Mark Carroll's Journal

Yesterday evening, we tried the local swimming pool. Unlimited access would cost me £15 per month. It's a reasonable enough facility, quite typical of those one finds in British cities. Swimming is taught to primary school children here, most of us end up being bussed there from school each week for a while for the lessons. I was struck by the disappointment of being able to stand in the deep end of the pool, which is apparently 1½m. I don't know if my childhood memories of such pools are different between I am now taller or they were deeper.

The swimming lanes weren't impossibly full but enough occupied, in some cases with people who weren't simply swimming up and down them, that I remained with my family in the more general area. I wonder how busy those lanes are on, say, weekday mid-mornings.

Given how little exercise that I feel that I have gotten since I stopped using the cross-trainers at my previous workplace, after they dropped the requirement to mask, I was surprised to find myself seeming fitter than I expected in the pool, it wasn't much of an effort to do a length of front crawl. After enough swimming, I started experiencing some toe cramps, which surprised me. I would stand and pause until they passed.

In terms of contagious disease, at the pool I didn't feel as if I was much getting enough close to people that my risk of COVID-19 is unacceptable, I just wish there were a more obvious place by the pool to leave rubber sandals that might usefully distance me from others' foot diseases. Since stopping swimming frequently back in 2016, when two increases in my payroll deduction for pensions made the gym membership too difficult for us to afford, I sure haven't missed having to treat occasional plantar warts and athlete's foot.