She had rediscovered swimming.
Fired by who knows what and I was far too polite to ask, she thundered up to Moana Pool and did 26 laps. The aim was 25, she said, but after 25, she realised she was at the wrong end of the pool. So she had to do one more.
This is the madness of the long-distance swimmer, the madness, in fact, of anyone who swims. I would struggle to think of a more useless thing than swimming.
Tiny pockets of resistance like Dr Dave Gerrard will jump up and down with a mynah bird squawk, but there are no educated swimmers. Ask any teacher who has to teach a pupil who has risen at five that morning to swim 400 laps. Ask what time of the day that pupil will fall asleep in class. More pertinently, ask what percentage of dawn swimmers are actually ever awake in class.
I did three years of education at university and I know for a fact you cannot educate someone who is fast asleep.
Hence the madness. I feel sorry for them. Swimming 25 laps where the only reward is not drowning is as bad as life gets. To actually decide to do a 26th lap is like hammering 10 toothpicks under each fingernail with a mallet and then deciding to do it again with 11.
And yes I cannot swim. But there is a scientific reason involving a lack of body fat that precludes my ever being able to swim. In medical terms, I am a cluster of bones inside a brown paper bag. Throw the bag into water and it will sink. Giraffes and armadillos are the same, though armadillos are discernibly more intelligent that most human swimmers.
My friend concluded her Phidippidean text with the doe-eyed phrase, I do so adore having my head under water.
This is madness of a very very advanced kind. Even leaving out the near certainty of cerebral hypoxia, one needs only to look at the sheer outrage of what she is saying. Having Head Under Water. Most rational thinkers are fully aware of the website The 15 Most Brutal Methods Of Execution, but few of them realise how high up that particular tree of death sits Having Head Under Water.
In fact, and I will admit that blocks of cement are involved, this one comes in near the top, ahead of such moral indignities as The Five Pains (cut off nose, cut off hand, cut off foot, castrate, then cut body in half) and Burning At The Stake, which only earns a lowly 11. Death with head under water, what my friend the former competitive swimmer adores, is fifth.
And yet, ironically, I almost technically became a swimmer by swimming under water. Our Kaikorai School class was trained at the Wakari School pool, and the certificate you received at the end to show your mum you could swim, involved the successful completion of one 15-yard lap.
The bones-in-the-bag thing taught me early on that the minute I leaped into the water I would head straight for the bottom, I would never be able to thresh and kick and lift head to the point where I could move forward. Hence I could only get the certificate by leaping an enormous distance into the pool at the start, and then without taking a breath, crawl and flail along the bottom of the pool on my hands and knees like a panicking crab.
There were no underwater windows like they have at Moana Pool; the coach just waited for you to turn up at the other end. And I damn near made it, my lungs strengthened by breath-holding games on those long bridges just before Christchurch, albeit weakened by a serious smoking habit already in place by the age of 10.
So I didn't get a certificate to say I could swim. But, hey, at least I was educated.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
