Swimming is the sport I have been able to continue up until now compared to others apart from walking, which is not really a sport. I sometimes jump rope and jog…. The reason I swim regularly is to maintain my physical condition.
I don’t have a fixed number of times to swim in a week, but I go to the pool at the gym whenever possible.
It could be 7 am right after I wake up, and sometimes it’s 10:30 pm after I get home from a performance in a concert.
My friends are surprised when they hear that I go swimming after a concert, and it is indeed the time when I am exhausted. But I somehow crawl to the gym and into the pool. It might sound like I’m doing too much but this is a kind of routine that I cannot skip, to keep up my physical condition to be able to perform on stage.
As the posture of playing the violin is quite unbalanced, if I leave it as it is after playing, it often leads to stiff shoulders, muscle pain, and headaches the following day. So, I use the power of water to adjust the imbalance of the body as much as I can.
After moving around a lot on stage in a concert, I do want to relax with a glass of wine, but then I talk to myself.
“If you want to keep playing forever, then you must go swimming. Even if it’s just for a short time, you should at least try floating in the water for a while.”
And of course, after walking for 10 minutes on the way to the pool, I start asking myself again, “I’ve walked this far, but should I go back home? Hmmm……but I want to keep playing……so I better go for a swim, even for a short time.”
Once I get to the gym and while changing into my swimming costume, lifting my sluggish muscles, I still have the thought of “I could just take a shower and go home”. I shake off that idea and start stretching my body lightly. Even at this stage, I still think “I could stop and go home”, but I automatically move toward the pool without hesitation at this point.
So, finally into the pool!
I tell myself that even swimming 25 metres would be enough. Then I have to start swimming.
But since the pool itself is 25 meters long, it would be nonsense to swim 25 meters and come walking back, out of the pool. If I do swim, I will have to swim back, so I decide I will do at least 50 metres.
However, I have my own rules for swimming which are “swim to the other side of the 25-metre pool in freestyle, return by breaststroke, and then go again in backstroke and return in breaststroke. I do this in one go, so that makes a minimum of two round trips, which is 100 metres.
When I‘ve swum 100 metres, I can stop if I want to, but I usually feel that I can still go a bit further.
I find myself swimming 4 laps without even thinking.
From then onwards, I have a unique way of counting how many laps I have done.
I count the laps, thinking about my “age”.
On my 5th lap, I think about the time when I was 5 years old.
On my 10th lap, about when I was 10, at 12, I made my debut as a violinist, at 14, how I was enthusiastic about practicing during the summer holidays… and so on.
It is fun to go through the memories in my head when I’m swimming. Doing it every time helps you remember things you’d already forgotten.
20 laps, 40 laps…… It would take a lot of stamina and endurance to swim to my current age, but it would be a wonderful time to face my past.
It is almost as though I’m experiencing my life over and over again. I feel a sense of nostalgia, love, and gratitude for life and the kindness and compassion I have received from others around me.
I feel that I want to do my best in my concert performances again. Thinking about the people
I might see in the future, and how they would be remembered in my underwater reminiscences. The thought of it warms my heart up.
For me, that is what swimming is all about.