Last night I went to see an art film installation called Pools… it was a film about a swimmer, and it was screened IN a pool. Like, they actually drained the water and put in a projection screen and a bunch of chairs and we all sat on the bottom of the pool and watched the film.

It’s amazing to me how many people make art about swimming.

We 3 swimmers are all currently drooling over one of our favourite artists, Lisa Congdon’s new illustrated book called The Joy of Swimming, and for many months now, we have been collecting and posting some of our favourite swimming art on our Pinterest board.

Our respective homes have been filling up with new pieces for our collections, and it's an ongoing thrill to see other blogs, like the Jealous Curator, feature some phenomenal swim art. I am currently OBSESSED with the work of Slovakian photographer Mária Svarbová.

The thing about this film I saw last night was that I was actually swimming through someone else's eyes... the artist went to some beautiful pools in London and Finland and Iceland with a GoPro camera strapped to his bathing cap.

And so, through the lens of this other person cutting their way through the blue, I turned my head when he did, I breathed when he did, I bobbed up to see the view of the old lady in the pink bathing suit at the end of the lane when he did. And I marvelled at how different his hands finished his strokes from how I do mine.

There was a little turn of the wrist that I don't do.

He doesn't breathe out bubbles the way I do.

He looks around at the bottom of the pool differently than I do.

It was an interesting experience, this borrowed, goggled viewpoint.

I felt a little seasick by the time the lights went up and I was happy to gulp in the spring night air on my bike ride home. It was then that I realized that it was the first time I have ever been in a public pool without my bathing suit on.*

* The guy who had a fancy waterproof case on his phone who timed how long each 50m took him to swim.
* The really fast swimmer who looked so much like my ex, I pulled off my goggles the first time I saw him to make sure it wasn’t him.
* The white-haired angry guy who yelled at anyone who didn’t follow the rules, and would intentionally crash into people who were swimming the wrong direction.
* The tall, kind man with the large Celtic tattoo on his upper back who used a striped pull buoy and did a lot of arms only.
* The bald guy with a wicked whip kick and blue eyes who worked at a hospital nearby.
* And the one woman, a kind, soft-spoken woman who only swam in the fast lane occasionally. She did yoga before getting in the pool and rolled her eyes with me at the male egos that occasionally overtook the fast lane.

If I had to daydream a perfect pool, it would be The Regent Park Aquatic Centre. There’s light and windows and a twirly slide and a shallow pool and a hot tub and a length pool. It positively sparkles.

 The length pool was even perfectly cold (I’ve gotten so used to doing lengths in bath-water temperatures, it was refreshing, and probably made me swim faster!)

 It was also the first swim Laura and I have ever taken together! (And Rhya was swimming at the same time in a pool across town, so it was very nearly our first Team Swim!)

 Of course, we didn’t check and see what time the pool ended, so it was a shorter-than-usual swim, but the sun was shining and it was pretty much summer outside and I didn’t even have to dry my hair for the bike ride home.

AND there are inclusive change rooms, that, I’ll admit, threw me initially. It’s the first inclusive change room I’ve used and it definitely meant I couldn’t go on autopilot. Leave the suit on in the shower, LZV! I got hit on in the fast lane, and it felt uncomfortable (not quite unsafe, but not physically comfortable) to be in a change room with the man who “loved my stroke and my smile.”

BUT, ideologically I support inclusive change rooms. For trans and gender queer folks, for parents with kids of a different gender—it’s a terrible thing to not be able to swim because of a stick figure on a door. I’ve since I read this amazing take on it: . “They take getting used to,” Meri Perra writes. “When was the last time any of us here showered with three strange men and two strange women to keep us company?”

 It takes getting used to! Yes. And I’m excited about going back to that glorious sunny window-filled day dream of a pool and getting used to it.

When the wonderful salt water pool at the Miles Nadal JCC closes down for renovations and they ask for pool haikus over Twitter, you KNOW we had to add our own #poolhaikus:

A pool of pale sky shimmering at close of day, calling out my name. —Rhya

Dreaming of fast lanes quiet as a summer lake, tired arms, full heart.
—LZV

Pencil crayon blue 
Glides past my periphery
So quiet below
—Laura

I was reading Margrit Talpalaru's meditation on running and writing and it all rang true for me, except I don't run anymore. I used to, and I miss it, especially in the spring. But I spent too many years dancing (damn you, beautiful, wonderful Martha Graham!) for my hip and back and knees to weather the pavement.

Swimming though. Swimming is my running. Except I haven't been swimming in weeks. My head is too full, and my body feels strange -- both pent-up, and lethargic. Nothing an hour in the fast lane couldn't fix, but my local is still closed for repairs and I've been too lazy eating brunch and not doing yoga and finding crocuses to find a new length swim.

Sometimes it's good to take a break, that's what I've been telling myself. The principle definitely applies to writing and work and most things, though I'm not sure it's totally applies to swimming for me. I haven't missed swimming like this since the six weeks after my son's birth, but they were so filled with so much newness and so little sleep that it was hard to miss the pool like I do now.

At least I've been writing about swimming. A lot. And thinking about swimming, a lot.

And I quit my job (yay!) and got new jobs (yay!) and one is near a pool I've never swam at before, so there's that on the horizon. And if the renovations go according to plan, my local swimming hole will be back up and running soon. Maybe even next weekend. You know my fingers are crossed.

My local swimming hole is closed for a month. Of course there are other pools that I could swim at, but none are a five minute bike ride from my front door, and none are at the perfect time on the weekends. It's overly dramatic to say I'm devastated, but I kind of am.

And it's clear I am not alone in my dismay. On the final length swim before it closed, the tone was somber and funeral, like we were never going to see each other again, our mixed and motley crew of weekend swimmers. The fast lane and the change room were tinged with despair.

But out of the despair, some coping strategies were born:

Hardcore Triathlete (who you know is hardcore because she has a triathlon cap and a mesh bag with fins and her own personal pull-buoy) had done extensive research about all the pools in the west end of Toronto. She even had them ranked them depending on their length swim time slots and water temp. She had an amazing tip about one pool on the Lakeshore where lifeguards kick slow swimmers out of the fast lane (#heaven). 

Fast Lane Friend claimed he didn't have it in him to trek any further than the two blocks our local was from his house. He planned on pulling out his bike.

The two Elderly Women Who Do Water Aerobics In The Slow Lane made plans to check out Memorial's warm water. Their grandsons like swimming there...

Super Fast Swimmer Who Doesn't Look Like A Swimmer And Has The Most Beautiful Butterfly, nodded a stern, meaningful goodbye at the end of the swim, but other than that he didn't really have much to say about the pool closing for a month. He's more the strong silent type.

I have great plans to do weekend yoga (which I haven't done) and brunch, (which I have done) and I've made a few trips to pools further afield, which semi-filled up the pool-shaped hole in my heart. It'll be warm enough to get my bike out, but really, I miss MY pool, with its lackadaisical lifeguards and fast lane politics and chatty, opinionated change room ladies. 

The countdown to April is ON...

Beyond the Pablum Marilyn Bell consumed on her Lake Ontario swim, I've really never considered what long distance swimmers eat. I always think of them swimming, not eating, but then of course they'd have to eat if they're swimming for 20+ hours. Hell, I have to eat every three hours even when I'm not swimming in open water.

It turns out, Doritos (Rhya's swim snack of choice) and my peanut butter cracker combo would not cut it. This Lucky Peach article by Kate Greene on the chicken legs, peaches, liquified bananas, sticky rice balls with bananas, combined with the errant swallow of salt/fresh water and salt-swollen tongues is fascinating.

We are on the cusp of spring... swimming is near!

Due to late night pool schedules and my tendency to hibernate during the winter, this season has been sadly very water-less... and I'm feeling it. I've been searching out images of beautiful pools on instagram and making a list of all the places to visit once the weather turns warm, with my mind always returning to the sad fact that I have not kicked my feet in enough swimming holes this winter!

But then it dawned on me... I have been frequenting a pool almost every night this year! I realized this while I was chilling with my daughter during her nightly bath time routine. She was splashing around the tub and chanting "I swimming, I swimming!"

I mean technically, she was really just sitting, but I wasn't going to argue, because two year olds are the worst people to argue with.

The bathtub is TOTALLY a pool, a pocket sized one, but still a contained body of water. And I hang out next to our petite pool literally every night. My cast of swimmers consists of a bunch of colourful plastic friends from all over the animal kingdom; my favourites being Moo-rris the cow, Mr. Crocodilow, oh and I can't forget my own fiery wildebeest! It's a truly unique experience. There is singing, splashing, the occasional tantrum, and always an abundance of swimming stories.

So I guess it turns out that this winter has been water logged after all. Are you listening Summer, because you have a lot to live up to.
 

In Patagonia there is a super untouched area that still exists, centred around the confluence of 2 rivers: the Rio Azul and the Rio Blanco. There is not much in the way of civilization there, save for some farmers and a network of hiking trails that plays home to some serious free spirits. There's hardly any wildlife there either. Some birds and a couple of wee lizards. The very occasional mountain cat. Some fish. That’s it.

The rivers there are fed by glaciers. They are BLUE. Like, brilliant blue. Gorgeous, brilliant blue.

My first day hiking there I “bumped” into 2 American guys, one from New York, one from Oregon and we “chatted” across a canyon. They were psyching themselves up, shirts off, for the cliff jump into one of the deep pools of blue situated at a bend in the river. Finally, with some egging on, one of them did climb up for the 20 or 30 foot jump. I clapped and cheered with total glee from my side of the gap. Well done, Oregon guy.

The next evening I happened to be reading the excellent book “All the Light We Cannot See” and was struck by a phrase in the story – “the complicated blues” – it was about the colour of music, but it stood out to me because that afternoon I had spent some time beside another swimming hole in the Rio Azul. 167 steps down a cliff (I counted), near my mountain lodge.

I sat and studied that swimming hole for an hour or two. I was trying to imagine explanations for why the water would be that colour. THOSE colours, more accurately. Because the longer I watched, the more the colour was not just one colour. It was complicated.

I sat and imagined slipping out into the centre of the complicated blue. Perfecting my starfish, complete with radiating Ophelia hair, floating floating floating, unbothered by anyone because there was no one.

My hiking boots came off. My socks came off.

But there was no swimming in that heavenly hole that day. The reason was not so complicated.

The simple truth was that it was really, really, really fucking cold.

Once upon a time, a perfectionist met a pool skimmer.


* * * * *


This story has no end.

Even though it is currently sleet-snowing, I really can't complain about the cold this winter, but even mild winters mean that swimming is relegated to humid, chlorine-y pools. These grey, slushy days, (and even the cold, bright ones), have me dreaming of swimming outside. Most specifically at Sunnyside pool, on the very edge of Lake Ontario in Toronto's west end, and it is, in my humble opinion, the greatest pool in Toronto.

First off, it's big. Not quite Kits Pool big, but way bigger than your standard 25m variety. And such a big pool means tons of people and tons of people means tons of people watching, which on the pool deck is nothing short of fascinating! So many tattoos! So many different kinds of bathing suits! So many different ways of getting into the water! So many different ways of being in the water: you've got the swimmers, and the floaters, and the canon ballers, and the sun tanners, and the kid wranglers. It is the most wonderful cross-section of people in Toronto.

It's open every day from the end of June until Labour Day from 10-3:45, then then 5-8. It's open till 11 on extreme heat alert days. Those late night dips? One of the very best things to do in Toronto in the summer.

Though the width isn't a full 25m, there is always length (or width!) swim in the very centre of the pool and because the shallow end is so big, there is so much space for kids of all ages to play. The super shallow end is filled with babies in PFDs and little kids just learning to float, where closer to the deep end, it's the older, splashy kids playing frozen tag.The deep end hosts older ladies in bathing caps doing breaststroke, tangled couples, and epic diving competitions. 

On a really hot day, deck space is at a premium (especially deck space without fence shadows to ensure prime tanning!) What I would give for some Sunnyside deck lying right about now.

The countdown to June begins in earnest...

PS: the pool also has an amazing history!

What is a swimmer to do when all the swimming holes are frozen and/or far too cold to swim in? Head there anyway and marvel at the beachy art installations, of course!

It's the second annual Winter Stations Design Competition and 7 lifeguard towers in The Beaches have been transformed into winter warming stations along Balmy, Kew and Ashrbidges Bay beaches. They are incredible! The theme this year is Freeze/Thaw (fitting as the city just saw a 40 degree temperature span from one weekend to the next). 

I fell in love in the fast lane. And it was a real fast lane -- at U of T, where the fast lane is all triathletes and Masters swimmers and is a full 50m. I had been a medium lane swimmer, but switched lanes just so I could swim with the tall swimmer with a mean whip kick.

I have never swam so hard, or been so out of breath in all my swimming days the day I moved over to the fast lane. but I kept up. 

And then, somehow, we both grabbed flutter boards at the same time and kicked side by side for at least a half hour. It was what swimming pool fairy tales are made of.

I can't remember how he asked me out, but he did after that swim, and I must say, there is something extremely reassuring to know that you'll always look better on a first date than you do in a bathing cap and goggles.

We dated, (and swam together) for two years and though I haven't seen him in years, I still know the cadence of his front crawl, the angle of his hand as it hit the water.