21 February 2021
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow
There'll be swimming
Just thinkin' about tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow
'Til there's none!
My last swim before our latest COVID-19 lockdown was December 18th, 65 days ago, but our pools re-open bright and early Monday morning and I have a 45 minute session booked at 7am at the Allandale Recreation Centre. Beyond that excitement, I managed to reserve two more swims at the end of this week and we have our first Masters workout on Tuesday evening. If everything goes off without incident, I'll go from zero to maybe 10,000 meters in a week. To say I am excited is an understatement!
While I look ahead to what I hope is uninterrupted pool access through the rest of 2021, it is also a time to reflect back on my small pool accomplishments from 2020. After an almost uninterrupted upward trend, and a very high sustained volume of pool additions over the last 3 years in particular, 2020 marked a huge (but understandable) downturn:
... and yet there were still some limited achievements:
Not only did I finally go to the state of Rhode Island for the first time in my life, I managed to swim in a pool there!
Before all business travel got shutdown, I managed to swim in new pools on all my trips - Pennsylvania, Raleigh, Orlando, Phoenix and Montreal (in addition to RI).
I have even added two pools post-COVID, back in that magical sweet spot in the fall, before the second COVID wave, when life almost started to feel normal again.
As I look ahead to 2021, as much as I would like to swim in new pools, I am really just looking forward to swimming again. I do hope that communities around the world follow the science on pools and realize they are safe - MIT/CDC, Swimming Canada, WHO/Swim England, and others. I feel like I learned to cherish swimming very much after the first lockdown; after the second stay-at-home order, I will be thankful for any day the world and my body permit me to swim.