"Fat to Fittie"

Swimming, swimming, swimming. top advice from Dory, but if you’re thinking about starting up after not bothering for ages, there are a few things you need to know before taking the plunge. As there are a lot of things for me to say on the subject, I’m going to do this blog in two parts.

Firstly, if you’re a bit overweight like me, it’s not easy walking into the pool area for the first time, especially as you’ll be at your heaviest, as this is you finally deciding to do something about it. The best advice I can give is to just go for it, everyone’s nearly naked so I promise, they won’t just be looking at you. Obviously the first thing you need to do is get in, I’m lucky because where I go they have stairs, so you just walk in forwards, but most pools have those ladder style steps you have to go down backwards. As you descend in, the feeling that all eyes are on your arse is immense, just make sure you have your shorts or bikini bottoms pulled up, no one wants to see a tiny crack, neither should you go full wedgie and don’t under any circumstance attempt to dodge this first embarrassing step by going down forwards, it won’t end well, trust me.

If you’re like me and can’t walk well, the feeling you get from being in the water is fantastic, but as good as that feels, you’re not going to lose weight by just stretching your legs a bit. The first step is usually to swim in the open pool, mostly full of parents and kids, this disguises you quite well, but you can soon tire of the constant splashing and idiot grown ups throwing diving sticks for their offspring to fetch like a Labrador. It’s not long before you have to make the decision to try the lane swimming.

In some swimming pools, this is all they have at certain types of day, but no matter what, if you want to get serious about swimming, you need to know how they work. First. choose your lane, Fast, medium or slow. Obviously for me it’s slow, for some there’s a bit of a stigma attached and don’t like to be associated with the old or elderly, I don’t give a toss and would quite happily use a lane named fat git’s that can’t swim. Quite often the beginner that stat’s in medium is often relegated once they get passed and splashed a few times and opts for the slow. The next thing you need to asses is which way round everyone is swimming, particularly if you’re the only one in, there are usually arrows on the board letting you know. Believe me, if you get it wrong, you’ll soon know when the regular swimmer shows up and refuses to do anything other than the correct thing, even if there are four other people going the wrong way, git.

So you’re finally up and swimming, if you’ve not done it for ages then it’s going to be a slow start, but trust me, you’ll soon be putting in the lengths, it really won’t take long. Once you do and you’ve stopped feeling insecure, then the next problem to overcome is the boredom, after swimming up and down, up and down, up and down for what feels like an eternity, simply going there and back just for a change, isn’t enough. There’s not much else to do than people watch, which as you soon realise because they’re all wearing very little, you begin to feel a little bit pervy, even worse when you catch the lifeguard watching you. This from a guy who’s getting paid to sit on top of a set of steps, blow his whistle occasionally and ogle girls.

Next comes the issue with the warm patch, the odd little pocket of warmth you feel while swimming up and down. Now I could never pee in the pool, can’t go when someone’s watching, but I’m sure that there are some that do, I know because I often swim through it. When I was a kid we used to go to an open air swimming pool that was full of everything, so this small experience is not a worry for me, we used to also go a lot in rivers bit like the new trend that people call “wild swimming” or as we used to just call it “swimming”, at least in the pool there’s chemical’s so I’m sure anything that shouldn’t be there is taken care of. That brings me onto, oh wait, ran out of time, to be continued…………..