth pool at one end) so I get only a few steps before the water is up to my chest.

The indoor one, when open, is fine - I walk/swim about half and half. Due to a weirdity of design, the "near" end of the pool as you arrive is the deep end, a counter-intuitive fact my brain persistently refuses to accept. Accordingly, I nearly drown approximately every other length when I try to put my feet down at the deep end.

Home-gym claims to have two 25m pools, which they refer to as the shallow and deep pools. In reality, they have one 50m pool with a removable dividing wall. The shallow half also has an extra bite out one side, where it shelves very gradually. On Thursday evenings, the divider comes out, the whole pool is adults only, and I cheerfully wade around in the shallow cut-out while everyone else does serious lengths.

Which is great, although I do look like a massive idiot. Walking-in-water is not something in the national consciousness, thus people look at me and wonder what on earth I'm up to. I've been asked several times if I'm just learning to swim.

On Saturday, I failed to read the cryptic timetable properly, and turned up when the shallow pool was having "junior fun swim" (it involves a lot of inflatables and does look like fun). The deep pool was adults only, but since I can't reach the bottom at either end, no good for walking.

So instead I experimented with the rec pool, the hip-deep warm pool full of parents and toddlers. This is ideal for walking, with only the mild side effect of looking massively sinister as you walk round and round, the lone adult among families of small children splashing about.

I don't think I'd previously been to a pool in London, it's a much more multi-cultural affair than I'm used to. Near home, the pool is often full of Asian women swimming almost fully dressed. The lifeguards occasionally switch into Polish to keep order. Near work, I saw a Chinese girl doing dolphin stroke, which I've never seen before. Once I can swim again, I might even enjoy this swimming lark... I can currently manage around ten metres, which is a huge improvement over "acute agony for some minutes after any hint of frog-kicking".

Comments

[lnr]

It would be a bit much to try claim a Kudo for this one, but thanks for the earworm.

I should swim more.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

How did you get on at Glasto? It was hard enough for those of us with mostly-good knees....

[venta.livejournal.com]

It was... not the best of weathers. But I returned home without sustaining damage! Epicly long write up in the pipeline :)

Did you have a good weekend?

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear about the lack of damage! We did, thank you, aside from the obvious pall of gloom hanging over the site from Friday morning onwards...

[susandennis]

Water walking isn't at all uncommon here. My pool is 25 yards long and 4.5 feet deep in the middle (3 feet deep on the ends). It has 3 lanes. Generally, the walkers use one and the swimmers use the other two but there are mixes sometimes. Two couples walk the lanes nearly every day for 20-30 minutes. Most walkers are old like me BUT not all by any means. There's one guy who gets into the pool after his workout in the gym and does a swim/walk combo set for 20 minutes every day.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hold on, your pool has shallow ends and a deep middle? Not a shallow end and a deep end? My mind is officially blown!

[susandennis]

I know!! It's the only one I've ever seen but it's perfect for walking. You can kind of get some speed up and then you have to work hard for the middle part and then you get to pick up speed again.

Come on over! I can get you a guest pass :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew, I thought you were going to tell me all US pools were like that :-)

I've always quite liked the idea of visiting Seattle. Might not fit it in before surgery on Monday, though!

Maybe I'm going to the pool a the wrong time of day for the walking demographic? I'm going outside of office/school hours - maybe my pools are full of retired persons walking when I'm not there?

[susandennis]

Wouldn't surprise me at all. I always go in the morning so I get a mix of pre-work and retired. Happily, gratefully, my pool is 18 years and older so no children of any kind.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

What's dolphin stroke?

Also, I've never considered pools in terms of their walkability before!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, now you ask about dolphins I'm a bit confused. I've only read about it before - mostly, I think, in context of a newspaper story about a Chinese pushy dad who was training his daughter to swim it by chucking her in the sea with her ankles tied together. But now I've tried Googling, I'm not sure I've remembered the details correctly.

The best I can come up with is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAIRWXYX3s8

The girl I saw was doing that sort of movement, but not completely submerged.

I've never considered how walkable pools were before, either! I can tell you that the indoor pool (Oasis Leisure Centre, Holborn) has much slippier tiles on its floor than the shallow pool (Gurnell Leisure Centre, Greenford)!

[gggwilliam.livejournal.com]

Cool. Thank's for sharing

[deborahw37.livejournal.com]

Brilliant physio ! It really helps.. as long as you avoid junior fun swim time:)

[rapperaddict.livejournal.com]

I do like the image of you constantly circling the families and toddlers. I think you should just go for it and buy an attachable shark fin and hum the appropriate theme tune as you go...

[venta.livejournal.com]

I see. You've heard rumours of recovery, and are trying to keep me away from Mabel by getting me arrested....