Early Bird Swimming

Over the past few years I have been going to some early bird swimming sessions before work, three times a week. Well, that is the plan - of course, it doesn't always work out quite as regularly as that! The idea is to keep vaguely fit and that is all, so I avoid doing too many lengths. Anyway, in March 2004 I wrote a song about it. I'm not sure why, but it took a long time to bring it into my performance repertoire. For a long time I couldn't quite work out how to end it with a nice little guitar riff. I feel fairly happy with it now.

When I watch olympic swimmers, with my untutored eye, they all look pretty much the same to me. Their training has perhaps ironed out a lot of the quirky individual stylistic differences. Yet this is precisely what I find fascinating when I go to early bird swimming. The swimmers do their lengths and each one has his or her own individual style. After a while you can recognise them just as you would recognise who somebody at a distance by merely looking at their gait! Here is part of one of the verses dealing with this:

Up and down the lanes the people go,
Some are fast and some are very slow.
Breast stroke ladies, hair kept dry
Glide like swans, their heads held high

The chorus refers to the fact that swimming lengths can become almost meditative after a while, providing that the pool is not too crowded. And I do believe that it calms you down, ahead of a busy day. At first I often think about what is going on in my world at that time, and what I have to do that day. But after a while, these thoughts slide away and then there is just the swimming and the breathing. Mildly therapeutic, one might say.

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