I have vague recollections of this chick I knew once who used to walk around to the local pool near her house in the mornings before breakfast, and swim… She started off just turning up and swimming for a bit of exercise because she’d been in two car accidents and was trying to stay fit while her doctors told her to lay off the scuba diving and water skiing and other fun stuff like that. So, she started going to the local pool, and because her neck was kinda pooched from recent whiplash, she’d mostly do breaststroke. Bobbing her way up and down the pool trying hard to keep her hair from getting wet too much because the chlorine would turn it a delightful shade of green if it was exposed everyday.
Everyday. Back and forth. Slowly but surely increasing the amount of laps she could do until eventually she had to limit herself to 40 laps a day (about half an hour or so) because she was spending too much time there and then having to rush to get to uni. Not a cracking pace but a decent distance.
Well, since then she’s gotten nearly 20 years older, had two more car nasty accidents which turned her youthful whiplash incidents into a particularly pervasive and persistent chronic back pain condition, has had a kid, become way too sedentary and, like many of us, has gained more weight than she should have. So, anyway now she’s out there in her granny togs and she’s back in the pool after a long absence. Her first day out swimming she managed six laps. Only six. With many, many rest breaks it took her over an hour. To do just six laps. And oh my god, it hurt so much I didn’t… err, she didn’t ever want to go back. But she came back the following week and managed to do eight laps, then tried next time and managed ten laps.
It’s costing her a lot of effort and she needs a lot of rest breaks and fuck it hurts to keep going. And she probably won’t ever get anywhere near the 40 laps per day of her stronger, younger self… but she’s going to just keep swimming anyway.
