This particular time in early September is a date I dread.
This is not because of any lingering horror of being a teacher and the inevitable quoting of the deathless line in Wordsworth, “shades of the prison house begin to form Upon the growing boy” which seemed to me to work for pupils as well as teachers approaching a new year, and I have thought and quoted it through my life – right up until retirement. From retirement onwards the metaphor of the “prison house” takes on a rather more terminal meaning that merely getting a new timetable!
No, the dread here is the annual closing of the swimming pool for its “Essential Maintenance”. This usually means a fortnight of closure which in the past I have compensated for by using other pools in Castelldefels and Gava, using the community pool, and swimming in the sea.
The community pool and the sea are free, but the other options come with complications. As I no longer use my bike thanks to the element of instability that my new knees have gifted me, I need to take the car and park, and in some cases the distance from the pool that a vacant parking space offers itself, I might as well as walked from home! That is not strictly true, but a long walk is something that I do not relish, and neither do my knees. There is also the cost of swimming in another pool. A one-off swim is expensive, so you need to buy a season ticket or a multi-swim card and that is all a bit of a faff. So I look for alternatives.
For the last couple of years during this time of enforced dryness, I have reasoned that as I pay a subscription to my swimming pool and gym, I should really take advantage of the latter and use the various machines that are dotted around the torture area assigned to those who like to sweat.
As I vividly remember asking one attendant at a gym in Cardiff to “walk me though” a reasonable workout regime – and not being able to move a muscle without exquisite pain the next morning, I now take things relatively easy. When you are a swimmer, you take for granted the cushioning and supportive elements of the water in what you regard as fairly hard exercise. When you transfer that level of effort to the air, the gravitational drag on muscles is rather different.
Therefore, when I go to the gym, I have a Survival in Relative Comfort approach to the machines which, to my eyes all look like instruments of torture. I start with the static cycle, especially one machine that has real back support, I then move on to some sort of knee bend thingie where the weight that you push is adjustable by the use of weights. I always check where the rod in the weights is situated before I start, because once or twice I have started without looking and almost popped my knees with the astonishing heaviness that some people take in their stride. I then move on to the rowing machine and end up with a gentle walk on the treadmill.
There are variations in the order and selection of machines because sometimes the ones I want are occupied so I have to improvise with the schedule. Some machines I do not use because I have yet to work out how one threads one’s body into to them to get them to work. You might well say, just look at how other people use them and then emulate. Which is good advice, though I have also noticed that the more professional users have their own individual variations in how they utilize the various flanges and bits of the machines – and given the way that their bodies look with triple layer muscles, I do not intend to match their exertions, even in my imagination let alone in what I like to call “real life”.
There is obviously an overlap between gym and pool, though there is a distinct sub-species of masochist that concentrates solely on the gym, and usually specializes in an area I never walk in (let alone participate in) the area of the Free Weights. This is the area that has a mirror wall so that the sufferers can watch their pain. Each to his (and it is usually ‘his’) own.
I would imagine that tomorrow, for my first visit to the gym there will be some people that I am on ¡Hola! Level acquaintanceship with who will in various ways question why I am there, when most of them will have seen me (there is a row of machines with a view of the pool) ploughing my lonely (if I’m lucky) furrow up and down ‘my’ lane.
I am an early morning user of the pool and there are a number of regulars in the pool and the gym who I tend to assume are the ‘users’ of the facilities, but I really fail to understand that there are many more people who have a different timetable from me and so there are layers of ‘ownership’ of various aspects of the pool and gym that are time sensitive.
It’s like a Sci-Fi story I read that described an over-populated world in which your life was lived according to a particular day, so that if you were a Monday person, you would live your active life on a Monday and then go into suspended animation for a week, until on the following Monday you would be revived and assume that you were in day two of your particular week.* So, in the pool and gym there are people who would not consider using the facilities at the time that I use them and vice versa.
The few times that I have swum out of my time I have been confused by the differences in clientele almost as if it was a different place.
Well, for the next three (sic.) weeks I will be changing my habits and (resentfully) following a different path.
Life is hard sometimes. But at least I’m not teaching!
*Philip José Farmer's “The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World” (1971).
