Grab your goggles: it’s time to dive into the timeless ritual of swimming in the public pool. Hey, no petting!
As a swimmer, neither my technique nor my commitment is particularly strong.
I don’t have much interest in improving my stroke, and there have been long stretches of time where I’ve fallen out of the habit of regular swimming.
I visit the pool only for general fitness and relaxation. Yet every time I commit to an hour in the water, I’m reminded that the returns outweigh the investment.
Here, then, is a love letter to the public pool – arranged by topic, and written by a plebeian swimmer who has never managed a tumble turn.
Timelessness
For the most part, the public swimming pool exists beyond the conveniences and annoyances of modern life.
There are only so many innovations that can be brought to the experience of swimming.
Sure, things change. I haven’t seen a warning against poolside smoking or ‘petting’ in many years.
Likewise, I don’t miss stepping through a communal chlorine foot bath before entering the pool.
And of course, if I really wanted to, I could employ waterproof earbuds or other fitness wearables to ‘enhance’ or quantify my time in the pool.
But fundamentally, my experience of slipping into the water feels unchanged after four decades.
The lane ropes bobbing on the surface, the tide washing into the skimmer drains, the hand of the pace clock turning steadily – to me these elements feel immutable.
Ritual
Most forms of elaborate physical exercise include an element of ritual in the preparation, and swimming is the archetypal case.
There’s the disrobing and preliminary shower which – combined with the knowledge of the physical exertion to come – carries with it the hint of ritual purification.
You leave your earthly belongings behind in the locker, with the feeling this could be the beginning of a new habit, or another step on the road to cleaner living.
What does Don Draper do when he realises he needs to get his shit together? He quits drinking, starts journalling, and heads to the pool in pursuit of ritual self-improvement.
Contemplation
It’s probably a cliche at this point, but I’d wager more epiphanies have happened in a public swimming pool than a conference room.
Separated from almost every possible form of mental distraction, your mind is left to simmer down and stew in the water.
The thoughts that emerge from this process might be practical (I need to buy ingredients for dinner), creative (I might write a blog about this) or trivial (I wonder what that latest photo is showing).
Crucially, the contemplative process is left to run its course. Or at least, to run longer than usual. There is nowhere to write things down, and therefore no way for your thoughts to be prematurely interrupted.
In the absence of note taking, you’re left with a couple of options.
The first is to accept the situation, and hope that any truly valuable thoughts will return once you’re on dry land.
The second is to use some variation of the method of loci to retain your insights.
There was one period where regular swimming become part of the cadence of my life, feeding both my studies and my health. It even seeming to permeate my viewing habits. The method of loci became an essential part of the process.
I would often find myself standing, dripping in the changing room, as I scrawled ideas in the margins of a dampening copy of The New York Times, with the urgency of a man awaking from a vivid dream.
Soundscape
Nothing sounds quite like a pool.
The pump and filtration system hum eternally, the drains gurgle and over this baseline of brown noise, there’s the echo of voices ricocheting off hard surfaces, and the splashes of people diving, kicking, playing.
This is just the pool when you’re at rest.
That familiar blend is immediately warped and muted as you go below the water, obliterated by a thunder of bubbles, before returning in short clarifying bursts every time you surface.
The longer you stay in the water, the more likely you are to hear your own ragged breaths after a chain of laps.
Counting laps
For years during my sporadic periods of swimming for health, I counted laps (or lengths, whatever term you prefer).
Those laps were variable. 8m plunge pools, 17m health spa pools, 25m municipal pools, one Olympic-size 50m pool. But whatever the dimensions, the counting was still crucial.
Sometimes I counted the net amount of laps, no matter the stroke. Sometimes I counted the split of breaststroke and crawl.
Yet, despite having nothing much to focus on except that number, I would still manage to lose track of it. Am I on 24 now, or 26?
Usually I’d penalise myself, drill-sergeant style, by rounding down the total.
As with step-counting, this was an obsessive tendency that I never thought twice about.
Until one day I went to the pool and just decided to swim for my allotted hour, with no thought of breaking a personal record, or exhausting myself.
And I enjoyed it all the more.
One pool, two worlds
To swim underwater feels like the closest thing to flying I’m ever likely to encounter.
I recently watched my five-year-old daughter make this same discovery. She’s still learning to swim, but she has no interest in learning to cross the training pool, head above water, under her own steam.
Instead, she wants to dive-bomb below the surface and retrieve ‘sinkies’ from the bottom of the pool. Or pretend to be a ninja leaping into a slow-motion attack. Under the water, she already feels at home.
It’s a truth that’s not always possible to keep in mind, as a land-dwelling hominid. But it’s there any time I visit the public pool: below the dappled surface, a new world is waiting for us.
