53. The Longest Mile

When I was in primary school we learnt to swim at the local swimming pool called the Hector McNeil Swimming Baths. From it’s concept that pool was doomed. It was closed a few years after it opened by the council as it wasn’t making any money – for the most bizarre reason ever.

You see someone made a ridiculous error when they were building the pool; they forgot to put a walkway between the adult pool and the children’s pool and didn’t realise till the building was almost complete. Instead of starting over, the idiots decided to reduce the length of the big pool by one metre. So instead of a 25metre pool they had made the world’s first 24 metre pool.

That meant that the Hector McNeil couldn’t hold any race meets or swim galas since the pool was too short. It also meant that when ever we went there and tried to get “swim badges” we always ended up swimming random numbers of lengths. The most I ever swam was 1500m which was stupidly 62.5 lengths (instead of the normal 60) and I got a cheesy badge which my Mum sewed onto my swimming trunks. I remember being really pleased although I’m sure I miss-counted (perhaps on purpose) and probably didn’t swim the whole distance.

During the rest of my time at school I was more concerned with eating all the pies and by the time I reached university I was focusing most of my energies into seeing how much booze a single human being could consume. This gave me a spectacular beer gut, moobs (that’s man-boobs for those not in the know) and a real aversion to being anywhere near a pool (all you chubsters out there know where I’m coming from). The result being that I’d not really been swimming much in the last 20 years.

However, since moving to Sydney I’d swam 30 or 40 lengths in the apartment’s 25m lap pool about 3 times a week and today thought I might should see if I could actually swim that distance – and I could. When I got to the 60 lap mark I decided to rebel against the metric system and did the extra 4-and-a-bit laps that took the distance to one mile. It wasn’t a particularly fast time at 37 minutes but I like to think that’s due to me being not very aqua-dynamic as opposed to my piss-poor technique!