“What about not knowing what’s beneath you?” people ask, eyes wide, panic in blazing neon across their faces. It’s the question most put to me when I tell people that I swim outdoors, year round. People are less worried about the fitness or the cold than they are about … the unknown.
But how can you know? How can any of us? We can make educated guesses, but in truth, none of us can know what’s coming next. Because what people are really asking when they ask about what lies in the unknown depths of the ocean - is how to cope with the unexpected. But we can’t know, we can only brace ourselves and decide to enjoy life anyway. And it was truly understanding this, learning not just to cope with it, but to embrace it, that open water swimming taught me.
When I first tried to swim in the sea off my home town of Brighton, I had the shimmering confidence of a newlywed. I felt as if all sorts of possible avenues were suddenly opening up to me, I could be all sorts of versions of myself now that I had achieved this major life goal, and swimming outdoors felt like small fry in comparison.
I quickly realised that swimming amidst changing currents, swelling tides and the wash from passing bank holiday jet skis was very different from the tentative ‘holiday breast stroke’ I had got by with in pools for the first few decades of my life. While I trusted that I could gain the fitness, and learn the techniques required to do a decent front crawl, it took me significantly longer to learn to trust the unpredictability of the water around me. In fact, it took the best part of a year to learn to let go, exhale fully and enjoy the experience of swimming in the deep, face down, lungs open.
My timing couldn’t have been better. Because just as I had learned that trust, the unknown reared up in a way I had never expected: my husband and I were referred for IVF. As we tried failed embryo after failed embryo, suffering a brutal miscarriage along the way, I realised that learning to expect the unexpected was not just a good swimming tip but a lesson for life.
And as that summer I first called myself a ‘proper swimmer’ turned into winter - and we still weren’t successful - I found myself taking greater and greater solace in the water. I had fought – and enjoyed the fight – for a body I was proud of and now I saw a body that barely felt like mine at all. I missed the old me, I longed for the future me and I had no idea who the current me was supposed to be. Yet, against it all was the background of my swimming. An unlikely athlete anyway, I surprised myself by enjoying the cold water of the sea off Brighton as the seasons changed and the water became less hospitable. The salt and ice of the seawater began to feel like a safer, softer place to be than any other. Because it was here that I truly had to live in the moment.
It was in the sea that I found enormous solace regarding the unknown self that I had become. You can’t fret about the political implications of not being a mother when you are focused on snatching an inhale between rolling waves. You can’t dwell on whether your deadening sadness is real or merely a side effect of expensive drugs when you’re navigating a lobster pot in the dark because you’ve chosen to swim round the pier for Halloween. And you don’t have time to worry what your thighs look like when what they are doing is gifting you the warmth and buoyancy to keep swimming, to keep exceeding your own expectations of yourself, to keep feeling alive.
When, after a break of several months and a lot more swimming through the coldest months of the year, we eventually chose to return to the clinic and use that final embryo, it decided to stay. There is absolutely no connection between my swimming and my finally getting pregnant. But there is every connection between those months, when I chose again to love my body, and to use it instead of to demand things of it, and the peace I found at last – regardless of the outcome. The water returned me to myself, a united self that I could finally recognise once more. And I am forever grateful.
Alexandra Heminsley joins us here on the bottom of this guest post for a webchat on Wednesday 30 May at 9pm. Post your questions here in advance if you can’t make it on the day.