Tasmanian Words: Swimming For Pleasure - Part One
When an opportunity to try water aerobics came her way Sylvia Watkins jumped in with both feet. Her account of her experiences is a most refreshing read.
This is Part One of a three-part series. Parts Two and Three will appear in Open Writing on Friday and Sunday this week.
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Hoiking Out the Old Bathers
In the bleak mid-winter, weeks and weeks ago, Senior’s Week - free water aerobics – COME AND HAVE A GO! Well, why not hoik out the old bathers just one more time? So I did and this is the story of what that led to.
All my life I have enjoyed the occasional swim as I played with my children in the pool and made sure: A. they liked it and B. they could save themselves and/or others if the need arose (although any dramas usually had more to do with horseplay in dinghies.)
Then whenever grandchildren needed supervision and encouragement, I went into the pool with them. Coaxing them down the big slide, watching hand stands, adjudicating races, always in the water with them, always ready to shadow them down to the deep end - far enough away to ensure they looked cool, close enough to ward off bigger, faster swimmers. Those joyful duck-dives, those awful belly flops the heart-stopping lessons on the flexible diving boards.
I guess in a year or so, I’ll be taking my great-grandchildren and loving it. As they get into teenage, though, first you can leave them for half an hour and do some laps yourself, until slowly you realize that they would rather you just dropped them off and find something else to do as they are not there for pleasure exactly but rather to train for some other sport. So the bathers get shoved into a bag at the back of the wardrobe and swims get further and further between.
Your, by now middle aged, child is keen to keep active and is considering signing on at a gym, which happens to have a pool attached. Fancy a swim, Mum, two nights a week while I train? Mmm! An almost empty pool and nothing to do but laps – boring! Until you discover that this facility also has a steam room, a sauna, and super spas – that’s better!
The downside is that this is a business based on workouts in the gym full of ghastly looking machines and the pool is just incidental. It is based on packages where the membership fee for 20 weeks gives you access to everything. All very trendy, but way too fancy for me, so the old black bathers get stuffed back into the wardrobe.
Along came Senior’s Week and the offer of free water aerobics. Lots of people from my U3A decided to hoik out the old bathers one more time and have a go. How could I resist?
First thing to say was I didn’t recognize some of them in togs and without specs, and some of the costumes had certainly come out of the ark and some, like mine were pretty battered !
No matter! In we went. Our instructor was a jolly, happy 20-something. “Hi, I’m Jo, let me get the music going and we’re off.”
After about five minutes, we told her that we could either hear the music, or her, but not both. This was a shock to Jo, who obligingly turned off the racket, then couldn’t remember the moves without it, so compromised by turning it down. Personally, I just followed the person in front of me and had a lot of fun.
The session went for 45 minutes and included using kick-boards, spaghetti floats and foam dumb-bells. It clearly demonstrated that pushing against the water resistance increased the benefits of the exercise and that. as the water was making us virtually weightless, our joints were able to do things without pain. We were then invited to afternoon tea in the foyer.
The foyer was filled with noisy seniors now fully clothed, but rather scraggy around the head. As one bald-headed friend said, “At last! A sport where we end up looking better than the females!”
Many took the opportunity to look through the racks of swimsuits for sale and some even purchased, I was tempted but luckily was without my plastic. Tea, coffee and sandwiches disappeared like magic. “By crikey! this swimming makes you hungry,” I heard on all sides.
We were taken on a tour of the fearsome looking gym section and then we quite expected the hard sell, but no, soft sell maybe – lots of leaflets, lots of timetables, but mainly it was, “Did you have a good time?” and “Hope to see you all again.”
It made me think. This was great fun. This would take the boredom out of swimming laps without any children to supervise. and maybe I didn’t always have to be useful. Perhaps I could do it for myself? A revolutionary thought, this.
Should I sign up for a package and then make myself go to get the value, the benefit and the pleasure? How many family things would crop up to prevent me in the course of the package? No, that’s not the way to go.
What if I splashed out on some new bathers and then went to enough classes to feel I had got the value of the purchase? Yes, that was more likely. What if I looked at a less fancy pool I knew of, which was closer to home and ask if they had a pay-as-you-go arrangement? What if I left it till summer?
As it happened, it was all taken out of my hands when I received a request from the grandchildren’s primary school teacher.
