I am aware that I have neglected this blog of late. I have a magnum opus that I have[n’t] been working on recently, so I thought I’d put something on in the meantime. Here’s a report on my first swim as a sexagenerian.
This morning was my first swim as a senior citizen and when I got to the pool I got £2.20 out to pay and the man said “That’ll be £4.20 please”. As you can imagine, my poor little face fell. My bottom lip quivered as I said “But I’m sixty now and I had to pay the window cleaner so I don’t have enough”. He then asked me if I have proof but I didn’t, so I started to leave, absolutely crestfallen. He then, out of the kindness of his heart, said “I’ll put it through today but please bring proof of age next time”. I could have kissed him but I didn’t because I didn’t want to freak him out or put him off his breakfast.
When I got in the pool the man who does just breaststroke was already in. I won’t call him Adam Peaty because I can keep up with him when I’m doing crawl. Then another man got in with a chest strap heart rate monitor. He is one of those swimmers who looks REALLY slow but actually packs a fair pace. So I shared the lane with these two for a while and then suddenly in gets Ian Thorpe. No, not the real Ian Thorpe, this one’s older and balder but he’s still fast. He’s also really good at overtaking, which is good because he overtook me quite a few times, even when he was swimming with a kick board (yes, I felt inadequate).
I decided to do less breaststroke today, so I did 4 x 100m crawl followed by 50m crawl and then 50m breaststroke. I was going to repeat this but Ian Thorpe got in so I did loads of sets of 50m with the odd carefully timed 100m until I got to 950m and then did two lengths of breaststroke. After that it was still relatively early so I did another 200m of crawl and then got out. As I got to the lockers (number 15 for me today – I now have 3 lockers I can use), I saw Michael Phelps about to get in. We exchanged pleasantries and then went our separate ways.
Afterword. I wasn’t actually swimming with Ian Thorpe or Michael Phelps. Those are just the names I give two pretty fast swimmers that I share the lane with. Ian Thorpe is shorter, fatter and balder than Ian Thorpe and Michael Phelps is shorter, fatter and balder than Michael Phelps.