I was rain-checked on Thursday evening, so given that during the week my swimming gear generally resides in my desk drawer, out it came, pool timetables were checked and I headed off towards Streatham Ice & Leisure Centre for an unanticipated & welcome return to the pool project. It’s the first swim in a little while, a weekend spent feeling ill & sorry for myself had chucked a bit of a spanner in the swimming works a couple of weeks earlier. This was a welcome return to water.
I haven’t quite worked out the grounds for my fairly illogical approach to whether or not I think I’ll like a pool. I suspect a lot if it has to do with location & associations with particular places, which for a lot of London, can only be based on things I’ve read or heard about a place. Rightly or wrongly, Streatham fell in the category of pool I didn’t think I’d like so much. The best bit of this approach is that I’m always happy to be proved wrong when I think I’m not going to like a place. The converse is, of course, a bit disappointing, but I can’t really expect to have my cake and eat it I guess.
Given that I’d arrived for the 7pm ‘swim fit’ session, which as the website tells me is: a session aimed at swimmers 16 and over who want to swim in a laned environment allowing a great water based workout, I’d have quite liked the lifeguards to have stopped the kids continuing their water voleyball game in the big wide lane that I needed to swim in given that I was never going to keep up in the fast lane! However, once they’d chucked the ball into the that lane more times than was probably amusing for the speedy swimmers the ball was confiscated, I can’t say I was disappointed, sorry. I made my own lane adjacent to the fast lane divider & was clearly giving off ‘don’t mess with my temporary lane’ vibes as when Mr Splashy got in & tried to change things I faced him off & he took the hint – result! I clearly operate a ‘first come first served’ approach to marking territory in a swimming pool!
A largely unremarkable pool in many ways but perfectly decent & it did the trick, it reminded me I’d missed swimming but fortunately I hadn’t forgotten how to! I managed the regulation 1km in the time it usually takes & it has kick-started the project back into action, the 62nd pin happily went into the map when I got home.
all the pools in london 