The Swimmers

Introduction

We were all swimmers once. I still am, wherever that may be, though it seems to be harder to find a pool when you are in and out of different countries, and harder still to find a lane that you can call your own.
We did not just swim, we trained, so that eventually the word ‘training’ became irrelevant and it was just ‘swimming’.

I have to go.
Where?
Swimming.

I will try to tell this story about resilience, power, and fortitude. I will try to demonstrate flow, the way arms flow through crystal, with mere words. I will try to bring the beauty, the cruelty, but above all the mystery of the world that is the swimmer’s mind, to you.

A good way to begin, I feel, even before I introduce those that I swam with, or myself, is to look at something that maybe you saw on television once, and even if you didn’t see it, let’s start here. With this idea. It’s an idea of swimming that is beyond movement. It’s meditative, it’s problem solving. It’s consistent. And within all of that, are the broad strokes of an artist who knows how to paint a body in water.

If you’re not sure what I mean, here’s an illustration:
There’s a detective, who drives a red Ferrari (which doesn’t belong to him as far as I know), and who lives in flatlet somewhere beyond the mansion of a lush estate in Hawaii. Higgins is the landlord, and he owns two Doberman pinchers that are about as stern and unflappable as he apparently is. Zeus and Apollo. Thomas Magnum is the detective, and when he finds himself in trouble, lost, he swims laps in Higgins’ pool. The pool is used as a source for consciousness. It may not be for you, but it was for us.

A swimming pool is a little piece of blue rectangle as is usually the case, and big cities in South Africa don’t often have more than 2 or 3 each. Today, fewer and fewer are outdoors. In our time, it was all outdoors, summer and winter, rain or shine. This gave us a connection to the Earth, wind and fire that few have today. A daily undressing, a daily baptism, a daily dose of white radiating webs off the white tiles below, and then the serenity afterwards.

I will introduce each of us in turn to you, but first I want to introduce the idea of swimming to you. The idea of it as a habit, the way Forrest Gump and Terry Fox turned running into jogging. Into an exploration. Into an obsession. Into dreams and destiny. For each of us it is different. For me, it gave as much as it took, and it took a lot.

A swimming pool may be a small blue speck of paper seen for a second from a boeing that goes shrieking into a thunderstorm. It is also a tiny fragment of the ocean. In it, echoes the throes, the tides, the emotional toss and flow of childhoods dreams and shattered hopes. It is a rectangular container that holds water, and our movements, and all that propels us as swimmers over its surface, and sometimes, under it. This is the story of the swimmer’s from a small club in a small town that many people in South Africa laugh at. Bloemfontein. This is where I was born. Tolkien, was born here too. And our hopes flew with the dust against the sun, against the flash of the blue rectangle below, up, up into the sky.