Like riding a bike – a reflection on swimming and age

I grew up with a mother who loved to swim. As a young girl she’d swum competitively, and like most good Swedish swimmers, she had a collection of swim badges. Some of those badges merely required swimming a specific distance—200 metres or 1 000 metres or 3 000 metres. Others were more of a combo: swim a certain distance, do a life-saving exercise (i.e. haul a heavy doll behind you) swim x metres fully clothed and dive off the ten metre trampoline.

How my mother ever managed the trampoline I do not know—she hated getting her hair wet. But maybe that was a quirk she developed as an adult.

When I was a child, we spent many of our summers in Motala, a small town in Sweden where my mother had grown up. Anyone who has visited Motala knows that it sits on the lake Vättern, and anyone who has ever dipped their toe in Vättern knows it is a very, very cold lake. Which had not, apparently, stopped my mother from earning all those badges—because yes, she earned all of them outdoors—and was not going to stop me or my sister from earning our badges. According to our mother.

My memories of those summers is mainly about being cold. You swim 1 000 metres in 18 degree water and your toes and fingers go quite blue. An invigorating experience, along the lines of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So yes, I have a lot of swim badges too, as does my sister who, to my great irritation, proved to be a much better swimmer than me despite being much younger.

Some years later and we spent most of our summers in Malmö, southern Sweden, where we would go to the beach and swim in the sea separating Sweden from Denmark. Much, much warmer water. My mother loved going to the beach, but there was no general slouching in the sun. Nope, if we went to the beach there was an expectation that all of us—my mother, my sister and myself—would swim.
“Exercise is good for you,” my mother would say. Hard to disagree with, but I wanted to jump and dive, not swim back and forth. I ended up doing both, seeing as my mother was equipped with quite the cobra eye which meant you did not disobey a direct order.

The swimming thing became a habit. When I had kids of my own, I made sure they all learned to swim at an early age and that they all could swim out in open water for at least 200 metres. I did not insist on swim badges. I did, however, sound a lot like my mother when we did go to the beach, in that I wanted them to do some real swimming, not just splash around and play.

My mother continued with her swimming, but one day when she was a bit over sixty, something changed. She no longer wanted to swim alone. Somewhat shamefacedly, she admitted that she no longer enjoyed swimming in water where she could not reach the bottom. I didn’t understand: she still knew how to swim, so why this sudden need to either have someone with her or be able to touch the bottom?

A few years later, my mother developed COPD, which sort of killed any further strenuous swimming—especially in cold water—as she found it increasingly difficult to breathe. At that point, I concluded that this was the reason why she’d developed a fear of deep water and of swimming unaccompanied some years earlier—her body was warning her that not everything was as it should be.

I am now at approximately the same age my mother was when she became somewhat leery to swimming on her own. I do not have COPS. In fact, I am in the best of health and am quite confident in my swimming skills. Except that suddenly, I no longer want to swim where I can’t see and touch the bottom. I have, dear peeps, become a swimming wimp and I do not like it.

Over the last few years, I have also developed a distinct fear of going down stairs, of walking down steep hills and using stepladders. I would never dream of diving off the 10 metre platform, but I am happy to report that I still do dive—off the edge of the pool. I am chalking all of this up to advancing age, as I do the fact that I now need bifocals.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about all this. I don’t think I have a problem with becoming old (we all know the alternative is not particularly fun) but it irks me to discover that abilities I took for granted no longer are there. These days, I cannot keep full schedules in my head, and my to-do lists have to be on paper as otherwise I forget just what it was I was supposed to do. My PT has told me to forget about getting any stronger: “at your age, it’s about maintaining strength and mobility”. I get it, I really do, but heck, I do not like it.

It was therefore something of a relief to get on a bike for the first time in twenty years some days ago and realise that this I could deffo still do. Evidently, there’s some truth in the old adage “like riding a bike”.

Growing older is in many ways not bad. I have less to prove, am better at laughing at myself and don’t care quite as much about other people’s opinions. I dress the way I want to dress, I am totally relaxed about ditching a book twenty pages in because it’s not doing it for me and have become much, much better at saying “no”. Magic word, that. . .

Growing older is a bit like driving off the highway and taking the older, two-lane road instead. Yes, it is slower, but that in itself allows me to see more, take in more of the scenery. Over time, the tarmacked road will likely become a winding gravel road—slower speed, but look, there’s scabiosa growing in tufts beside it, and isn’t that an absolutely massive old, gnarled oak shading the road? Some more years on, and the gravel road converts into a grassy track, each step requiring concentration. But the journey that is life still goes on, the miracles that dot the wayside are just as many, just as awe-inspiring.

I may have left the metaphorical  highway behind, but I have ways to go before I hit the gravel—or the grassy track. And just to confirm that hypothesis, I decided to do something about my swimming. I am too much of a water baby to accept being restricted by an undefined unease, and so, today, I told hubby “I’m going swimming. Now.” And I did.

The first few metres felt rather scary, but after that I found my pace, strong strokes carrying me further and further out into the lake. Absolutely lovely. So lovely I flipped over and lay like a starfish out where the water is deepest, staring up at the sky above.

Tomorrow, I will go swimming again.