Back in the Pool

At the end of May I swam in the Southern Portugal Masters Championships, held over two days at the outdoor fifty metre pool in Loulé. It was my first competition in a swimming pool for twenty-five years.

It was thirty seven degrees on the first day, and club tents went up around the grassed area for shade between races. Around two hundred and fifty swimmers from twenty three clubs took part, with teams down from Lisbon and Porto, one from Madeira and a couple from Spain, even though it's billed as the southern championships. Music played between races and the whole thing had the feel of an afternoon out despite how seriously everyone raced.

I swam at national level as a junior, then at the National University Championships in the UK and trained with a club in west London until I was around thirty, though I wasn't racing by then. That's when I switched to open water which opened up a whole new world for me within my greatest passion. I swam for a few years with an ocean team in Bondi, in Sydney, before moving to Portugal five years ago. Stepping onto the blocks in Loulé for the fifty metres breaststroke, was in one way completely familiar and in another totally alien.

I swam the fifty metres and the hundred metres breaststroke and came second in my age group in both. The same swimmer beat me in both events. In the hundred, he and I both went under the existing Algarve record. He came away with it since he touched first. I'll take being fast enough to have broken it too, even without my name against it.

The race that stayed with me longest was in my own heat, against my own coach, in the fifty. We were racing in the middle lanes, right next to each other, and went the whole length more or less level, both of us aware of the other the whole way down the pool. He got ahead by the halfway mark and I spent the last fifteen metres kicking as hard as I've kicked in years, certain he was about to get away from me. I touched him out at the wall and won the heat. It was only once the times went up that I found out the same swimmer who'd beaten me in the hundred, racing in the heat before mine, had beaten me in the fifty too, by five hundredths of a second.

That race against my coach was pure racing at its best, not just against a friend but against my coach and teammate. The moment we finished we were both burst out laughing before either of us had looked at the board to see who had won. We'd been able to see each other the whole way in our peripherary and neither of us had let up. We cared who came first, of course we did, but in a fun way and in that moment what mattered more was that we were racing hard, side by side, giving everything we had. I was exhilarated for the rest of that evening and we've been laughing about it since. It brought me right back to why I loved racing in the first place, without the pressure I used to put on myself when I was younger. Now I'm doing it purely because it's fun.

We'd also spent the past few months training as a team, and this was our first competition together. We raced the 4 x 50 metre medley relay and the 4 x 50 metre freestyle relay, and I was more nervous about those than my own races. We'd been practising takeovers and starts for weeks and didn't want to be the one who cost the team a place.

Being back in a team again after training mostly alone for years was the part that stuck with me most. Not the times, not the record, not even that race against my coach, good as that was. Just being part of something with other people in the water again.

I'm training for the short course championships now, the twenty five metre pool near Tavira in November.