Swimming Holes We Have Known: swimlit

Bits and buoys and the best swimming summer since I was 8

2018

There's still a solid month left, but I'm going to call it already: this is hands down the best swimming summer I've had since 1988. I've had such incredible swims in all sorts of different pools, and lakes, a veritable swimiracle, a quarry even. My baby girl is ALL about swimming, my kiddo is on board and practices front crawl in his bed instead of sleeping. It is the best. Just the best. More on some spectacular swims I've had and places to jump in soon, but in the meantime, I'm celebrating the renaming of the Regent Park Aquatic Centre after the wonderful, generous local councillor who was a huge supporter of the centre. It's now the Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre. Even typing that out makes me a bit weepy.

In other public pool news, I'm *still* thinking about Katrina Onstad's piece about public pools in the West End Phoenix: "A public pool on a summer day feels beautifully optimistic," she writes. "Today's pools feel inclusive, and provide a kind of informal social infrastructure."

What a beautiful homage to public pools – their imperfections and beauty and necessity.

This swimming article in the New Yorker by Carolyn Kormann made me want to swim every pool in Toronto in a day (though it'd definitely take more than a day...Toronto has 58 outdoor-run pools!)

"As I marked the locations of Manhattan’s pools on a map, a constellation emerged: the people’s moat, a secret waterway, a liquid realm. Among the honking taxis, flashing lights, and fretful pedestrians, I would swim." Read the whole article here!

And though I don't have any plans to head west any time soon (sob), if you do happen to be out near Edmonton, please swim at the Borden Park Natural Pool and let us know how it is!!!!

"It’s the first pool of its kind in Canada and only the second one in North America. It’s modelled on natural swimming pools that are popular in Germany and Austria. Instead of chemical disinfectants, dechlorinated water is cleansed and purified though a series of sand and gravel filters and by the natural interactions of plants, algae and zooplankton." M

HOW AMAZING IS THAT? You can read more about it here!

Last thing, because this swimmer needs to hang her suit up to dry: here's 49th Shelf's amazing #swimlit list. If you can't be in water, you might as well be reading about it, right?

Lindsay
Thursday, August 2, 2018

All I want for Christmas...the swimmer's edition

bathing suits

(Clockwise from top left: Lisa Congdon's The Joy of Swimming, Lisa Golightly's swimmer, Team Mermaid's caps and Minnow Bather's Guinevere Maillot in Lilies in Twilight suits). Photos from makers' IG accounts

All I want for Christmas is a good solid swim. Maybe an hour or so in a quiet pool. Santa? Can you hear me? I've been pretty good this year, minus the few tantrums I threw when the pool was unexpectedly closed (ahem).

In case you have a swimmer on your Christmas list, my fellow swimmers, Rhya and Laura, and I have some swimmerly suggestions (please note: none of these are affiliate links nor have been sponsored in any way)!

* Swimming books: I'd recommend Gillian Best's The Last Wave (god, I loved it!) and Turning by Jessica J. Lee (I reviewed it here!), Lisa Congdon's The Joy of Swimming, or if you're in the UK, Watermarks: Writing by Lido Lovers and Wild Swimmers (full disclosure, I have a piece in this amazing watery collection!)

* A fancy suit, perhaps one from the Canadian-made Minnow Bathers - lordy they're beautiful suits.

* New goggles (because Kerry Clare reminded me this week non-mouldy, fresh swimmin' specs are a glorious thing indeed!)

* A new bathing cap: perhaps a long-hair swim cap for the large ponytailed swimmer in your life, or a Team Mermaids cupcake-covered cap

* A Turkish towel: These are beautiful!

* Wireless swim headphones: This is Rhya's ultimate dream

* Cute flip flops

* A swim bag

* A flutter board or a pull buoy

* Zippered pouches

* Mini shampoos and conditioner, maybe even some moisturizer to help combat the post-chlorine itch

* Swim art (and I'd add Lisa Golightly's work to the mix! My sis gave me this print last year and it continues to blow my mind with its beauty and this gem is hanging in my daughter's room).

* This one's a big extravagant, but pret-ty next level for a swimmer in your life: The best gift I've ever received was a weekend in a hotel (that had a pool, obvs). I starfish-slept in the enormous king-sized bed and swam at least twice a day, and ordered room service, and it is still one of the next three days I've ever spent.

* And maybe the best gift of all: T he gift of water therapy for a patient at Sick Kids' Hospital

P.S.: The UK Team Mermaid crew has a great swimmer's gift list here, too!

Lindsay
Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Swimlit: Gillian Best’s The Last Wave is a love letter to the sea

English Channel

I don’t understand the sea. Not one bit. I grew up in my neighbourhood pool, and in Ontario lakes, and the thought of a shifting shoreline, not to mention undertows, is disorienting, terrifying even. I also can’t read a tide table to save my life. When I hiked the West Coast Trail at 18, I got caught not once, not twice, but three times on the beach with the tides coming in, scrambling up slippery ladders, soaked to my knees.

But if there’s anyone who could convince me of sea swimming, it’s Canadian-born, Bristol-based author Gillian Best. In her debut novel, The Last Wave, Martha, a devoted ocean swimmer who wears the second skin of her bathing suit tan for most of her life, never once steps foot in a pool. “The sea is alive, expansive; a pool is dead and confining. The sea is freedom. There is nothing in a pool: no current, no tide, no waves, and most of all, no history,” Best writes.

In the book, Martha swims to escape just about everything—the drudgery of motherhood, the mind numbingly boring tasks of being a housewife and is so well crafted, when I spoke to Best this week, I had to keep myself from asking how Martha was doing.

Best laughed. “She’s like an imaginary friend to me, too,” she says. “She’s good, she’s doing well.”

Martha doesn’t just swim in the sea, she crosses the English Channel nine (!) times (with one failed attempt). The book traces her swimming journey from 1947 until the present day and includes her Channel swims, estrangement, dementia and a devastating cancer diagnosis.

Best writes: “Gliding through the water almost completely submerged had always been a retreat to a different world for me. Swimming front crawl allowed me to focus inward, blocking everything else out—and the absolute quiet it afforded was unique. No other solitude—not going to the library, not sitting on a bench by myself—allowed my mind to wander so freely, roaming the wilds of my fantasies and the hundreds of other lives I imagined for myself.”

Swimming has also provided sanctuary for Best, the sea omnipresent in her life as well. As a 12-year-old, she spent time visiting San Francisco with her father. “I was always the first one in the ocean and the last one dragged out,” she says. She would collect small bottles of seawater and take them back to land-locked Waterloo with her so she could smell the briny sea during the “grim” Ontario winters and “be transported.”

She believed for years she’d be a professional surfer – something she laughs about now – but realized that it wasn’t surfing she was obsessed with, but the ocean. “It’s a holy experience, how people relate to water,” she says.

After years of swimming competitively, and lifeguarding and teaching swimming, Best moved to Toronto for university and was diagnosed with painful arthritis, a type in which, she describes, her spine and hips are trying to fuse. She began swimming again and says it has saved her time and time again. “I can be limping and hobbling on land, but as soon as I’m in the water, I can move again.”

“For me, water is physical freedom,” she says.

Though Best wrote about the English Channel, and ocean swimming and the power and fortitude of the sea, she admits she’s a pool swimmer herself.

“When I was living in London, I used to swim at London Fields Lido,” she says, a 50m outdoor pool in east London. It’s heated, year round and Best tells me about swimming in the snow on the few snowy days in London. (Check out these amazing photos from The Guardian!)

“I prefer the wonderful incongruity of a pool in downtown London to Hampstead Heath or the Pond,” she says.

And because I ask every swimmer I met, I asked her if she has any other favourite swimming holes:

1). Her brother’s secret swimming hole in Guelph that he takes her to every time she’s home for a visit (I press for details, but she says she has no directional sense so this one remains a secret!)

2). The Hart House Pool at the University of Toronto: “It’s just so beautiful,” she says.

3). The 25m outdoor pool in her mom’s neighbourhood in Waterloo. “I went for a swim the day I arrived from the UK,” she says. “And it’ll be the last thing I do when I leave, on my way to the airport."

A swimming kindred spirit if I’ve ever known one.

Best will be launching the book in Toronto or Waterloo next week (swimwear option!):

Toronto: Monday, August 14 at 7pm at Glad Day Bookshop (499 Church St).

Free event; everyone is welcome.

Waterloo: Tuesday, August 15th at 7pm at Wordsworth Books (96 King Street South

Lindsay
Friday, August 11, 2017

On the swim-less days

all the pools

Summer has finally arrived in Toronto. It has been gloriously sunny for days – perfect swimming weather – but I have a three-month-old and leaving her on the side of the pool in a car seat like my mom did with me back in the early 80s is probably not going to fly. So instead of swimming every day like I want to, I've decided to write about swimming every day that the outdoor pools are open in Toronto. I started on June 17th and will keep on until Labour Day.

Some days are long meandering tales of swimming and water and lakes and rivers, other days are just a few words. Some days I write about swimmable puddles, other days are about lifeguarding. It really is the next best thing to swimming...

June 18
I want my arms to be too tired to hold anything, my legs too heavy to carry the weight of me.

June 19
Four years ago today I sat on a beach made out of rock that clacked under foot, a dry, dull clack that competed with the carousel's song and the waves against the shore. I sat on the stones and wondered if this was the Atlantic, or the sea (I still don't know). I wondered if the tide was coming in or going out – I come from a world of lakes and find the idea of a shifting shoreline disorienting. I sat and debated going around and around on the carousel.

I let the sun sink into my shoulders and slipped sun-warmed stones into my pockets so I wouldn't forget the afternoon.

I wish I had gone swimming in Brighton.

June 26
I want my arms to be too tired to hold anything, my legs too heavy to carry the weight of me. I want to lose count and lost time and feel the calm flood my lungs, the calm that settled into the rhythm of my arms, my breath – 1-2-3-breath, a glimpse of the lane rope, 1-2-3-breath, a glimpse of the tiled edge.

July 1
Underneath the lifeguard chair, between the pool and the deck,
the smallest bit of green watches the sun shift turquoise and blinding.

Lindsay
Thursday, July 6, 2017

Swimlit: "Lake Ontario" in Watermarks: Writing by Lido Lovers and Wild Swimmers

all the swimming holes

It is no secret that I LOVE swimming And writing about swimming combines two of my very favourite things in the entire world, so imagine my delight when swimmer and writer Tanya Shadrick put out a call for swim writing on Twitter!

Watermarks: Writing by Lido Lovers and Wild Swimmers is a collaboration between Pells Pool, the oldest outdoor freshwater public pool in the U.K. (we three swimmers must make a trip!), and Frogmore Press and is the most perfect swim-filled anthology. Divided up into types of bodies of water – oceans and seas, rivers, lakes, pools and lidos*, it is such a delight to read. And I'm not the only one who thinks that! The collection was in the Top 10 books on Amazon.co.uk when it came out and is already in its second printing (!!)

My piece in the book is on lake swimming – and features my beloved Lake Ontario!

About the anthology:

Watermarks is a collection of new poetry, stories and non-fiction by lido lovers and wild swimmers: writers who find inspiration in or near outdoor pools, lakes, rivers and other wild waters.

Full of quick turns, graceful strokes and surprising dives into the depths, this is writing to make us catch our breath, laugh in delight or shiver a little.

Our call for new poetry, short fiction and life-writing celebrating the life aquatic was answered by swimmers at home and abroad. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote that ‘all good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath’ and all the writer-swimmers in the book had us hold ours a little too.

Lake Ontario. Skarðsvík. Isola Santa. Galway. Hong Kong. Trollhagen. In waters from around the world, we are immersed in birth and death, danger and rescue, new loves and last. Ness Cove. Spitchwick. Thurlestone. Sharrah. Swimmers closer to home take us places few know and less dare:freezing mountain pools, rivers in full spate where buoyancy is lost suddenly in froth and bubbles.

With work by more than fifty fine writers, the collection includes an extract from Alexandra Heminsley’s new memoir Leap In and work by Lynne Roper, the visionary West Country wild swimmer and former press officer for OSS who died in August 2016.

*Confession: I've only just, in the last year, learned what lido means!

ps: you can buy a copy here (they ship to Canada!)