"Fat to Fittie"

So far my new healthy regime is doing well, many days without drink, eating good thing’s, losing weight and managing to get plenty of time at the pool and that doesn’t mean sat on a sun lounger watching arses in thong’s. Swimming was something that helped me lots before I tore my shoulder, not that I’m blaming it for getting fat again, but as my legs are knackered, the only real exercise I can do is in the water. I’m currently swimming the length of the English channel one mile at a time, five down as I write, it might not seem much, but my local pool is 45 metres long, so that’s 36 lengths, usually takes me 90 minutes, if you do the maths, that means it would take me exactly 33 hours to swim the channel for real, the average time is 12 -16 hours, so it gives you a rough idea how slow I am and that’s without the distractions of cold, high waves, boats and turds.

It’s hard work and can be a little boring, you tend to do a lot of people watching and counting as you swim up and down,……. up……..and down…….up…….and down……..! I pretty much know how many cubicles there are on each side, how many flags hang over the pool, where all the cracked tiles are, how often the lifeguards test the water, when they change round from guarding the shallow end to the steps at the deep side, it’s like the famous quote in Escape from Alcatraz, “Sometimes I think that’s all this place is….one long count, the swimmers count the minutes, the lifeguards count the swimmers and they both count the tiles”. I often wonder what the lifeguards are thinking, at least when you’re swimming there’s a focus, they just sit in the chair looking down, for obvious reasons, can’t have any distractions, so they have to just watch, in my case some fatty swimming very slowly, up and down…..up……and down. What makes someone decide they want to be a lifeguard, I guess watching Baywatch has something to do with it, bit of a difference though rescuing some bronzed god out of the Californian sea who’s just been attacked by a shark, to dragging some fat bloke out of the local council pool cos he’s got cramp.

To try and pass the time I’ve invested in some water proof headphones, I’m not normally someone who uses them, but obviously have no choice when swimming. Sometimes the pool plays music over the speakers, but apparently there have been complaints from the more serious swimmers, which I don’t get, if you’re doing it properly then most of the time your heads underwater, so how can the odd bar of Every breath you take be a distraction, that was seriously what was playing last week, I wondered if I was the only one who saw the irony, surely all they could hear as their head dipped in and out was something like, “oh,……………see……………..me…………..aches……………take ! Anyway, I have my own now, but as I said, never been someone who listens on headphones, so this was literally the first time I’ve had to download and convert music to mp3, then copy to the headphones, I won’t lie, it got pretty heated, but after about 6 hours I finally got some songs on. Please don’t ask why but I couldn’t get a whole album done at the same time, which would have downloaded in about three minutes as it kept jamming, instead I had to do each song individually, the stress levels were high. Now though I have the new Elvis album Epic, to listen to, which has a run time of 75 minutes, as you know, it takes me 90 to swim the lengths, so what am I going to do for the other 15? Probably count the lockers, not done that yet!