Exercise, Music, and Literature?

 

 

 

Waterproof headphones for swimming have their limitations.

     I remember thinking that I could make use of all those lengths in the swimming pool finally to listen to and get to know Beethoven’s Late Quartets.  Pretentious?  Moi?  I worked on the assumption that as I was ‘trapped’ in the water I could use the enforced concentration to break the barrier of my earlier dismissal of the music and find a new appreciation.

     In theory that was a good plan.  I downloaded some of the quartets to the memory of the headphones and prepared myself to be amazed.  And it didn’t work. 

     It wasn’t my prejudices getting in the way, it wasn’t that I didn’t listen, it was more the actual mechanics of the production of the music.

     Swimming is loud.  To the outsider it is just the gentle (in my case) parting of the water in an unobtrusive and fairly quiet crawl, but to the swimmer, especially with earplug-type headphones on the sound of the motion of the arms through water and the bubbles of air are more cacophony than anything else.  And the subtlety of Classical music with its sonic highs and lows is not the best way of cutting through the ambient swimmer’s sound to make a good listening experience.

     This is where pop music comes into its own with a thumping bass and a clear instrumental accompaniment to a strong singing voice or voices: those come through loud and clear, where most classical music does not.  And yes, I have tried bone conduction as well and it works, but only up to a point, and that point is far away from the texture that makes listening enjoyable.

     But now, for another week, I am in the gym as the ‘maintained’ pool begins to refill and whatever has had to be done during its three-week shutdown draws to an extended close.

     Goodness knows, swimming is basically boring – and I therefore have considerable admiration for those professional swimmers who simply have to do length after length after length (after length) to maintain their professional standard.  And I can see why the sheer tedium of training encourages many dedicated swimmer sportspeople to give up.  I do not, of course, pretend to be in that category in either the dedication or in the tedium, but I do like to be distracted during my swims and during my (enforced) sojourns in the gym while the pool is being serviced.

     With my daily swim I have divided up the hour and a quarter that I spend in the water by doing firstly a series of water-based exercises loosely based on what my physio told me I had to do after the knee operations.  I then do two lengths of leg-paddling using spaghetti floats, then two lengths of breast stroke, then umpteen lengths of front crawl with one of those ‘infinity’ floats clutched between my legs, to compensate for the disequilibrium that two new metal knee joints give, then two further lengths of leg-paddling and finishing with a modified form of the exercises with which I started.  So it is a varied mixture and anyway, the thought of a cup of tea in the adjoining café keeps me keen!

     I have established a pattern for the gym (only another week before the pool is back in use!) which comprises 1km on the rowing machine; 30 minutes on the cycle; 5 minutes on a sort of knee compression thing; 5 minutes on a variant of knee pressing, and a 5-minute walk.  I also, at some point, do the leg raising exercises that I usually do in the pool and discover that they are a bloody sight more difficult in the air!  And that is my hour done.

     Only the cycle affords the opportunity to do something other than suffer, and I have found that I can read on my mobile phone (everyone else uses their phones to establish a wi-fi link with the machines so that their exercise can be endlessly analysed, collated and admired.

     As the bike that I use has an actual back to it, one can luxuriate in moderate comfort and there is the sort of stability that makes reading a positive pleasure.  Except, reading what?  Rather like my pretentions to get to know the late quartets in my swim, I realize that what you need when doing exercise is something that does not demand a great deal of brain power to appreciate.  And I have found that the perfect fodder for a 30-minute static cycle is firstly to complete the Guardian ‘Quick’ crossword, that I will have started before I leave the house and then let myself drift away in the narrative nonsense of one of the ‘free’ digital books that a website regularly offers me.

      The last book I read during my cycling was an episodic, feel-good narrative sparked by the finding of a book list by various characters, a conceit that allowed character development and a pleasing circularity to the various story lines.

     The latest book is, or seems to be, an Egyptian murder mystery with references to the British Museum and King Tut and the puzzle of mysterious inscriptions and that sort of thing.  Ideal!

     I only hope that I can spin it out over the next week, when the water will then reclaim me and the constant attempt not to drown will be mind-filling enough to keep me occupied.

 

Bring on the water!

 

 

There is water in the pool!

     By itself, that opening sentence reads more like a truism than an observation – a pool, self-evidently must have water.  But we are talking of my local swimming pool that has been drained and closed for its annual maintenance period, and I have been ‘forced’ to go to the gym.  Which I hate.

     As my swim is an early morning one, I felt that my transfer to the gym for the period of exile had to be at the same time.  I am, in some things, a creature of habit and I know that if I break routine then I am quite capable of dismissing that particular activity from my life with consummate ease.  So, hate it or not, I traipse to the gym at 6.30 am and do my rounds of the hated machines.

     I have established a Via dolorosa Machinarum with each of the instruments of torture being an individual statio on my particular Camino Doloroso de las Màquinas.  I start with the rowing machine – we only have one, so I go there first to ensure that it is done and dusted before the ‘masses” arrive for their pre-work rituals.  I do 1,000 m of brisk rowing and stop.

     My second statio is the static bike on which I do 30 minutes of pedalling at level 3 or 4 and can read from my phone via Kindle to pass the time.

     It is from the vantage point of the static bike that I can gaze through the large windows on the side walls of the gym into the parallel building that houses the pool.  As I start my ‘exercise’ early it is not yet light and the pool is in the sort of gloom that I feel matches my mood as I complete my go-nowhere exercise.  And where I can also make out (just) the echoing emptiness of an empty space where the water should be.

     It wasn’t so much direct observation that alerted me to something positive, but rather the rippling reflections of dim light being caught in the windows.  Ripples mean water and the only place to hold enough water to create ripples like those was in the pool itself.

     I looked more closely and noticed that there did appear to be a different quality of obscurity underneath the bottommost rung of the metallic ladder at the end of the pool.  And an even closer look discerned what could only be water!

     I have long learned to treat Spanish estimates of “this will be ready by . . .” as anything more than pious well-meaning, but essentially empty platitudes: and nothing says a pool is not ready for use than it being empty of the one element that makes it a pool.  So, the slow, but visible element rippling gently, is, to put it mildly, encouraging.

     I am further encouraged by the necessity of getting the pool up and running for the contracts with the various schools in the immediate neighbourhood that have to be fulfilled.  Money speaks.  And speaks loudly.

     I will look with an evaluating eye at the water level tomorrow as I peddle nowhere, and can afford myself the luxury of assuming that if it is higher than it was yesterday then my pedalling is (metaphorically) getting me further towards the reopening of the pool.

     And to those of my fellow sufferers in the circle of hell that Dante would have created if he had known that such places like gyms with Los instrumentos del tormento had existed (with willing participants!) who smile at me and say, “After a couple of weeks you will be converted and will come here rather than the pool!” – my only response is, “Watch me!  I am a proud heretic and will burn rather than stay a second beyond the opening of the pool!”

 

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 pool 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 without artifical aids – 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 inside those knees!

     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.

 

The sleep of reason produces monsters!

 

 

 

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). 

 

This & That

 

 

 

 In the compensatory way of Catalan weather, it is now gloriously sunny and raining!  I managed to get my tempest-delayed bike ride from this stormy morning in, just before the lashing rain thoroughly soaked me – and that last bit can be read in both ways, and both are right!

     In this part of the world, thunder sounds as if it is being ‘played’ by an over enthusiastic ASM in some ropey rep.  It grumbles away in the background until you suddenly feel as though you are in the front line in WW1 as a cataclysmic clap of thunder sounds as if it has taken over all of your immediate surroundings.

     As I have been typing, the rain has stopped and a sunny dampness has settled around the blissfully quiet pool, devoid as it is of persons of limited age.  It won’t be long before the determined sunshine chimes in with their youthful energy and the (imagined) solitude is rudely broken.  Again.

 

 We are approaching the two-week period when our local pool is closed for essential maintenance, or whatever.  This means that each year I have to decide about where I go to maintain my daily exercise.

     Let me be clear, only the pool is closed, all other aspects and facilities of the centre are available.  My knees preclude padel, so the only other alternative is To Go To The Gym.

     When I first came to join this centre, I was given the guided tour by one of the managers who asked, “Would you like to see the gym?”  To which I replied, “No.”  I was there for the covered 25m pool and nothing else.

     I am not going to the other main pool in Castelldefels because I have bad (and expensive) memories of using the place, so my choice in past years has been to go to the municipal pool in the neighbouring town of Gavà (Gavá, in Spanish) which means that I have to use my bike to wing the desolate abyss (an unlighted link road) between Castelldefels and my destination pool, with frankly rather frightening traffic obviously resenting my presence on the tarmac!

     This year, however, I am seriously considering To Go To The Gym in the pool with a much shorter bike ride, and most of it on an actual bike lane!  My reasoning is, that if I can find a gym instructor who lacks that sadistic side that seems a common factor in so many of their approaches to exercise regimes, and someone who actually appreciates the bone-on-bone reality of arthrosis, then I could profitably do some exercises to strengthen by leg muscles to show willing by the time I (finally) get to the traumatologist where something might be done.  I have to admit, I am not entirely convinced by that reasoning, and I am telling myself that the early morning cycle ride to Gavà in the dark was frighteningly exhilarating and availing to good.

     The internal debate can continue until the 5^th of September (when I have a delayed routine hospital appointment in the morning) but by the 6^th I will have to have decided.  Probably before then, because the days of just popping into a pool and being able to have a swim, post pandemic simply do not exist.  So, some planning needs to be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I sit in the sunshine drinking my tea and adding pepper to my tortilla francesa baguette I am often regaled by music that is entirely unknown to me, piped to the outside sitting area by who knows who inside.  Most of it washes over me, but occasionally I perk up a little and take notice.

     Yesterday was one such day because part of the lyrics of one of the songs sounded odd to me.  The song (I have since discovered) was a “collaboration” between Yves V, INNA & Janieck.  How it took that many to write the deathless lyrics or the equally deathless tune, is somewhat beyond me, but one particular line stuck out, “You haunt me like a déjà vu” (written without the accents in the original, but let it pass, let it pass – and I might add that they were added automatically by Word when I typed them and not with my fingers.) 

     And I realized that I have never seen the phrase used like that.  Yes déjà vu is a noun, but I had never seen, or indeed heard the phrase with only an indefinite article to keep it company “a déjà vu.” One hears things like, a sense of déjà vu; it is déjà vu; it was déjà vu; a feeling of déjà vu, but never, “a déjà vu.”  In the chorus of the song the first line uses “a déjà vu” but the repeat is “You haunt me like déjà vu” which is how I would use it.

     Obviously, using the indefinite article is not in any sense wrong, but it is odd that it is generally not done.

     I am now wondering if I should find an opportunity and try out the song’s way of using the phrase and see how it sits with my way of expression.

          

                    Words, I love them!