2026 swimming

As I wrote¹ last year, as usual, the swimming pool opened at the time of the Harvest festival (known as Whitsun to our Christian friends); this seems to be the earliest date for some time as normally the pool doesn't open until June. For the first two days, the pool opened at 10 am, which is an inconvenient time for me, but today, there was health swimming at 8:30 am, which is much better for me (actually I would have preferred even half an hour earlier). 

Several months earlier, probably after the removal of yet another growth, I considered how I can minimise my exposure to the sun. When I'm swimming, my back is exposed and I've had quite a few growths removed from there. The answer was a Quick-Dry Swim Shirt Short Sleeve that I ordered from Temu about six months ago. I hadn't tried wearing this shirt until this morning so there was a slight worry that it might not fit, but the size was fine. As opposed to the sort of swimming shirt that I would wear 20 years ago that would flap around in the water and slow me down, this one fit snugly (without being too tight) so it was as if it wasn't there. I should note that the colours in the accompanying photograph have been manipulated; the original was too dark.

By 8:30 am, I was at the swimming pool, alone; the lifeguard opened the gate and I went in. I suspected that the water would be cold but I didn't expect it to be so cold! The first step down the ladder where I'm standing had the water cover my ankles; I waited a minute or so to acclimatise. Then another step down the ladder and my calves froze up. One more step and my thighs were covered; then I let go and floated for a bit. The water was freezing! Of course, I paid less attention to the cold once I started swimming. My body remembered was it was supposed to do and the only ache came from my neck (normally my left arm starts aching after a few lengths).

I swam two lengths, had a short rest. swam another two lengths and a rest, etc. In total I swam 10 lengths. That was enough for this year's debut performance. I should note that I was the only swimmer in the pool; my normal pool-opening companions were strangely absent. I sent a WhatsApp message to one of them and received an answer a minute ago: she was at her brother in law's flat in Tel Aviv. She also suffered from the cold when she was in the pool (I don't know when). Two people turned up only as I was preparing to leave and they too were surprised that I had been the only swimmer.

I had dug out my bone conducting headphones² a few days ago and fully charged them in preparation. The set list for today was two of my songs, 'Night scented stock' by Kate Bush, 'Katie's been gone' by The Band, and 'Stormbringer' by John Martyn. Another song might have started just as I finished but I don't recall. I often find it hard to recognise the songs at first because they play in a completely random order. 

I've been suffering quite a bit from stomach problems over the past few months and there have been the odd hint about them here. As a result, I abandoned my time restricted eating, as I found that eating something in the early evening helped with the aches. I saw a gastro-enterologist about six weeks ago who ordered a gastroscopy; this didn't reveal anything interesting, although a polyp was removed and sent for biopsy. I saw the GE doctor again who wasn't impressed by any of the possible findings of the gastroscopy. The one strong recommendation that he made was that I should double the dosage of omepradex; I always thought that this worked like paracetamol - the effect of each pill would wear off after some hours - but apparently not. I can definitely say that the days when I have 'gastric distress' are becoming fewer, and when they do occur, they are much milder than some of the bad days that I had before. All this is to say that I will be able to resume time restricted eating on the days when I go swimming - and this year I intend to swim frequently. Last year, time restricted eating helped reduce my weight and I don't eat on pool mornings until after swimming.

On the other hand, the new prophylactic medication Depalept³ that I have been taking to prevent migraines has worked well in that respect but seems to have caused my weight to balloon, although this may be water retention as my wife says that I don't look any worse. The medication has also had a very interesting effect on my sleep apnea: the central sleep apnea have almost completely disappeared (I didn't have even one such event in the past week) and obstructive apnea have also almost completely disappeared - two in the past week. Whatever the CPAP measures as deep sleep has also been affected: whereas this used to be in the range 0 - 20 minutes a night, now it's 50 - 120 a night. I shall mention these side effects to the neurologist in the follow-up appointment next month.

Internal links
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[2] 1587
[3] 2095

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
363	23/05/2011	Apology	Mobile phone
584	23/05/2013	Doctorate on hold	DBA
857	23/05/2015	Venice log 4 - Waiting	Holiday, Venice, Italy
1223	23/05/2019	Arriving in Athens (Greece 7)	Holiday, Athens, Greece
1224	23/05/2019	Athens hop-on hop-off (Greece 8)	Holiday, Athens, Greece