Bumblebee Paddles

Walking and swimming are, generally, my exercise of choice. Paddlesport in the summer, but that’s for fun, not for exercise. And since it’s still the middle of winter, although you wouldn’t guess that by the blue sky and sunshine outside right now, let’s go paddlesport adjacent and I’ll tell you about my swimming routine. It’s obviously a good thing to be a competent swimmer if your entertainment of choice is a precarious low-to-the-water paddlecraft.

I was first plopped in the water when I was a few months old. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that I could swim before I could walk. I did swimming lessons until I was eleven and my next major job is to take all my badges off my towel and put them on my stripy towel t-shirt. I don’t ever see the swimming towel because it’s too small and old to use and it would be nice to see all the badges I’ve earned over my entire life – because I’m still adding to them today.

There’s a very pleasant outdoor pool just up the road and when I’m not at the boathouse or at Rangers or at Brownies, I try to swim there from the day it opens, which might be May or June, depending on the weather and how many people bothered to turn up for the first few weeks last year, until it closes in September. These days, they’ve discovered that people will keep swimming in it even after they’ve turned the heating off, which is good for their balance books but makes me nervous that they won’t turn the heating on until later than normal this year – why bother, when people will come without it? I’m not a fan of cold water swimming, although maybe this season is the one where I stay later than normal and try to get used to it.

It’s the sort of warm that makes you initially wince as you step in and then immediately realise it’s actually like a warm bath and after six lengths, you start to think it’s actually a bit too warm. I love it. I love that I’ve been a regular enough customer that the lifeguards who check you in now know my name – or at least, the one who’s been there since I started going does. The youngsters haven’t quite got the hang of it.

I try to swim a mile every time I go there. Between 2020 and 2022, that was twice a week, pretty religiously and since it’s a 25 yard pool, that means 72 lengths. Strictly, it means 70.4 lengths but if you’re going to start that 0.4, you might as well swim all the way to the end and then all the way back instead of guessing how much 0.2 of a length is. In 2019, that would have taken me around an hour and six minutes. I can now do it in about 50 minutes fairly comfortably. Then I joined the boathouse and from 2023, I’ve been lucky to make it to the pool once a week over the summer.

That changed this year. I did a 24-hour swimming challenge. You can do it literally, by joining a 24-hour open water relay swim next September but you can also do it “virtually”, which means setting your own timescale and swimming it either outdoors or in a pool. I set mine for six months, which works out at one hour-long swim a week, which seemed both a challenge and fairly doable. No way could I have gone swimming twice a week for three months, not with Guiding and travelling and living. But it meant that I had to swim elsewhere, because I wouldn’t be going to the outdoor pool and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be swimming in that unheated water throughout winter for an hour at a time. I doubt even the hardened ice swimmers do that.

So I started using my local pool. I swam there regularly as a teen – well, messed around in the water, anyway – but I’ve used it very sporadically since then. The water is cold, it’s got too much chlorine in it and I don’t like their lane system. I still don’t. I’m far too fast for the slow lane but if I move into the medium lane, I seem to be among competitive swimmers and while I can keep up with them, I can’t keep it up for longer than two or three laps. So the actual swimming is frustrating. It’s operated by Everyone Active, which has the most user-unfriendly website on the planet, which is why I was delighted to take a photo of the colour-coded timetable laminated and stuck on the reception desk. I don’t like that I have to pick a lane when I book or when I arrive at the front door – I don’t know which lane is going to suit me today, I don’t know who else is going to be there! At the outdoor pool, I’m a textbook medium but here, it depends on everyone else. It is too chloriney but I admit, they’ve adjusted the temperature and it’s quite satisfactory. And I walk there. It’s 2.5km, which is just a little over my normal everyday walk, which is around 2.3km. Of course, on my daily walk, I only do that once, whereas if I walk to the pool, I’ve then got another 2.5km to walk home and – forgive me for putting on the Three Yorkshiremen voice – it’s uphill in both directions. It’s a short sharp hill up to a junction followed by a long downhill on the way, which means a long slog uphill back and then a short sharp downhill and in a way, I really prefer the short sharp climb. After an hour’s swimming – or an hour and half on Tuesday evenings! – that walk uphill really doesn’t appeal.

I finished my 24-hour challenge this week, two weeks ahead of schedule. That’s partly because I’m going away next week and won’t have time in the last few days to squeeze in a last minute proper swim, and partly because I just liked the idea of getting to the pool several times in the last few weeks and getting it over with. I’ve covered 36.92km, or 22.94 miles over those 24 hours and if you take out all the swims at the outdoor pool I would have done anyway, that’s an extra 24.12km or 14.98 miles I wouldn’t have done, over 16 and a half extra hours. If anyone’s interested, that gives me an average swimming speed of 0.97mph.

Let me tell you about some particular highlights.

• The moonlight swim at another outdoor pool, one which doesn’t heat its waters as well as my local one but does have room around the edge for a proper fire in a barrel. That swim was borderline too cold for me but I do enjoy the hot chocolate by the fire afterwards
• An hour of lane swimming in Gellért Thermal Baths’ pool, which is maybe the most beautiful pool in the world. I spent a good chunk of the day in its thermal pools but I also made the effort to swim 48 lengths in the actual swimming pool, which required me to wear a swimming cap because hygiene only exists in swimming pools and not in thermal pools
• An hour of swimming at Széchenyi Baths, which is the big yellow thermal complex in Budapest. It has a 50m lane pool with the outdoor thermal pool at one end and the outdoor activity pool at the other. Swimming caps again.
• An hour of swimming in the London Olympic pool. The last couple of times – including one swim in October – I’ve been up there, the competition pool has been occupied and I’ve had to go in the training pool, which is very shallow and has a very low ceiling and although it’s a serviceable pool, it’s marginally less interesting to swim in than my own local one. But in December, I got lucky and the competition pool was open. It’s 50m, which is always a treat, it’s about 3m deep and it’s huge and it’s surrounded by these big blue windows and it’s just magical to get to swim in it.
• Two swims in Iceland in December. Well, actually three, but only two were particularly notable. Iceland has a lot of geothermal outdoor pools and so at Sundhöllin I swam in a blizzard so thick I couldn’t see the other end of the pool. At Laugardalslaug, there was a thermometer over the far end of the 50m lane pool so I could see that while I was nice and warm in the natural geothermal water, it was -2.5°C outside, which is why I had to keep dunking my face in the water to defrost it.
• A free swim before and after aqua fit. I thought it was at 7pm so arrived early to get changed and figure out where everything was and it was actually 7.15pm and it turned out it’s fine to get in and start warming up before aqua fit. I also noticed there was a public swim afterwards, so I asked at reception if I could join that straight from aqua fit. Yep, no problem. Long, awkward pause where we both stared at each other. “And do I… have to pay for that?” “Nope. You’re in there anyway”. So that was nice.

Am I going to keep swimming this winter? Yeah, probably more than I usually do, which is not at all. Not at the rate I have been. Six swims in 2025 so far, two of which were an hour and a half. I’ll go when I haven’t got anything else to do and since the boathouse is looking like it’s going to be quiet this year, maybe I’ll get to the outdoor pool twice a week this summer for once. And of course, we’ve got our boat club pool session booked in for next month so I’ll be back in the water for that.