I breathe, I push, I pull. I am.
After five minutes or so, my body would start to warm me from within, the hard work of the swimming pushing heat as far as it could out into my limbs. Usually, before returning to shore, I would flip onto my back, and take a bit of time to stare at the sky as I floated. I would feel the sun on my limbs, even as the cold water licked them from below. On our return, my skin would have turned a glowing red, as if I’d received a thousand tiny slaps – a sort of cold-water tan. I would feel the humming of my body working hard internally, organs buzzing with activity as they tried to keep me warm, to keep me steady as I dried myself, took off my swimming costume and got dressed on the beach with as much dignity as possible. Sometimes I would be shaking, my teeth chattering, so I’d walk home fast, sipping coffee. Sometimes I was too cold to move for a few minutes, and would bend over, my fingers splayed behind me and my back to the sun, trying to make myself as wide as possible in order to catch the most rays. Within half an hour, I would be glowing from within, warm for the rest of the day. Like a hangover in reverse, I had done something that was painful for moments but that left me feeling well for hours. I had made the difficult habitual, the habitual easy, and the easy beautiful.
There is an increasing amount of research into the positive effects of cold-water immersion, in particular swimming, on the body and the mind. A German study has discovered that swimming in cold water reduces levels of uric acid in the body, making us better able to cope with stress. Even simply sitting in cold water has been proven to decrease the heart rate by nearly 10 per cent – this lowers the blood pressure, creating a feeling of calm. And recent research has shown that cold water can have a positive effect on patients with depression or anxiety, decreasing cortisol levels.
For me, the winter of swimming was a sort of inadvertent exposure therapy. A type of behavioural therapy used to treat anxiety disorders, exposure therapy usually involves helping people to confront their fears by exposing them in tiny, almost insignificant amounts to the thing they are most afraid of, until they are so accustomed to it that it ceases to worry them.
Over the winter, I repeatedly exposed myself to the elements. With a series of small, recurring shocks as I hit the water day after day, I took myself to a place I never thought I could go, reminding myself just how much I could withstand as I witnessed body and mind rise to the challenge of cold water again and again. Previously distressed at having reached the limits of what my body could do for me, I rediscovered pride in what it could achieve and where it could take me.
More importantly, I was exposing myself to myself. In a world where ‘bikini bodies’ are prized as the ones of most value, to feel happy in swimwear became not just a challenge but a source of comfort. That winter, I was the heaviest I had ever been. At the time, it felt like weakness, like surrender, but now I see that what felt like unnecessary blubber from hormones, grief or greed was helping me, keeping me warm, keeping me in the water to do what I needed to do. Moving, flowing, accepting. To thrive at the weight I was felt not just subversive, but a triumph.
I was emerging from the water calm but energised. After weeks when all that had coursed through me was the exhausting, erratic drumbeat of adrenaline and the insidious creep of cortisol, I felt as if I’d given myself fresh blood. Calmer, fitter, stronger. I could do more than I’d imagined, and the more I swam, the more I witnessed others experiencing this alongside me. In the summer, I tried not to look at bodies in the pool or at the beach: I didn’t want to be a contributing factor to the anxieties of swimwear. But as the winter months slid by and the water was calmer, emptier, I saw more. As I glided along in the lido, trying to still my breathing before putting my face under the water, I saw women slowly easing themselves down the steps, scars the length of their thighs. I saw injured shoulders ahead of me, struggling to swing their arms around but finding fluidity and peace in the water. I saw women who arrived at the seafront jangling with panic or sadness leaving it serene an hour later.
These people, these quiet everyday gladiators battling the wet and the cold, showed me time and again that it wasn’t just me who headed for the water in times of distress. Women miscarry every day, many of them in conditions unimaginable to my relatively ordinary experience. There are people all around us dealing with sickness, injury and upset, but they choose to keep moving instead of standing at the edge of life, peering in. The more you swim, the more you see the change in people before and after the water, the more you realise you are not alone.
Because the water is not just somewhere to enter events, beat times and reach mile markers. It lends itself less than running does to the big sponsored challenge. It’s the exercise for those who thought they couldn’t exercise any more, or for those who want the release of endorphins without the sucker punch of competition and impact. It’s for the scarred, the sick and the sad. We know the healing potential of water, its kindness to bodies that feel ungainly on land. When Esther Williams, the screen goddess of the 1940s, was asked as she turned ninety whether she still swam, she replied: ‘Of course. It’s the only sport you can do from your first bath to your last without hurting yourself.’
To be a swimmer is to see things from a different perspective. Roger Deakin, in his much-beloved Waterlog, calls it a ‘frog’s eye view’; my perspective is not just a visual one but emotional as well. The year-round swimmer who is not necessarily training for an event is a different beast to those who speak of ‘a life lived in sweat’, ‘feeling the burn’. We know there will be days when you simply can’t swim in the sea, but we also know there are days when other things must be dropped because it’s too beautiful not to.
As I was told that summer we got married, swimming is a sort of meditation. It slows you down and opens you up, just as marriage has done for me. I used to long for D to come and see me swimming, so that he could marvel at what I had mastered, but now I realise he never needed to see it: he never doubted that I could do it.
When I think about never having a child, a sort of breathlessness, almost a vertigo, comes over me. The same metal vice tightens around my ribcage, the one I felt as I entered the sea those first few times, as I became aware of the Greek currents tugging me, as I entered that black tarn. I don’t know if we will ever have a child. I don’t even know if we have it in us to try IVF again. I just don’t know; just as I never know for sure what swims beneath me as I push myself through open water.
What swimming – and in particular swimming outdoors – has taught me is not just that there is capability in me that I did not credit myself with possessing; it has taught me about my adaptability. It is not enough for me to swim in pools and lidos alone, no matter how much I love the primary-coloured elegance of Bristol’s changing huts or the silvery lining of Parliament Hill’s freezing depths. I cannot just head up and down, swimming back into my own wake as it smashes against the four neat walls. The sea might be holding the memories of the sun six weeks ago, but as you swim in it, you leave your wake behind you, surging forward to whatever your future holds.
And it is not enough to simply train hard and swim hard. You must adjust how you move, refine how you approach the water and embrace your environment. In swimming, as in life, I found fortitude and resilience when I needed them most, but I also found the courage to amend my plans, to change depending on what the weather, the tide or my own body had in store for me. I have learned not to be frightened by this; that life is to be lived as a participant, not a spectator.
The most useful thing that anyone said to me about dealing with grief is that you never really get over it. When you have difficulties with fertility or staying pregnant, the whole experience is a process of accepting that grief might be coming, that it might be round the corner. But is that not the very nature of love? To fall in love is to expose yourself to infinite potential for rejection or pain, and to be a parent is to accept a lifelong commitment to the unexpected, the uncontrollable and the unknown. To love truly, to love deeply, is to know that yo
u might lose it in a heartbeat. In the same way that you never know if the wind will change when you’re half a mile from the shore, or the waves might smash you in the face just as you gasp to breathe, you never know if to love is going to be to experience pain. That is never a reason not to do it, not to try.
The morning that I swung my legs out of bed and felt my feet hit four inches of water instead of carpet was a stark example of how each of us has no idea what we’re going to wake up to on any given day. You just never know if it’s all going to be okay. But if we only ever thought that, we’d never leave the house! We have to get up, get out and get moving. We have to swing our legs out of bed every morning and seize what swimming has taught me: that not knowing can never mean not doing. We must take gulps of air when we have space, but we must never forget to exhale. We must stand on the shore, proud of the life our bodies offer us, and accept that we’ll never truly know what lies beneath the surface any more than we’ll know what lies ahead. And then we must leap in.
PART 2
CHAPTER TEN
A Brief History of Swimming
As a species, we have been swimming for ever. Unborn, we swim in the womb; as infants, we splash in the tub; and as adults we simply carry on associating water with pleasure and relaxation. It has always been thus: the very earliest evidence of civilisation indicates that swimming was part of being a human, at whatever age, whether for fitness, transport or pure pleasure.
The Cave of Swimmers, in the Libyan part of the Sahara Desert – as featured in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient – has small swimming figures etched upon its walls, looking almost as if they’re flying. It is understood that the figures are now ten thousand years old, drawn at a time when the Sahara was significantly more watery than it is today.
In both the Louvre and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see small Egyptian cosmetic spoons in the shape of female swimmers holding dishes ahead of them. Dating back to 1300–1400 BC, they are delicate, ornate and charming little figures, made of wood or alabaster. The women are swimming on their front, elongated as well as elegant, and appear relaxed, at ease with themselves and content in their environment. The little dishes were designed to hold kohl or other make-up. The artefacts call to mind the recent Charlotte Tilbury range of make-up bags featuring iconic 1970s Norman Parkinson photographs of Jerry Hall in swimwear. Both are equally beautiful, one just an update of the other.
In Classical Greece, swimming took on a heroic role. Socrates was a fan (albeit in a slightly curmudgeonly way, merely trying to persuade others to like it); and then, of course, there was the Homeric hero Odysseus, who spent ten years on the Mediterranean trying to get home, including two entire days in the water itself after being caught in a huge storm when he enraged Poseidon, god of the sea.
It wasn’t just mythical heroes enjoying or enduring their time in the water, though. Also in the Louvre is a vase dating back to 520 BC by one of the anonymous painters employed by the potter Andokides. It shows a group of Amazon women relaxing by, and in, the water. One is swimming with a couple of fish beneath her, one is about to dive in, and one is moisturising herself post-swim with oil from a small aryballos, a jar more often used by male athletes. There are even a couple of soft swimming caps in the image. It looks like a lovely afternoon spent at the water, and offers a rare glimpse in swimming history of women enjoying themselves.
Roman swimming meant Julius Caesar upping the macho ante once again, cut off from the rest of his troops and swimming for his life to escape an Egyptian revolt. His heroic swim took place when he was in his fifties, and is described by Plutarch, who tells how he had to carry his sword and cloak in his mouth, holding his papers aloft with one hand while he swam with the other. Hardly recreational, but it did the trick: he escaped. It did, however, set the template for swimming’s place in history for the next few hundred years – largely as a skill to be called upon in battle: useful, but hardly delightful.
The mood started to shift in the 1500s. Sir Thomas Elyot makes a reference to ‘swymmynge’ in his 1531 guide for would-be English gentlemen, suggesting a rebrand was coming, but things really took off with Everard Digby’s 1587 book De Arte Natandi (On the Art of Swimming). Digby was a bit of a maverick all round. His opinions and campaigns – ranging from papism to the briefly fashionable teachings of Ramism and general disrespect towards his masters and fellow scholars, as well as his habit of honking a horn and ‘hallooing’ all day – eventually got him ‘sent down’ from St John’s College, Cambridge. But as far as swimming was concerned, he was deadly serious. Despondent at how it had been so long relegated to martial uses only, left to what he dramatically called ‘the depths of ignorance and the dust of oblivion’, he was on a mission to restore its reputation. He wanted to rescue swimming, to make it a sport and a joy – something beyond a mere means of escape from marauding enemies.
There are so many wonderful books inspired by swimming – more than I could ever have imagined when I first felt the seawater around me on my wedding day – but regardless of Digby’s hallooing antics, De Arte Natandi is my favourite. This is not just because of its irrepressible enthusiasm and the way so many of its instructions are still pertinent today, but also because of its forty gorgeous woodcut illustrations. Digby really is the ultimate enthusiast. He longs for us to share his passion, and is brilliant at explaining it properly to his readers. He also seems to be an advocate of positive body image, judging by his little anecdote concerning a frog and a toad, the issue being who looks like they might swim the best, and who actually can. Clue: the toad, despite looking as though it might do better in the water, simply ‘sinketh right down’. Thank you, Digby; this is a lesson for all of us who have stood nervously at the water’s edge.
De Arte Natandi – which was originally published in Latin, before being translated into English eight years later, and then into French – was an ambitious project. In Digby’s day, there were no swimming pools, lidos or seaside holidays. Swimming took place in the sea, lakes or rivers, and was largely done by boatmen and other workers. But by writing his book in Latin, he was aiming it directly at educated gentlemen: he really wanted to improve swimming’s status across society.
The book begins (as do most swimming courses today) with a chapter on getting used to the water. He recommends only swimming in daylight and in sufficiently warm weather (May to August is specified). But, wisely, he cautions against jumping in if you’re too hot, recommending that one takes a few minutes to cool down in the shade first. He suggests avoiding reedy, muddy areas, and water ‘in which animals may have been washed’. He also advises against swimming in the rain because of its effect on both visibility and the quality of the water. ‘The drops do trouble the superficies of the water, hurteth the body, disturbeth the eyes and lastly, draining from the banks into the river, bringeth also with it whatsoever dung, straw, leaves and filth do lie near.’ He is also an early advocate of not swimming alone, suggesting that his reader finds a swimming pal ‘taller and stronger than himself’.
The chapters that follow tackle the performance of a variety of strokes, including some quite fancy arrangements that seem to be early synchronised swimming. What is clear throughout is Digby’s enormous degree of faith in his fellow man (women seem to be of little concern to him). He believes we are made for swimming as much as the fish themselves, telling his readers that ‘a man may swim with his face upwards, downwards; on his right side, on his left side; stand, sit, lie, carry his clothes and other things safely, walking the bottom of the waters: which no fish nor other creature can do’.
The main stroke he advocates is similar to modern-day breaststroke, and he recommends learning with someone holding your chin up at first. He also has a suggestion for Tudor armbands made from pig intestines: ‘take two bladders, blow them full of wind and fasten them so together he may have them to lie under his armholes, which will easily bear him up’. Ta-da!
He talks the reader gently through diving; side-stroke,
where ‘the upper hand roweth like an oar’; and doggy paddle, or ‘to swim like a dog’; and explains turning in the water, describing the swimmer gaining momentum by rolling side to side like a ship at sea. He even advocates the benefits of treading water, accompanied by a little vertical chap in the woodcut illustrations.
But the most beautiful moment is when he reassures readers that if they get tired, they always have a secret weapon to fall back on: backstroke. This, he declares, is a gift that Mother Nature ‘hath denied even to the watery inhabitants of the sea. No fish, no fowl, nor other creature whatsoever that hath any living or being, either in the depth of the sea or the superficies of the water, swimmeth upon his back, man only excepted.’
And he’s right. When I first read that sentence, I felt time wobble, as if I could reach back through 450 years and sense exactly what Digby did in those intoxicating moments towards the end of a challenging swim, when you gently turn and gaze at the sky. After half an hour of hard push and pull in cold water, to turn as you reach a patch of water warmed by the sun and feel its rays hit your belly is one of the sweetest sensations swimming can afford. Digby knew it, and I know it, and we both want you, the reader, to be a part of it.
He has no concern for racing or speed, only for the buzz of exercise taken and the relaxation that swimming can provide. He is quite specific about making a slow, cautious entry to the water. But it isn’t just daydreaming on one’s back that he finds delight in: before the book ends, he pops in some tips on stretching (in case of ‘cramp or any other infirmity’) and on some elaborate water-dancing techniques: lying on one’s back and raising one foot at a time out of the water. But please take note – this should not be confused with his advice on how to clip your toenails in the water, which is also included.
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