A Little Mermaid

Here's Nancy in the top pool at Center Parcs modelling her Christmas present from us - a glamorous flowery swimming hat. She looks so absolutely gorgeous I simply must have one too! 

Winter Wonderland

Our last night here for this year - a crescent moon, clear skies, a magical swim, followed by a snowy walk home, marvelling at the local winter wild life 

Christmas Cousins

The kids expressed an interest in diving into my blog. While I was swimming I worked out a way to do it using my phone. All my best ideas surface when I'm swimming!

The Kids United

Gabe, Geno, Becca (Honorary Cousin), Maeve, Eddie, Eve, Nancy, Nell, Immy, Malachy, Jem.

Woodland Retreat

It's become something of a tradition in our family to descend upon Center Parcs for a festive get-together the weekend before Christmas. This year we are also celebrating my godmother's eightieth birthday, so here we are, in our forest dwellings, gathered from as far afield as Australia and various points in the UK. Yesterday our eldest daughter flew in from the United States to complete the party, getting away just before the east coast snow storms really took hold. 
Swimming for pleasure is most definitely the order of the day! On Friday night we floated around under a starry sky in this pool at the spa -

Later this morning I will clock up a few laps in the lane swimming pool, then tonight we will be riding the wild water rapids when it's dark and frosty and the crowds have thinned out.

The Devil's Swimming Pool

 

Being a cautious type, I am terrified, yet strangely drawn by these photos. They depict what must be one of the scariest swimming spots on earth. It's perched on the edge of one of the natural wonders of the world - the Victoria Falls / Mosi-oa-Tunya (the Mist that Thunders) - on the Zambezi river between Zambia and Zimbabwe.  Lodged above the 108 meter cascade, it's a naturally formed hole in the riverbed, entered by jumping from the Zambian bank. At this point the river is 1,708 meters wide. Apparently it's very safe in the dry season, with a wide lip which controls the current and keeps these thrill-seekers from plunging to oblivion. Nature's unpredictability would make this a swim too far for me.....

Flying the Flag

Chris at Lazy Swimmer drew my attention to Australian women swimmers at the turn of the last century. I had to include the photo of this feisty pair on my blog. They are Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie, the first women to represent Australia at swimming in the 1912  Stockholm Olympics. Initially they were refused permission to attend, but after some wrangling they were allowed to take part - on condition they paid their own expenses. They organised their odyssey to Europe and went on to win gold and silver medals for their country. 

Mina's love of swimming was obviously a family affair - her father Henry Alexander Wylie was a champion swimmer himself and established Sydney's well-loved ocean pool - Wylie's Baths - in 1907.

http://www.wylies.com.au/

The Last Swim

Tonight was the penultimate poetry class before the holiday and our teacher introduced this poem by Michael Laskey. He was in Manchester at the weekend giving a poetry reading and running a writing workshop. I wasn't able to attend, but I will seek out more of his poems as I love the powerful simplicity of his writing.


The Last Swim

September, October ... one thing 
you don't know at the time is when 
you've had your last swim: the weather 
may hold, may keep nudging you in.


Only afterwards, sometimes days on, 
it dawns on you that you've done: 
just the thought of undressing outdoors, 
exposing bare skin, makes you wince.


And that's best, to have gone on swimming 
easily to the end: your crawl 
full of itself, and the future 
no further than your folded towel.
Michael Laskey

From The Tightrope Wedding, 1999

Photo of Hampstead Heath swimming pond by tonyhall used under a Creative Commons License 

Not Drowning But Waving

--We interrupt this blog with a news flash -- REGISTRATION HAS OPENED TODAY FOR NEXT YEAR'S GREAT SWIM ON 4/5 SEPTEMBER IN WINDERMERE!!! 
Woo hoo!!! Big news in our house - we are already signed up and in there! After the popularity of this year's event and the rising profile of open water swimming in the UK, I don't think it will be long until it's fully booked.


The picture is of me and our son on a training splash in Windermere in July. Behind us is the Low Wood Hotel - swim HQ. I like our synchronized wave and the speed limit sign with a 10 in the background. 2010 here we come! 

The Knitted Poem

Yesterday, for one afternoon only, the Victoria Baths played host to the Knitted Poem. What on earth is that, I hear you ask! 
To mark its centenary, the Poetry Society commissioned more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world to knit squares featuring individual letters. These were sewn together to form a poem whose identity was a closely guarded secret. In October the poem's title was revealed - In My Craft Or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas. The giant woolly masterpiece (13mx9m) was star of the show for National Poetry Day on October 8 in London. This weekend the poem was on tour in Manchester.
It was displayed in the Second Class Males pool where it could be viewed on the ground and from the gallery above. We went along to gaze in wonder and sneak a peep at the baths - to see how the restoration is coming along before the building goes into hibernation till the weather warms up in April.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art. 
Dylan Thomas


Click on this link for some poetry and knitting fun!
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/poetviews/

Victoria Baths - Manchester's Water Palace

Another swimless week. My cold flared up again and now I have earache. Unlike the waterlogged UK, my dry spell will continue for a bit longer, I think. Anyway, swotting up on women Channel swimmers has been a fascinating swimming substitute! 


In an earlier post I mentioned the Victoria Baths, where Sunny Lowry used to swim

This amazing amenity was opened in 1906. It was a hub in the local community, with a first class mens' gala pool

second class men's pool, ladies' pool

as well as Turkish baths

and bathing and laundry facilities. 
Despite desperate efforts, it was shut down in 1993. 


In 2003, the Victoria Baths' fortune changed - they featured in a reality TV show: Restoration. Out of a selection of deserving but doomed buildings, Manchester's Water Palace stole the hearts of TV viewers, who voted to give it a new lease of life. It received a grant of £3million which was the cash injection needed to get it on the road to recovery. 
The plan is that the gala pool and Turkish baths should re-open to the public. Other areas of the building will be available for exhibitions and functions. 


There isn't a happy ending yet. The actual total needed for the whole project is £20million, so there's still a way to go and the baths aren't useable, although they're open regularly for the public to come and see for themselves the progress as it happens. 

Forces To Be Reckoned With

I've been back in the archives today and found these pictures. I think they speak for themselves.

Annette Kellermann

Ethel 'Sunny' Lowry

Channel Icons - The Sequel

Ever the obsessive, I've been unable to leave the mystery of which UK woman was the first to swim the Channel. Here are my latest research findings:

1.   1927 - 7 October  - Mercedes Gleitze - 15h 15m

2.   1927 - 13 October  - Ivy Gill - 15h 09m

3.   1928 - 10 August - Ivy Hawke - 19h 16m

4.   1928 - 24 August - Hilda Winifred Sharp - 14h 58m

5.   1933 - 28/29 August - Ethel 'Sunny' Lowry - 15h 41m

Channel Icons

Here's another Channel mermaid - Ethel 'Sunny' Lowry (1911-2008) - who swam the Channel in 1933 when she was 22 years old. It was her third go, having been thwarted by storms and tides on her first two attempts. She swam from Cap Gris Nez in France to St. Margaret's Bay, Dover and completed in 15 hours 41 minutes. Born and raised in Manchester, she was a cousin of the artist LS Lowry. She swam at the Victoria Baths in Manchester and was an ardent champion of the baths which were closed in 1993. In 2003 they featured on the BBC TV programme 'Restoration'. From a selection of buildings facing dereliction, the baths were voted by the British public to be most deserving of a £3 million grant to set them on the road to restoration and recovery. More about them later.  

But here's a little mystery which I can't seem to solve. As a Mancunian, I like the fact that Sunny made her mark on the Channel, for women and for Manchester. She is frequently referred to as the first British woman to swim the Channel. Yet where does the woman in this photograph fit in the English Channel picture? 

She is Mercedes Gleitze (1900-1981), a London typist. She is also referred to as the first English woman to swim the channel. On her eighth attempt, she swam from Cap Gris Nez to St Margaret's Bay on 7 October 1927 - six years before Sunny's attempt - and completed in 15 hours 15 minutes. Shortly afterwards, another woman - Mona McLennan - made the crossing, but it later emerged that Mona's swim was a hoax. Then the legitimacy of Mercedes' record was also called into question. She was greatly upset by the slur and made an attempt to clear up any doubts with a 'vindication swim' on 21 October. She wore a Rolex 'Oyster' watch around her neck. It kept time beautifully, and Rolex used Mercedes' endorsement to publicise their name, but unfortunately for Mercedes, the sea conditions were so brutal that her attempt failed. Her successful crossing is listed in the records of the Cross Channel Association, so I'm puzzled as to how all the pieces of Sunny's and Mercedes' stories fit together. Great women, great swimmers, both of them, whatever the details may be.

Back in the Swim

After a break of over two weeks - the longest break from swimming I've had this year - I got back in the pool and swam a mile yesterday. I've had a cold bug for the last fortnight which wiped me out, so I'd decided to give myself plenty of time to recover before getting back to it.


I certainly haven't missed the early morning starts as the weather has been depressingly cold and wet, but by yesterday I felt ready for a gentle afternoon reintroduction to the water. I wasn't as out of practice as I'd feared. My goal was 40 lengths which felt manageable, so I did another 10, then reasoned it would be a pity not to do another 14, to make a neat and tidy mile. Easy peasy! I find that swimming in blocks of 10x25m breaks the task into bite-sized chunks and also seems to free my mind up to muse about other things. I've been thinking about channel swimmers and how they occupy their minds during their marathon swims - real psychological stamina!


While on shore leave I've been reading The Great Swim by Gavin Mortimer. It's about the early twentieth century race to be the first woman to swim the Channel. It's amazing to read what those gals achieved in the days before sophisticated weather forecasts, purpose-built swimwear and goggles etc etc. And all the while risking social disapproval by cutting their hair short and revealing their knees in outrageous woollen bathing costumes! What fantastic, determined young women! Here's Gertrude Ederle (first woman to swim Channel - August 6, 1926 - 14 hours 30 minutes):