‘How many lengths is it, that they’re supposed to be doing?” Angela Baxter is the counter for her niece, Catherine Daly, who is swimming the Swimathon in London’s Crystal Palace pool. “I think it depends on how far she wants to go, and also how long this pool is,” I say, with a helpful face. She says: “Is a length just one way? I’ve been counting there and back as one.”
You can do 1.5km, 2.5km or 5km, and you can do it on your own or in a team. If that sounds like a lot, you can do “simply swim” and go as far as you like.
It’s part of Sport Relief because of the fundraising angle, but when it was set up in 1986 it was just for the sheer love of swimming.
“Then we relaunched it in 1988,” Duncan Goodhew recalls, “with Princess Diana.” He beams. “I’m 57 this year,” he says, holding his arms out to indicate the time-defying amazingness of his good health.
This whole thing is like a wormhole back to the 1980s, from the scrubby, concrete, endearing ugliness of Crystal Palace’s vast sports centre to the fact that Goodhew is standing here, looking the same as he did when he won his Olympic medal in 1980.
“I had this moment when I was 18 or 19,” he says. “I’d be counting tiles on the bottom of the pool. I’d had a falling out with my coach. I had to really think about why I was doing it. It’s almost as if I went back to the beginning again, and I saw the water through a child’s eyes. I always say to people: ‘Before you go in, really look at the water. Look at the light refracting and dancing on the surface. When you get out, look back and enjoy where you’ve just come from.
“The water bombards your senses, it caresses you all over, you’re weightless. It’s an extraordinary, almost religious experience. If you want to count lengths and count tiles, you can make it as boring as you want. You can see the devil in the detail. Or you can see God in it.”
Goodhew is a motivational speaker now and he’s really good at it. I would quite like to get into the pool, even though I don’t have my swimming costume and I don’t really like getting wet.
Meanwhile, in the pool itself, are the swimathoners – a few soloists, and two incredibly healthy-looking groups doing a 5km and a 1.5km, both from the physiotherapy centre opposite.
Andy, Clare, Ray, Kerry and Helen have just emerged from the shorter swim, and look overjoyed. “If we didn’t have to get back to work for patients, I’d go all day,” Andy says.
It all looks quite bonding, or to put that in the language of the 1980s, they look as though they enjoy each other’s company more than most colleagues.
“Actually, we were hugging each other a second ago,” Andy says. “Are you going to turn into one of those workplaces where they hug?” I wonder. “Well … I think it was most probably the happy endorphins.”
Leena, 39, is in a two-woman team with her friend Jane. Originally from Finland, she applauds our charitable impulses. “Britain is great for fundraising. Finland isn’t really like that.”
However, even though she and Jane have raised £650, that’s not really why she does it. “I swim because it’s a meditation for me. I organise my day and my thoughts with the laps. Once you’re into a rhythm, I find it really therapeutic.”
Swimming is incredibly good for you; I remember being told that at school, that it was the only exercise that uses every single one of your muscles.
But there is more to it than that, as Goodhew explains. The pressure of the water makes the blood flow in a different way (I imagine this is a better way). It produces long, supple, flexible muscles.
Goodhew still swims for four or five hours a week, often in a small 20-metre pool, outdoors, where cars stop to honk at him and people overstretch themselves by trying to outpace him for a length.
Everything he says makes it sound intensely, peerlessly enjoyable. And you do start to see it through his eyes, not as people flogging themselves down monotonous lanes, but as people losing themselves in wonder, emerging at the end of it elated.
Apart from Catherine Daly, who is probably still in there, waiting for her aunt to notice that she’s swum as far as Paris.
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