It's mid-July, which means the end of July is fast-approaching, which means August is nigh and I'm trying not to panic about ALL THE SWIMMING I WANT TO HAPPEN! There are some grand swims on the horizon—a swimming hole date with one of my best ladies (sans kids!), a trip to Toronto Island, swimming lessons for my oldest timed so I can swim while he does, a trip to my favourite Haliburton lake...but as I sit here with my hair dripping with chlorinated water, I'm pretty excited about the last few weeks.


I woke up at 5am for my first training swim in 23 years (!). It was a beautiful morning—Sunnyside pool was still and glorious, the sun just rising over the Gardiner Expressway. My hope was that the triathlon team I was swimming with was going to swim the length of Sunnyside, but alas, we did widths. It was fun to swim with others—I so rarely do! And it was a bit of a confidence boost to note that I'm a stronger swimmer than I'd previously given myself credit for. If it was lengths, I'd be all for 5am starts, but I'll stick to sleeping in to 6:30 and doing my widths whenever I can rustle up childcare.


One of my first dips was in my newly beloved Smythe Park Pool—down a windy, tree-lined path to its 50m glory, and waiting for me in the parking lot was a snapping turtle! And then I had the glorious 50m to myself for a long stretch and it was magic. I've been back a few times and it's such a lovely, quiet spot.


I also remembered that the 50m Giovanni Caboto pool has an 8:30-9:15am swim (strange time, I know!) on Mondays and Wednesdays so I biked over on a daycare day and went for a glorious swim. I've heard it gets a lot more full in the evenings, so if there's anyway you can swing it, I highly recommend it!



I also just wrapped up a poolsitting gig (and the house attached to it!). There were a lot of cannon balls and star jumps and I even hosted my very first pool party (and then another because it was so much fun the first time 'round!)  My youngest is a water baby through and through and would wail every time it was time to take her suit off (I feel you, kid!), but the best part about it was that my not-particularly-exuberant-around-water kid FELL IN LOVE with it. He started swimming (in a puddle jumper) on his own, and was just bursting with joy. It was the greatest.


And one of the very best things about this summer has been everyone's responses to our crowd-sourced user guide to Toronto pools! I've gotten so many notes from SO many people, some I know and many I don't, with tips and intell about pools, and notes about how they're trying out pools for the first time, or have been inspired to gor for a dip. It's all so very inspiring. Holler if you have questions about a pool, or if you have any info about one not on the list yet!! (List is here. I just updated it today!!)



Oh, and we started an Instagram account! All turquoise blue and beautiful. Come find us there!

It's June 1st, which means the countdown to swimming in Toronto's outdoor pools IS ON! I follow a lot of UK lidos on Twitter and watching them fill with that incredible turquoise blue makes me so envious - BUT, my beloved Sunnyside opens on Saturday June 16, and most of the other pools open the following weekend.

Last year's opening weekend was, ahem, less than successful, so I have great hopes for this year's!

Here's a chart with the opening dates of alllll the outdoor pools!

So while I wait for the chlorinated blue to fill the pool, I've been thinking about my 2018 summer swim goals.

So far, I've got:
- 50m evening swim at Smythe Pool with my fast lane pal
- taking my 14-month-old for her first Toronto swim (last year didn't count...!)
- a week of lake swimming
- a Lake Ontario dip off The Island
- a swim in The Beaches
- a roadtrip to the Elora Quarry
- getting a new bathing suit
- a dinosaur park/picnic/swim combo with my kiddos
- a SHWHK team swim!

Anything else I should add to my summer swim list?

I did succeed in writing about swimming every single day (!) the outdoor pools were open this summer, which made even the swim-less days manageable, and I swam a lot this last month – gracious friends and family watching my baby while I got a swim in. I even read on the deck twice –  not usually a rare occurrence in the summers but with small windows (babies!) and frigid temperatures (brrrr!).

I watched four Harvards dive and split off and re-find each other during my penultimate swim at Sunnyside, and thought a lot about my Papa Doug who used to fly Harvards and my very last swim of the season was pretty anticlimactic, a cold, fast swim under a grey sky. Definitely a whisper, not a bang.

I must begin with the caveat that summer is not over. I REPEAT, SUMMER IS NOT OVER. But as it's the last week the outdoor pools are open in Toronto, I figured it was time to celebrate some of our swimming accomplishments in embroidered badge-form:

This summer's grown-up swimming badges (clockwise): 
- Laura Queen of the Docktail's Swimming Sommelier Badge (featuring a perfect vinho verde, a boozy watermelon rosemary lemonade, an aperol spritz and an epic red).
- Patrice's Swimming Sustenance Badge (featuring her roadtrip clambake)*
- My Jumping-In Bravery Badge (because this summer marks the first I haven't hung off the ladder for HOURS)
- Rhya's Director of Underwater Photography Badge (because of her hauntingly beautiful river photos!)



And I couldn't let our epic Swimming Holes We Have Known collective cliff jump go unrecognized! CLIFF JUMPING BADGES FOR ALL!


Check out last summer's badges here!



* please note the French knot shrimp. THEY KILL ME!!

I lose all sense of time when I'm swimming. As soon as I'm front crawling, it could be 5 minutes or 45, I really have no gauge – it's one of the reasons I love it so much. Outside of the pool, I am ruled by clocks and always know exactly what time it is and how long I've been doing whatever it is that I'm doing, but when I'm swimming that all disappears.

I used to have a waterproof watch, but I haven't been able to find it since I moved homes almost two years ago, and most of the time I don't miss it. I guess if I counted my lengths I'd know approximately how long it'd been, but I don't. I can't let my mind wander to all the strange and wonderful places it wanders to when I'm swimming if I'm trying to remember that I'm on length 8, or is it 10?

"Fancy" indoor pools have a racing clock, the red-blue-green-yellow second hand counting down when you have to push off the wall, even if you still haven't caught your breath, but most City of Toronto pools don't have them (or they do, but they broke years ago and are now art installations). Most indoor rec pools usually have a clock somewhere, perched above the pool, often times an hour off because no one re-set it when when Daylight Saving Time started or ended. Then, I count out my 30-minute warm up, 10 minutes of kicking, 5 more minutes of front crawl, 10 minutes of sprinting and 5 minute cool-down.

But outdoor pools rarely have a clock big enough to see from the deck. I would love do it not to matter, to be able to swim until I was tired, but I usually know I've got 45 minutes to an hour to swim.

My trick to make sure I don't entirely lose track of time, is the LZV-patented Lifeguard Clock: using the lifeguards' changeovers to mark the minutes. Guard changes at big pools usually happen every 15 minutes, 20 minutes at smaller pools. I try to remember one feature about a guard near the fast lane – that they're wearing a cowboy hat, or reflective sunglasses, or have a ponytail, or a long-sleeved shirt. When Cowboy hat is replaced with Ray Bans, I know it's been 15 minutes. When Ray Bans is replaced with Side Pony, it's been 30 minutes. It's not a perfect science, and sometimes guards look so similar it's hard to tell if there's been a guard change or not, but it keeps me from getting out of the pool after 10 minutes, or staying in for hours...

Swimming hole season fast approaches. (Laura has already been in for the year's first dip!) We swimmers have some amazing near-Toronto road trips planned this summer (like this one!) and these days I'm constantly scanning maps for nearby blue.

Swimming in lakes/rivers/quarries is one of my very favourite things to do, and I always forget until I am mid-swim how many things terrify me about swimming in bodies of water that aren't pools.

It began with the shark-shaped driftwood under the floating dock at my grandparent's cottage.

And then my dad told me that pickerel have teeth. (Of course, I imagined piranhas and a National Geographic photograph of a cow's thigh bones picked clean).

I am still afraid of pickerel, all fish, really. And I have to not think about them when I swim, singing this song to myself instead.

And seaweed, because what if it tangles around my feet and holds me under the water.

And leeches. (Shudder!)

And loons. I love loons, their song, their speckled backs, their solid, not hollow bones, their calm, but after they slip under the surface, who knows where they go, with their razor-sharp beaks and red eyes.

And bears. Crazy, I know, but there was a cottage, once, and I had a hunch there'd be a bear on the far side of the lake. It made my daily swims terrifying and fast (and apparently, there were bears spotted exactly where I imagined them!!)

But the murky greenish-blue that filters the light in diagonal beams, the sun-warmed surface and the floating in the middle of a lake, staring at the sky, trump all of the things I'm scared of.

I am off to find a swimming hole or two this weekend, leeches and seaweed be damned...

I grew up close to Lake Ontario, but my childhood swimming always took place in public pools, northern lakes and the occasional backyard pool. So when I moved to Roncesvalles, a few blocks and a bridge north of the lake, with no pools with early morning length swims nearby, I decided it was time to jump in.

There was a pilot project that summer, where the curve of lake at Sunnyside was cordoned off and cleaned with UV light. I didn't look into the science, I just believed the sign and biked down at 7am every morning in June, left my trackpants and my towel in the sand and swam.

It was so cold. Colder than any swim I've had in a long time, but I was determined to swim before heading into work.

The water was thick and sludgy, and weeds trailed along my arms. (I still shudder thinking about the weeds). But I swam, trying not to swallow any water, pretending I wasn't as cold as I was, back and forth along the rope, channelling my inner Marilyn Bell. She was 16 -- I was 30 and I was just swimming back and forth, not across the entire lake!

I would bike home shivering, picking up coffee smelling like lake water. It would take at least 45 minutes in the hottest shower to keep my teeth from chattering for the rest of the morning.

But I swam in the lake as the sun cleared the highway, alone, in a small section of this huge lake, that looked sometimes like the ocean.



(Then I went to Nebraska and swam in a quarry that was not quite as cold, and when I came back to Toronto, the geese had taken over the cordoned off area at Sunnyside and the E. Coli levels were through the roof. That was the end of my Sunnyside swims, though it remains the perfect place for rocktails...)

I can trace each summer back to its swimming hole: 

• Twelve Mile Lake, across from the marina
• weed-and-leech filled Six Mile Lake
• the lake outside of the motel we stayed in somewhere between Vancouver and Calgary
• Lake Tanamakoon and the smaller lakes I never learned the names of in Algonquin Park
• a quiet bay on Lake Manatouwabing
• a deep Nebraskan quarry
• a tiny finger of an inlet of the Gatineau River
• a wide lake on the Quebec of Ottawa
• an isolated lake near Bancroft that was also the swimming hole for a family of black bears
• a waterfall in Newfoundland
• another lake in Haliburton where the fish swam right up to the dock
• And this year, the Gatineau River again, but this time from the rocky beach near the poison ivy and the sailing club.