Sweating, exhausted and increasingly paranoid about the ever-more-likely chance of someone else entering the ladies changing room, I was desperate to sit down. But the logistics I was now dealing with had rendered this absolutely out of the question. The only way out was forwards, so I took a deep breath, wriggled my hands down and forward into the low-hanging sleeves and hoped for the best.
I should have known that it would be at this moment, when I was fully immobilised, that the door would swing open. I heard the clunk of a bag on a bench before I turned myself around to smile limply at my fellow swimmer.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I think I’m stuck.’ I lifted a hand in greeting, painfully aware that it was still encased in rubber. I had yet to get to the ends of the sleeves, and without the use of my hands to yank the fabric, I had just spent ninety seconds reliant on shoulder-shrugging alone to shuffle the wetsuit back over my clavicle and shoulders. Behind me, my arse was still hanging out of the bottom of the zipper.
‘Do you need … some help?’ the woman asked. I could tell that she was trying to be polite and encouraging. But I was past that.
‘Yes please,’ I said, biting my lip so as not to let my voice break, and submitting meekly as she hoicked the shoulders back, pulled the two pieces of fabric together and forced the zip up.
It felt as if I were wearing an iron maiden rather than a wetsuit. My heart was hammering, I was breathing using only the top fifteen per cent of my lungs, and the rubber around my neck seemed to be forcing itself into my throat. I waddled out of the changing room to the corridor, where I called for my husband.
‘They told me to say if it was too loose,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t, is it?’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said. He offered nothing else, aware that any further words were unwise.
‘Thank you,’ I replied, and returned to the changing room to take it off for the morning’s pool swimming. As I undid the zip and breathed out, a whoosh of freedom rushed over me. My shoulders dropped, my heart slowed a little and I let myself breathe in using my stomach. I hung the wetsuit next to my sports bag and consoled myself that I didn’t need to think about it for a few hours.
By the time I got to the pool’s edge, most of the rest of the course participants were already doing their warm-up. About six men and a couple of women were ploughing up and down the lanes with a sense of purpose I was not sure I could even fake. Patrick, the instructor running the day, asked me what sort of level I was, and I replied that I needed to be in the slowest lane.
‘No problem,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s the left-hand one. We’re just doing a ten- to twenty-length warm-up to get loosened up and so I can have a look at everyone’s technique.’
‘Okay,’ I said with a smile, shoving my hair into the swimming hat I’d been handed on arrival. A pause. ‘Does it matter if I don’t do it all front crawl?’
‘Just do what you can manage. We’re here to improve,’ said Patrick with a smile.
I edged my way to the left of the pool and walked down the steps into the water, shaking with trepidation. D saw me as he turned at the end of his lane, and gave me a quick thumbs-up. I felt my face turn crimson as I dunked my head underwater, ready to swim. How had I not understood that ten lengths was merely the warm-up, not the sum of the swimming we’d be doing on the day? I waited until the only other person in my lane was at the opposite end of the pool, then started to swim.
I had no idea what I was doing. But I gave it my all.
Determined to propel myself forward from behind with strength and vigour, I kicked as hard as I could with my legs, windmilling my arms to finish off the look. I made sure to keep my elbows locked as I swooped my arms up and out of the water, my hands slapping down ahead of me seconds later. At first I managed to do eight strokes before flicking my head up, straight ahead, and gasping for air. The next time, I managed six, then five. Finally I had made it to the other end. But at what a cost.
My chest was starting to seize up, constricted as if there were a metal brace around my ribs, my legs were flooding with lactic acid and my heart was drumming a beat I was sure could be heard in the water around me. I started the return length with a little breaststroke, keeping my head above the water in the hope of catching Patrick’s attention.
‘So, um, was this the sort of thing you were after?’ I asked. Patrick was walking up and down the side of the pool, watching us. I desperately hoped he would answer me, because that way we could carry on a conversation and I could pretend that that was the reason I wasn’t returning to front crawl.
‘Sure, just keep going,’ he said non-committally. ‘Whatever you can manage …’
Dammit.
I took a huge gulp of air, pushed my face back into the pool and stared down at the bottom. I could feel my heartbeat quickening as I thrust my chest deeper and held on to the air I had taken in, eking it out slowly, as little at a time as I could manage. I did another six or so strokes before I turned my head, almost rolling over, exhaled the remaining air I’d been holding onto and took another huge inhale.
Once I reached the end of the pool, I decided to use D as my next decoy ploy. I leant over the lane barrier to see how he was doing, but he took no time at all to tell me he was fine, so there I was, still somewhat out of breath, and only two lengths down. I had to head back up to the other end.
This time I figured it would be easier if I just did the swimming in as few blocks as possible, only stopping for the utter faff of breathing every now and again. I lifted my head out of the water – I had made it to the deep end in record time! Now, to head back. I managed three strokes before having to stop and fall into breaststroke again. This time, it wasn’t just my lungs that were starting to burn. My fingers and toes had begun that grim fizzing that I had long associated with my first few ill-fated runs.
Learning to run had taught me all about that horrible feeling as your limbs, lacking oxygen while having to work harder than they’re used to, start to squawk for help as you gasp for air. I know so many women who have experienced it, and have kept running as fast as they can for fear of not looking like a runner. Then, after three minutes, they return home, swearing off running forever. After all, how can it be good for you if it makes the roots of your hair, your fingernails, your internal organs hurt?
‘Just keep a steady pace,’ I have told so many disheartened runners. ‘It does hurt those first few times, but it’s just the unoxygenated blood doing its best to help limbs flailing with the unfamiliar. Try not to go too fast, and have a little patience. Get your breathing at an even pace, and in about ten minutes things will settle down. Just give it ten minutes.’
TEN MINUTES.
What the unholy hell was I thinking, telling people to hang in there for ‘just’ ten minutes? How had I thought this was helpful? I couldn’t keep going in the water for even five more minutes! I only had seconds left in me, without repeatedly resorting to breaststroke with my head up. My runner’s legs were no help in the pool, only serving to weigh my body down. And those words of advice that I had been dispensing in good faith to great results now seemed like a hollow taunt.
After about five lengths of hell, Patrick stopped me and pointed out that while the issues with my stroke could be dealt with at a later date, what I really needed to sort out was my breathing. He told me to try and breathe every third stroke; something I discovered later in the day was called bilateral breathing, because if you’re breathing every third stroke, you’re breathing on alternate sides. I nodded and did my best, but it still felt like some sort of impossible party trick.
It seemed there wasn’t enough time to get everything I needed to do done. My legs were powering like a steam engine, my arms were still looping around with elbows locked, and in the time it took me to do three strokes, I was not even close to having let go all the air I was taking in. I explained this to Patrick.
‘You have to force the air out,’ he said. ‘At the moment you are trying to swim with a huge bag of air inside of you
.’ He held his palms up, fingers splayed, against the back of the lifeguard who was standing on the side of the pool. ‘Think about how huge your lungs are. And think of them filled with air. That is what you’re effectively dragging along with you. It’s like you’re trying to swim with a huge plastic bag tied to your foot.’
I understood his point, I really did. But putting it into practice seemed impossible. As did his final piece of advice: ‘Relax.’
Once the torment of the warm-up was over, we spent time doing various exercises to practise skills such as sighting, and turning around a buoy, as well as a demonstration of why bilateral breathing is so vastly preferable if you’re going to be in open water. In these short bursts of swimming, when we were taking it in turns to just head for a buoy eight metres away and then do a turn around it, I was fine – there were huge gaps of time while the others had their go when I could stand around watching, chatting, trying to calm myself down.
After a few hours of this, we were out of the pool and heading to a meeting room for lunch and talk of tides, sea conditions and parasympathetic breathing.
Over a feast of salads and pasta, we talked about what we hoped to get out of the course. I was surprised to hear how many of the burly-looking blokes had been happily swimming in pools for years but felt they needed some help to get them over the psychological barrier that swimming in the sea presented. I seemed to have approached things back to front, having gambolled into the ocean a month ago, head full of memories of childhood holiday fearlessness, only to have the confidence whipped away from me as fast as my husband’s ring had been.
‘It’s so irrational! I was fine before!’ I said, whilst shovelling lunch into my mouth as fast as I possibly could.
‘What’s worth remembering about open-water swimming is that there are no irrational fears,’ said Patrick. I frowned. This didn’t sound like great news. ‘After all, you can never entirely know what’s beneath you at any given time when you’re in the ocean. You can have a pretty good idea, and you can be careful with where you swim, and what the tides are up to. But you can’t ever know for sure. There is just … too much ocean, and too little human.’
I stared at my plate. He had a point. If it was the case that the house always wins, then perhaps this battle to beat the sea was ill-conceived.
After lunch, it was time to go into the sea. This time I was prepared for getting into a wetsuit; like the rest of the team, I went for a ‘legs only’ approach until we had walked down to the east beach, between Brighton’s much-loved 1880s Palace Pier and its perhaps less-beloved 1980s Marina. Patrick was swimming with us, and there were other instructors there too – one in a kayak and one on a paddle board. They all had radios enabling them to talk to each other, and they had set out buoys demarcating our swimming zone.
Before being allowed to enter the sea, we were all reminded of the acclimatisation exercise that we had discussed and practised in the pool that morning. The technique involves moving slowing into the water before submerging face, then ears, then back of neck, then taking five deep breaths, each time fully exhaling to push all the air from the lungs. The idea was to get in and get the body accustomed to the temperature while letting water seep through the wetsuit and keeping your breath at a steady pace.
We’ve all seen YouTube videos of pranksters leaping into icy lakes then reappearing, gasping and yelping as if there is an electric shock beneath the surface, and they’re hilarious. But that stinging feeling is less amusing when you’re surrounded by unfamiliar churning water and you’re already nervous about having to swim through it. The aim of acclimatisation is to avoid this state of panic as well as keeping things physiologically steady.
The reality was a little different. I walked straight in, having had my wetsuit zipped up by my husband, and immediately drew a sharp breath that made my lungs feel as though they too had just been zipped up from behind, leaving only a matchbox-sized space at the top. It was as hard to exhale as it was to inhale, my body instinctively clinging on to that pocket of air it had snatched as the cold had hit me. It was by now early afternoon on a blissful summer’s day, so I had planned on the temperature being quite bearable. But the difference between the water and my body, warm after twenty minutes chatting in the sun, was immense.
I looked around me to see the others making those first tentative dips of their faces into the water’s surface. I tried it too, but found the cold so startling that I couldn’t keep my face in for long enough to exhale even half the breath I had taken. I took another gasp and tried another dip, this time just scrunching up my eyes and attempting to hold still long enough for the water to creep round the sides of my face and into my ears. Before long, my entire head seemed to be chilled from within. I lifted my face and let out a huge exhale, remembering too late that I was supposed to have done that while my head was still under. I tried a couple more times, but before long the team was heading for the swim zone by the buoys. It was time to say goodbye to the reassuring pebbles beneath my feet.
As we paddled further out, the sea started to get choppier. The sunshine meant that it was a busy Saturday on the seafront, with boats going to and from the marina and jet skis clamouring round the pier like water-bound starlings. The movement they were creating in the water was passed towards the shore, and seemed to be hitting us again and again.
We were told that first of all we would be trying a simple triangular swim around the three buoys – a total distance of perhaps two hundred metres. The rest of the group, better acclimatised to the water than I seemed to be, headed off in a pack with no hesitation, creating a world of kicked-up, foaming water behind them. Even D vanished on command, lost in the throng.
They seemed to hit an immediate rhythm, moving together almost like ducklings. I could see that they were using the drafting technique we’d been taught only a few hours ago – following in the wake of faster swimmers to take advantage of already parted moving water. But they were all faster than me, and now too far ahead for me to feel the benefit of that wake. Even if I had had the necessary speed to catch up, I’m not sure I would have tried, as I was worried about being kicked in the face or swum over. I had heard horror stories of triathletes receiving black eyes and smacked jaws, or even having their heads unceremoniously shoved deep into the water so that a bigger swimmer could pass over them, and now those thoughts were flooding my mind. I stayed where I was, treading water by the first buoy, panic rising in me as what felt like the metal girder of my wetsuit seemed to circle my chest ever tighter.
‘It’s a meditative act,’ they had told us. ‘Gentle, repetitive movements with controlled breathing. Isolated from the world and your troubles, you’re in your own bubble – literally!’
This is not meditation, I thought, as another wave slammed mercilessly into my face, forcing me to swallow frothing seawater just to keep an airway free. It’s barely survival.
‘The wonderful thing about the water is that it fully supports you – none of that impact you get with running!’ I remembered them saying.
But the water isn’t supporting me, I thought as it whipped my exhausted legs from side to side while I tried to kick against the waves. It’s beating me up.
‘There’s nothing like the sense of harmony you get from swimming in the sea,’ they had declared. ‘And it’s so refreshing! A total high!’
I am not refreshed, I thought as I craned my neck to search for the buoy I was aiming towards, the harsh salt stinging my eyes until they were useless while sandpapering my nose and throat. I am in harmony with nothing and no one.
I flipped myself onto my back and sobbed.
I tried several times to get going, but even when one of the instructors paddled alongside me in a kayak so I felt safe, even when I started way behind the others to avoid their churned-up water, even when I tried breathing on just the left, or just the right, or counting four strokes instead of three, I still couldn’t make it from one buoy to the next without stopping, breathless and thrashing. I couldn�
��t find a space for myself in the water. When I turned to breathe, a wave would come. When I tried to kick, I would feel the swell move stronger than me. When I aimed for calm, flashes of potential danger would flood my mind.
After a time, the panic turned to rage again. The hard-won friendship I had finally forged with my body over the preceding few years seemed to be crumbling around me.
Where once I had been convinced that any sort of sporting activity was not for me, running had taught me otherwise. I missed those dark mornings when I had run alone, learning to love my limbs as the strength emerged from them like sturdy thighs appearing from a sculptor’s marble. But today, today felt as if none of those mornings had ever happened. The sun’s glare highlighted the excesses of my flesh within the wetsuit. The waves’ power increased the lack of mine. My husband’s encouraging smiles were just a foil for the sense of dismay with myself that I was experiencing all over again. How could this truce with my body, the one I had worked so hard and so long for, now be falling apart?
I was a fit person! I had listened to all the lessons! I had the right attitude! It seemed ridiculous that this same woman who joyfully told others that they could conquer whatever challenge they chose, who had not even been afraid of the ocean a month ago, who cheerfully assumed that this would not be a big deal, was now reduced to this limp, flailing wreck. But I was. And in the water, you don’t get the chance to stop, to walk, to take a moment on the pavement.
I clung to the safety of treading water with my head up, feeling suffocated by my neuroses as much as my wetsuit, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in the company of Kim, the lifeguard paddling the kayak. She assured me that I had everything it took to be a sea swimmer, and that I just had to work at it.
‘I can tell you’re a swimmer,’ she reassured me. ‘You just need to relax.’
Oh, how I wanted to believe her.
I eventually crawled back onto the pebbles, furious, indignant and exhausted. But I knew I would be back. Because I had an inkling. An inkling that this was the beginning of my next big adventure. Slowly, as the day had progressed, I had realised the truth of what becoming a swimmer would entail. It wasn’t just about me accepting myself any more. That was only the start of it; I also had to learn to accept the water.
Leap In Page 3