A New String to My Fitness Bow

The third in a three part series of blogs about Jane Wright’s pre-season walking training, this time around she takes on swimming as an additional aside to her weekend country ramblings… 

I’ve got a new string to my fitness bow, though the gods are not smiling on the enterprise!
I’m trying to get in shape, so I’m ready to lead more great group walks in Europe for ATG Oxford, and my recent weekends have been dedicated to getting on trains out of London and racking up the miles walking cross country in all weathers.
But I also wanted a more modest routine to fit fitness into my weekdays. The gym was out: I find it too competitive and narcissistic. I don’t feel comfortable so I don’t go. But swimming is another matter. I love the sensation of carving a furrow through water. And when I enter the pool with a head full of stuff, the process itself will gradually allow my mind to unspool and leave me the space to think creatively, just as walking can do.
But no sooner had I found a friendly, light, 50 metre former local authority pool 30 minutes walk from home and started visiting it daily and feeling really great, than the management announced a complete closure for refurbishment (a jazzy paint job and a bar I gather – just the stuff I liked it for not having, in fact!). Since then I’ve been searching in vain for another pool nearby that I want to visit every day.

To be fair, the magical swimming pool at Pieve a Castello (in the pic above), ATG’s medieval former canonry converted for exclusive group walking holidays between Siena and Florence in the Tuscan countryside, is a hard act to follow. I never have time to use it during the day when I’m leading walks there, but will readily get up half an hour earlier than necessary and brave a little frisson-inducing chill for a swim in the early morning. For a start, you get the best view of this unique building from the pool, as the sun gradually rises above the olive-clad hill behind, the dawn mists lift and the place comes alive with birds.
Better still, the Pieve pool is like a wild swim without the weeds, though shared with the occasional Italian prince in miniature, a tiny Tuscan frog. Swallows skim and swerve inches from my face across the bright surface of the water, a young jay plucks insects from the grassy verge and, one very lucky morning, a pair of golden orioles, emboldened by the quiet before the day, flit through the trees nearby.

Looking forward to all this again, I’ve just realized something important: fitness is not an end in itself for me, but the enabler – and welcome bi-product – of a lifelong love affair with nature. And it’s the same with my now nearly 100 miles of pre-season walking. I’m pleased with the total, but that’s not what I’ll remember. It’s the carpet of newly opened wood anemones, bridal white with the palest pink flush, on the North Downs, or the wind almost lifting me off the ground with nearly half of sunny England spread before me at Ivinghoe Beacon.
So I’ll keep going and I’ll see you out there on the trail.