Fish to water...

Well it was a very interesting day today for swimming spectator and critic extraordinaire ... Me!

The hotel where we are staying has a gorgeous pool. It also has a indoor/outdoor hydrotherapy pool, Cleopatra baths, saunas, and a thermal suite (A series of hot and cold tubs for "cleansing the body and soothing aching muscles!" So as you may have guessed there is also a full spa and so on.....

The only sad part of the whole scenario is that I am only allowed in the pool! Yep, that's it folks! Alyn because he is NOT pregnant can go anywhere and is booked to do a spa day or thermal suiting and hydro pooling tomorrow while I.... wait? swim? float? I mean does this seem fair to you? I get to throw up for 9 weeks straight and he gets a spa treatment? What am I missing here? Perhaps we should have a vote on whether of not Alyn should go, or not go and stay in our hotel room and cuddle and give me foot rubs and things... sounds fair doesn't it?

Actually I don't mind if he goes as I am happy to float but a vote would still be fun!

In any case it was quite the spectacular thing to watch some of the people that came into the pool today try to "swim". Perhaps swimming it not a big thing over here and they don't teach their children to do it. I don't know, but I would like to give some awards to a few of the most entertaining pool inhabitants.

First we have the "That has to hurt" award.

Awarded to a young man in his late 20's early thirties who clearly was NEVER taught how to swim. Said individual (let's call him Bob) proceeded to do two lengths of the most awkward front crawl known to man. In fact when I first caught his flailing (I mean stroke) out of the corner of my eye I was forced to utter the words "Good heavens what on earth...." loud enough that Alyn thought there was something wrong with me or the baby. It was purely shocking! How he managed to maneuver without screaming out from the pain of the full length of both arms slapping down on the surface of the water like a belly flop with each and every stroke I'll never know. Had he decided to continue after his two laps of torture, which clearly satisfied his urge for water sports, I might have had to beg him or pay him to stop as even if you didn't watch the sound of the slapping was enough to make one wince!

Next we have the "Slow and steady wins the race"

This lady is perhaps the slowest swimming on the planet. The only thing I could come up with is that perhaps she is swimming for some sort of rehabilitation where the idea is to spend part of the time floating and part of the time swimming so she has combined it? She had a nice front crawl stroke really as far as technique but honestly it was similar to watching paint dry and I desperate wanted to stop her and ask her if there was some sort of posted speed limit in the pool that the rest of us hadn’t seen?

Finally we have “Convulsion man”.

This pool fellow so desperately needed intervention that it was everything I could do not to stop and ask him if he had ever seen water before and if he wanted to know how to go forward without going backwards at the same time! He was a heart attack waiting to happen seriously. The amount of effort he put out to get from one of to the other was unbelievable! I mean he created a wake that almost drowned me while floating. After 4 short laps the man was done but to his credit if the average person had put in that amount of energy swimming laps they would have gotten about 20 laps in so I figure he got his work out.

As for me I swam laps for about 40 minutes and then floated for another 30 minutes. Oh how I love floating! I always feel very sad for those that can’t float (like Alyn) as it’s such a wonderful feeling. Oh and being pregnant and in the water is quite the wild feeling as well I have to say… my back felt pain free after my pool session and as you might imagine I am going again tomorrow!