As temperatures climb higher and higher, inching towards that dreaded 46 degrees, I’ve found no better way to beat the heat than to plunge into a swimming pool. Even if the pool in question is the Delhi Gymkhana Club’s sub-20 meter covered swimming pool, beloved home to frolicking children and the backstroke-fond elderly alike.
I’ve grown up swimming, thrown into that very pool when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. I remember starting in the kiddie pool, swimming my ‘lengths’ very seriously with my mother dutifully cheering from the sidelines, before I finally graduated to the pool I swim in today. I initially learnt by watching the others around me. It was only much later that I enrolled in swim lessons to refine my stroke, delivered by Ashok Sir, Gymkhana Club’s lifeguard by day and swim coach by night (or rather, lifeguard by morning and swim coach by afternoon). Under his tutelage, where everyone at swim coaching was a ‘baby’ or a ‘baba’, my love for swimming grew. He inadvertently encouraged me into competitive swimming by pushing me to participate in Gymkhana’s annual swimming gala – an activity and interest that eventually morphed into my desire to join the school swim team.
I’ve experimented with several forms of fitness over the years – running, tennis, Zumba, Pilates, and my most recent attempt at yoga – a result of my boredom with one combined with the preferences of my exercise partner at the time. After (or in between) each of these, I’ve unfailingly gone back to swimming, my staple.
It’s not just that it’s the most weather appropriate form of exercise for our relentless Delhi summers, or a great full-body workout. More than that, it’s the ease with which it comes to me, more so than any other exercise I’ve tried. I find my rhythm, and it’s effortless. It gives me complete absence of thought, allowing me to shut my eyes and ears from the world (with perhaps the occasional exception when dodging someone swimming in my lane).
I remember there briefly being a time when I stopped enjoying swimming, towards the end of my stint on the school swim team. Swimming had become a chore rather than the escape that I had always embraced. I guess that can sometimes be the unintentional outcome of doing something you enjoy on someone else’s time or instruction. I was swimming because I had to, not because I wanted to. The love slowly dissipates and it becomes a compulsion, almost. It takes the fun out of it. I wondered, then, if I would ever get that love back. I subsequently went off to a boarding school in the mountains, where swimming was infeasible and a swim team non-existent, and that was it for competitive swimming.
With my competitive swimming days far behind me, and my laps at Gymkhana a consistent part of my routine, I realise that I’ve rediscovered the love that drove me to swim in the first place, in the very place where I first found it.