The Price of Exercise

 

 

 

“You know that the pool is closed?”  Was the question that greeted me this morning as I waited to get into the centre just before 8 am.  Yes, indeed I did know that the pool was closed and I was about to begin my via dolorosa of gym use for the next three weeks.

     As I went through my selected series of exercises, I was interrupted by a number of acquaintances who questioned my presence, with a smile it must be added.  And they sympathised with me as I explained the extra time that the gym would be closed.  And if anything their smiles grew wider.

     The interesting thing is why I am bothering to go to the gym.  The choice is mine after all.  I can choose to do something else for the next few weeks and not moan about doing something for which I have, to put it mildly, little enthusiasm.

     Why I do it is all down to self-knowledge.  I enjoy swimming.  I like the difference that water gives, it is a different element, and moving through water is not the same a moving through air.  When you have suspect knees then the support that water gives allows you to glide – an experience that is unique to the element.  I am also able to do my exercises that are supposed to strengthen my knees and the muscles that support my new bits!

     There are some that enjoy hard physical exercise and thrive on the pain that comes with pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.  I am not one of those people, and I look for an easy life.  Generally.  So, left to my own devices I would probably let exercise slide and do my mental exercises inside the pages of a good book.

     Having an early morning swim, getting up at 5.45 am, takes effort.  If that effort can be integrated into a regime then all the better, habits are difficult to shake off, the trick is doing something enough (if it is an effort) to make it into a habit.

     When I played squash I was a member of a squash league at my local leisure centre, that meant that I ‘had’ to play a certain number of games each month or I would be relegated.  It is the same methodology that keeps me doing a Duolingo exercise each day as I do not want to be relegated from the arbitrary league that the program has placed me in, and which encourages me to participate offering electronic digital inducements to keep myself applied.  We all need those incentives to keep us in line, because so few of us are real self-motivators.

     When I was in Cardiff, I used to swim early morning and after school.  After a day in work, virtually the last thing on my mind was calling into the David Lloyd Centre on my way home for a swim, and I spent the greater part of the journey home debating whether or not I really wanted to go for a swim.  Often that question was answered by the fact that I ‘found’ myself in the David Lloyd car park, while my internal debate was still going on.  Location trumping questioning!

     In a similar way, I go for a swim ‘most days a week’, it is a habit and I wake up at the appropriate time and get ready before I am fully awake!  It is built into the system that is me.  But, I also know that were I to break that system then the whole edifice of exercise will come tumbling down.  So, just because the pool is closed (other pools, and the sea are available) I know that I have to keep up the routine, even if it means going to the gym.

      One problem of gym going, as I found this morning, is that there is a different list of things that you must take to make the experience enjoyable and hygienic.  I forgot to pack another shirt ,and so I had to wear the soiled garment in which I exercised when I went for my cup of tea – luckily outside!

     And I learned my lesson.  Even though I liberally dowsed myself in Citronella, my sweat infused T-shirt attracted more than the usual tribe of blood sucking mozzies as punishment for my lack of preparedness.

   Tomorrow (Day 2 – only 20 to go, sigh!) I Will Be Prepared, and I will take a more potent repellent for fight off the desperation of the latter-part-of-the-summer insect life.

 

Stay in your lane!

 

 

 

Last night was not a good one.

     Incipient back ache developed during the night into one of those pains that while it wasn’t truly bad, it was bad enough to preclude the possibility of sleep.  And whatever position you choose, it is never the right one for any length of time.

     It reminded me of the horror (there really is no other word that captures it) that comes with trying to sleep in a horizontal position after having a complete knee replacement.  At its worst, my ‘sleep’ was limited to ten minutes from the time of hitting the mattress – not that’s not the right word, getting onto the bed was a tortuously slow process, as was getting up again – and giving up.

     Salvation during that period came from the reclining chair in the living room.  Although the foot rest part of the reclining process was never long enough to accommodate my height, it did allow me to adopt a three-quarter’s prone position that allowed at least fitful sleep – the sort that only occurs through exhaustion.

     What worked once for knees was pressed (literally with the reclining switch) into service for the back.  And to be fair, it did, sort of work.  The pain was still there, but it was almost like a ‘noises off’ effect and it allowed something approaching unconsciousness – a state I would not equate with real sleep.

     Because I go for a swim every morning during the week at 6.30 am, I am programmed to wake early and, even though the pool does not open until 8.00 am on the weekends, my internal body alarm does not differentiate, and I wake up at 5.45 am.

     Which I did this morning, and that gave me one and a half hours to debate with myself whether or not it might be a good thing to go for a swim or simply to stay at home, as, after a few tentative stretches it demonstrated that the pain in my back was still there.

     Eventually, I decided to go, as I reasoned that the water is supportive and I could adapt, tailor and truncate my pool activity to fit my pain threshold.

     The reality when I got into the pool showed that my decision not to skip a session was correct.  Not one of the exercise or stokes was so painful that it could not be done, and so I ended up completing a fairly normal session, with one or two of my exercises extended as I felt that the stretching might be beneficial.

     I cannot say that my swim has helped lessen the pain, which vividly reminds me of its presence when I move in certain ways, but I tell myself that I have exercised, and I have done my stretches, and so, even if I cannot feel the benefits immediately, it will help in the long run.  And in the short run there is the ever-present help of Paracetamol and pungent smelling unguent.  And looking at those two words ‘pungent’ and ‘unguent’ there must be some sort of linguistic link, that I am far too lazy to look up.

     Anyway, none of the above is the point that I set out to write about.  If you are in pain and the drugs and creams have had little effect, then you search for other ways to lessen the affliction.  And the swimming pool offers many.

     Ever since Covid our 25m swimming pool has been roped off into five lanes, and there is a booking system so that the lanes do not get overfull.  In theory each lane can take three swimmers as long as they swim in circles, or rather squashed ellipses.  This system depends on the three swimmers understanding the speed of the people sharing the lane and make due allowances, for example, allowing a stronger swimmer to overtake from time to time.  In theory this system works well.  In theory.

     In practice lanes are jealously guarded and any perfectly reasonable sharing is regarded more as an invasion.

     For example, I swim in lane 1, or lane 5, depending on how you look at it.  I have chosen (!) this lane because there is a hydraulic chair which lowers me into the water and the ladder that accompanies the equipment is particularly difficult to use.  With my two wonky knees I feel that I am more than entitled to use this ingress and egress, and I further feel that such a flamboyant entry surely entitles me to enjoy the lane in splendid isolation – and anyone sharing the lane will have to contend with the steps that jut out into the water and make a straight line difficult to keep.

     Although the basic stokes of swimming are well known, you only must compare two people swimming say crawl to see that their approach to the stroke is different.  In some cases, it is difficult to say with any confidence what particular official version of the common crawl or breaststroke that they are using.  The position of the hands, the length of the stroke, the turn of the head, the time underwater, the breathing, and the use of the legs and feet make an individual’s technique just that, individual.

     And then there is the amount of space that a person takes up when executing their brand of stroke.  The lanes are delimited by floats, they are, by definition, floating.  There is no separation vertically from the floats to the floor of the pool, only observation and consideration keep flailing hands, arms and feet inside the imaginary boundaries of an individual’s lane.

     Crawl is usually (just about) contained within the body’s width – though I have seen some versions of crawl where it is impossible to tell the difference between that and energetic drowning.  Breaststroke goes well outside the body’s width and if you are swimming your squashed ellipse in a lane with three swimmers and are near the floats then your hands and feet are almost certainly going to make your swimming into a contact sport.

     And then there is butterfly.  The sine qua non of selfishness in communal swimming – apart from one extraordinary occurrence I witnessed of a person swimming a width of backstroke when everyone else was swimming lengths!

     So, to lessen the paint of my backache I observed the tensions, the threats and the resentments that are inevitable when people seek to join an already crowded pool.

     As I start and end my session with a series of exercises based on the instructions from the physio who saw me through the first awful weeks after my operation, I have the opportunity to watch various dramas unfold with the barely concealed distate of people who think they are being hard done by.

     And it works.  I was more concerned about the human drama swimming around me than the pain tickling my back!

 

Frustration and release

 

 

 

Most days I get up at 6.15 am to get ready for my morning swim at 7 am in the local pool.  As it is August, I have the luxury of a lie in until 7.15 am as the pool opens at 8 am for that month.

     I would like to say that I feel a sense of smug satisfaction for rising so early and taking physical exercise before many people have stirred from their beds - and I suppose I do.  But, the thing is that I find it difficult to stay in bed after my accustomed rising time.  When I was working I went for a swim before work started and I have sort of continued that regime.  If truth be told, I do not really ‘lie in’ with any degree of sincerity.  At the time that I need to get up, I get up and if I try and stay in bed I feel uncomfortable.  So, my soft, musical alarm on my mobile phone goes off and I get up.

     This morning, my arrival at the pool was greeted by what appeared to be a small meeting at the gate.  It turned out that the increasing murkiness of the water in the pool over the last couple of days had prompted the technical services to Do Something and thus “product” had been added to the water, but for the “product” to work, we swimmers had to be excluded.

     The helpful message from management that the pool was closed was sent to members of the leisure centre via email at 10.10 am today, that is some two hours after we arrived to start our swim.  Sigh!

     I made the best of a bad job and decided to go for an extended bike ride from the pool to Port Ginesta, so that I could tell myself that I had kept up my morning exercise.

     Admittedly the effort of cycling those kilometres was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have an electric bike and I make full (full!) use of its electric capabilities, but it is still exercise under the meaning of the act and as such it is duly recorded by my Smartwatch and adds to my daily PAI rating (whatever that is) – one of those acronyms linked to health and exercise that, in spite of its meaning being ambiguous (or even unknown) is something I take semi-seriously and try and maintain a rating of 100 or as near as I can get.  Because, yes.

     Not only did I go all the way to the beach in Port Ginesta, but I also went as far as the Gavà bike lane could take me in the opposite direction, which amounts to a total of 17.85 km which, even on an electric bike (for me) is quite a lot.

     Not that the electric bike is my only form of ‘personal’ transport.  The electric scooter was taken out of the boot of the car AGAIN yesterday and I used it to get to our favourite ice cream shop as a jaunt to get out of the house.

     I am not a natural bike rider, but I am semi-professional compared with my shaky progress on the scooter.  On the scooter, like a highly-strung thoroughbred horse, I am spooked by: anything other than a completely level surface, traffic, people, turns, crossings, pavements, other scooter users, hills, slopes and the state of the world.  I do not, I have to admit, exude confidence when I am a-wheel, but it is the only way that I can match Toni’s walking without having to pay the price in pain for days afterwards!

     So far, my two trips on the scooter means that I have paid 150 euros per trip, given the total cost of the purchase.  A sobering thought.

 

 

The weather is a little cooler, I think, but that doesn’t make me particularly happy.  Yes, the sort of heat that we have been experiencing has been of a different quality than in previous years, but I’d still prefer that to the cold of winter – that any diminution of heat now makes me far is almost upon us!  But that is only may paranoia speaking.  I hope.

Broken Un-Birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today.  Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.

     I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses.  I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.

     I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water.  But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn?  Only I!

     I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.

     As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.

     I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.

     Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either.  Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!

     My art books are my escape.  Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.

     Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions.  Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby.  The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.

     I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!

     You might like to compare the two artists:

 

Go

 

 

 

 

 

 

POUSSIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWOMBY

 

As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art.  Money is just the commodification of art.  What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art. 

I still don't like Twomby.

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 86 - 10th June

It is getting progressively more difficult to tell that there is a pandemic still raging in this country.  A couple of days into whatever stage we have reached so far and people are behaving, for the most part, perfectly normally.

     People generally wear masks in town, though along the paseo they are very much in a minority.  The tables on the terraces of the restaurants are more generously spaced out and now there are tables inside the restaurants as well.

     It is still difficult to tell how many of the smaller shops are going to open after the virus has finally been dealt with.  The supermarket that I went to yesterday and which is closing down has been failing for some time and most of us are amazed that it has managed to last this long.

My early morning swim is now part of a regime again, it doesn’t take long to slip back into sometime established ways, though it might be difficult to get the same slot in which to swim each day.  We are only allowed to book up to 2 activities at a time and as there are only five lanes in the pool and one person to a lane, it is going to be difficult to bag a spot at the same time each day.  So far, I have been lucky and I am OK until Thursday, but I think that I am going to have to get used to using the kitchen calendar more noting the different times when I have been able to get into the pool.

     I met two teachers from the British School just before my swim and they told me that the lessons have been on line for some time and that they will not be going back until September at the earliest.

     In the UK the bunch of inadequate wankers that make up the government have done yet another U-turn about their insistence of kids returning to school in England before the end of the summer.  They have, at last, done the special sum of cutting class size and finding physical space to put double the number of classes in the space that previously accommodated half the number.  To say nothing of the extra teachers that are needed to make this happen.

     In education we are, of course, used to politicians telling us to do something and then ignoring the advice of experts saying why what these ideological purists want is simply not possible.  The real problem is that, with the cabinet of no-talents that Johnson has formed around himself, every department is failing and as chaotic as education, to say nothing of the writhing incompetence that the Home Office has come to personify.  It is intensely depressing to think that the immediate future of my country is in such inept hands.

     And then there’s Brexit.  Dear god!