Swimming Against The Tide

Have started swimming for the last few weeks. This is a new club that has come up on Southern Avenue in the relatively recent past. I have taken the 8:30 to 9:15 pm slot. My school friend Pradip Paul is a member there and organised the form for me for entry at a time when new member enrolment had officially stopped. 

The facilities at the pool are quite decent for our city. It's of decent size and well lit. But more importantly it is just 600 meters from our house. They have two 25 meter pools. One is for novices and the other is for regular swimmers. We have around 25 regular swimmers in the pool in our batch. But thankfully, a majority of them stand near the shallow side of the pool and chat among themselves. The width is not much but we somehow manage without any major collision. From the shallow side we go up the left flank and come back down the right flank.

I usually go for 4x2 laps every evening with adequate rest in between. When I started I could barely swim half the lap in one go. But now I have improved. I intend to try and make it two laps in one go from this week. Let me see how the body and lungs react. My ultimate goal is to be able to swim non-stop for at least half an hour. I wonder if I can ever achieve that, because our swimming will stop in August-September. The pool is not a heated one and is operational only in summer.

In terms of facilities the club has a number of open showers and two toilets that (very importantly) do not stink. The only problem with the pool is that the water is over chlorinated, which is the case with most pools in our city, if not the country. I think the organisers are little aware of the bad effects of an over chlorinated pool. Being covered, the chlorine does not evaporate easily as was the case with the CRC pool. 

Every evening, except on Monday when it is the weekly off day for the club, I go out in my Slazenger shorts and Adidas sleeveless vest, wearing the swimming trunk inside. I keep my towels and soap etc in an orange Wildcraft duffel bag. 

The fellow swimmers are mostly senior men. Ladies have different slots. The youngsters of the neighbourhood do not use this particular slot. There is one other 9:15 to 10 pm slot. That is relatively less crowded. I might go for that next year. But swimming with Pradip is also important and he may not be able to come that late. He lives in Chetla.

I used to swim in the CRC pool but then it became really a nuisance and I stopped going there. The toilets used to stink. Then they opened the changing room to the outsiders who came to the gym. These guys used to use a hell of a lot of body perfume and deodorant - something that I cannot stand for the strong smell. But the worst part was they had very little light around the pool, giving rise to a gloomy feel in the evening. There is no reason to do this except cost cutting. 

Also, the club is very lackadaisical about restarting the pool every year. They created the pool only to push up the entry cost of club membership. It is not a serious activity,

I must clarify here that I swim or cycle etc not to fight diabetes. I do them for my love of these activities. Even if they were directly harmful for health, for example like smoking is, I'd have done them. Despite being not very strongly built I love these two activities. 

This has probably to do with my father who used to tell stories from his youth when he used to swim in Mahanadi or go cycling to Hazaribagh etc. I still remember my father was looking over when I took a large bicycle out to play with and eventually learnt balancing on it. And it was he who first took me to the Lakes for me to learn swimming. I think for about two years he took us every day to the public pool to help us learn how to swim. I took a very long time to swim but I did.

Subsequently I had taken annual membership at Anderson Club to swim in the evening and now here. I think, in terms of facilities Anderson has the best pool.

Garmin Instinct

I measure my swimming laps using the Instinct because it has a Pool Swim mode and is guaranteed to be water proof (I make sure to wash it copiously after the swim to get rid of all the chlorine). However, it is not a GPS based measurement (one has to manually key in the pool length) but possibly they use hand movement to understand the start and end of a lap. Whatever be the algorithm it is most inaccurate. 

If I change my stroke in the middle of the lap it will count it as two laps. Sometimes it does not even record a lap at all. I have noticed that this happens on my return swim from the deeper side of the pool to the shallower side. I swim all the way to the other end of the pool and the reading is still the same. Very frustrating, to say the least.

Last Sunday it measured a total of 175 meters (when in reality it was 200) but after I got up from the pool (I forgot to save the ride earlier) it came down to 150. It is just not dependable. I still keep it on to have a record of the days I am swimming. Also it looks cool to have a watch on while swimming.

The Solution (7th July 2022)

I have solved the Garmin problem and it is now behaving properly. I had assumed that it has a default auto pause mode. I was wrong. I had to activate the rest mode and now the watch behaves perfectly and measures the distance correctly. I cannot remember now where I found it but it's there. 

Exercise And Toning

Every evening after coming back home I do some strength training exercises for about half an hour. Sometimes with weights, sometimes with the Swiss ball. One day for the lower body and another day for the upper. I would also once a week or so do only stretches or just work on core strengthening. 

I have discovered the videos of Lori Briggs that are excellent for core strengthening. She was the dryland coach for the US swimming teamt. Her videos are very good. Different. And she explains really well. These are more than ten year old videos. I wonder why she is not so famous in the youtube training circuit. Possibly didn't market properly.  

Although these are supposed to be meant for swimmers, any athlete would benefit from them for basic core strengthening. That is the real basic strength needed for any athletic performance.

I also found a particular exercise that the Dutch footballer Gwinjeldum (ex Liverpool and currently PSG) was doing on his instagram page. He holds the ball behind his leg with his ankles and hamstrings and then pushes his lower body up from the hip joint. He makes it look simple but it is terribly difficult. It is somewhat like the yoga pose of sarvangasana with the legs bent to hold a swiss ball and then you go up and down from the hip with the hands spread beside the body on either side.

Strengthening exercises have almost an immediate effect on performance in the pool. Even cycling or running speed is improved if one does core strengthening exercise. Running benefits the most from lunges but core is important too. 

My quads are really weak and it shows particularly during a trek. I go really slow on a downhill climb because while climbing down it is the quad that takes most of the load. I also have a bad IT Band problem on the right leg. It showed up as a big menace during our Darjeeling cycling trip. It came back again during our Lamahatta trip when I was running up and down the mountainside in search of birds.

I have a small bursa on my right knee that swells up when my legs are over strained. I think my right leg is weaker of the two. 

I hope the strengthening work will improve the situation.  

Thursday, 30th June, 2022

I have started swimming 5x2 laps every evening now. On the first day my deltoids ached nicely but then I got used to them. From tonight I plan to do 6x2 laps every night. I spend a lot of time chatting with Pradip when he comes to the pool. When he does not come, which is now very common, I tend to swim more. 

Ideally I should be able to swim 10x2 laps every evening. But then these days the pool is staying quite crowded with new swimmers graduating to our pool from the novices' pool. So getting a free stretch is increasingly becoming difficult. I believe this crowd will thin out once it starts raining more regularly. 

Thursday, 7th July, 2022 - A Few Positive Thoughts

I am now swimming 6x2 laps every evening. I have improved the techniques but more importantly have won a mental battle. For a very long time now, every time I swim I would see horrific mental images of people drowning or me being thrown into a high sea and this would make me panic and raise my head and breathe in panic. This leaves a swimmer very tired. 

In the recent past two young teenage rowers died in Dhakuria lake by drowing, when their boat overturned in a storm (I think their feet got stuck in the pedal strap). This thought would also haunt me, making me panic mildly. I knew this was a problem that was affecting my performance and I wanted to work on it.

I tried to fill my head with more positive thoughts and images. One evening I tried to divert my mind by imagining myself climbing up the Hill Cart Road, physically it is one of the most challenging things I have ever done in life. To me it is a very positive image of myself in my mind. But it did not help much. I tried to read up on the subject on the internet. 

I found one gentleman saying this about a young swimmer - I think on Quora - who used to panic in water and wouldn't swim. This gentleman told the youngster how would you like to save your friends from drowning? This thought motivated him to swim regularly and fearlessly and he became a very good swimmer and won several competitions later. 

I tried this in the pool last night. I imagined myself shouting to the two young boys not to panic and that I am coming. I know it is totally false. But it filled my mind with really positive energy and I swam quite effortlessly last night. 

I also pulled the cap over my ears this evening and this helped in swimming without water getting into my ears. I think these three things - changing breathing techniques, positive thoughts and cap over ear - had an overall positive effect on my performance. My goal this year is to be able to swim 10x2 every evening. As of now it is 6x2. I will get there in a couple of weeks, I am sure. When I started in late May I could barely finish a lap without crawling the last few meters.