No Sweat

I got back to swimming yesterday after at least 9 odd years (I think).

I started learning when I was 10 or 11. There was this South China Association of blah blah - a massive indoor heated Olympic size pool. A smaller pool lay next to it, hosting a range of activities among the newbies - Leg kickin' refinement, improvisation of your hand movement in the water, wathcing your friend showcase his butterfly brilliance and even trying the odd handstand in the shallow waters.

The Olympic size beauty on the other hand, illustrated a completely different picture. Lanes were marked with plastic coloured 'snakes', which were suspended end to end. A couple of Cantonese quirks were running alongside the pool and egging on drained rookie swimmers. From a birds eye view, the pool illustrated several slow moving dots in a blue frame, marked by fine dark blue lines along the length of the frame.

The training sessions were extensively characterised by non stop laps of the pool. My trainer never gave me a breather when I needed it most. He was a good trainer no doubt, but he showed no mercy. Haha. Maybe that's what made him click with all the rookies.

In the end, we reaped a whole lot from that training. Nothing like a swim. The only sport where you'll never feel the sweat.