swim

23 june

I hate fashions. I hate the idea that I am doing the same that throngs of people do, like any other… human. I have written extensively about how social we are, I have thought about it, I have done modeling about it, and I am responsible for plenty of statistical work that document tendencies and mass behaviour. I actually do politics, arguably the most social occupation there is. Still, I hate fashions. What I hate the most is to recognize myself enjoying something fashionable. 

Like swimming outdoors. 

To make it even worse: my mother expended a relevant part of her raising us dronning endlessly about the benefits of swimming, which made me expend a relevant part of my growing up resisting her. As a matter of fact, she is the perfect example of all the benefits of long life swimming. Well into her seventies, she looks a bit ahead of her fifties. Just take a look at the photos in her facebook, not photoshopped, and you will see a relaxed middle age, smiling, woman. Go figure. And go swimming indeed. 

After my successful half of a century resisting the tireless siege of my mother, I suppose I fell for the same combination of circumstances that has made many of us do things that we wouldn’t have thought off two years ago. The pandemic struck, and my (social) life was disrupted, let alone the japanese fencing that I do. I found myself searching for alternatives, biking longer and longer distances, eventually reaching on a regular basis a nice lake where I do scuba dive. In the summer  I started bringing my laptop and I got to do some work there, in a bench by the water. Eventually I brought my binoculars (another thing that I haven’t done before) and got to enjoy the birds around it. And why not to swim, given all this nice water just there? 

So I started, and I haven’t stopped. The summer ended and the fall came, so I got myself a neoprene. I even got a companion, the great mermaid Barbe, who still keeps me swimming in a straight line twice a week. And I hate to admit it, but my mother was right. Swimming is great. And I hate to admit it even more, but all these articles that you are apt to read in your preferred newspaper, all this ink expent in extolling all the great advantages of swimming outdoor, all of them are also true! 

Since about forty years ago, I have always been practicing one or another sport on a more or less regular basis. And all sports I have loved, sooner or later asked that effort, that contraction of muscles that somehow, feels unnatural. What I have done the longest is running, and I have certainly read the great “The lost art of running” by Shane Benzie, where it is drilled into us that proper running is stretching and using your natural elasticity… and yet. I expended quite some years climbing, and most definitively climbing is about stretching yourself… and yet. Even now, that I am approaching my sixth year as a beginner japanese fencer, an activity in which every teacher will demand big and relaxed movements from your whole body… even in this, there are those awkward moments of tension and torsion and compression. 

Nothing like that when swimming. Not ever. 

So there you will find me, after a day or two of hitting the keyboard, at the shore. In the winter it will cost some trepidation and some extra clothing, but winter or summer, I’ll be in the water in minutes from now. Arms going further further further! each time, legs in cadence driving on and on, eyes and face not willing to abandon those two universes that are, somehow, our universes. I can see the sun, or the clouds, for a moment. The next moment is the water, the fishes and the shallow bottom or the deep green, the deep mahogany or the deep blue of the water. And then the the ski again, and the water, and the ski… coming again and again to the conclusion that we are no gods and no animals, that we are some thing in between, also in between the air and the water. 

Stretching yourself there, right there.