Not very clever

Last weekend I went back to the pool I used to use before I joined a sports club. I did not want to join the sports club again. It is more convenient, but it costs too much and you have to join for a year. I use it almost daily during vacations (when I am here) but when semester starts I don't have time, and one day I sat down and calculated how much it cost me each time I went over a year, and almost fainted.

So instead, I went to the swimming school run by the city, where you can pay each time you go instead of on a monthly basis. I hadn't been there for about five or six years, and wasn't sure if it would still be there. It's a ten or fifteen minute bicycle ride away.

If it was there, I hoped it had been upgraded a bit.

It was still there. It had not been upgraded. I think they still have the same shower curtains, actually. I'm pretty sure I recognized some of those mould spots.

But at least I could swim, and I did. I did not swim lengths continuously – my back hurt too much for that (one of the reasons I've started this exercise regime) – so I swam one length, walked one, swam another, walked another, and so on. Occasionally I swam two lengths, just to prove to myself that I could.

In the dressing room afterwards I chatted with a lovely young woman who was there for the first time and was shocked by the showers. (They really are rather grotty.) She told me about another pool that is the same price, the same system (pay as you go), and, I'm pretty sure from looking at a map, a bit further away for me.

But a little more cycling distance wouldn't hurt me, I thought. It sounded ideal, so I decided to try it on Monday.

There is a free bus to this pool from my local train station, but I didn't want to depend on a bus timetable, so I rode my bicycle.

Have i mentioned that it is summer, and very hot? I don't think I have. And have I mentioned that although there is quite a lot of stealth green in my area (pot plants everywhere, stunted trees) there is also quite a lot of unrelenting, heat attracting, asphalt and concrete? Well, there is.

The new pool is located in a very industrial area, nearer to the sea than where I live, on reclaimed land. (One irritating 'feature' of Japanese cities is that often the nearer you get to the sea, the more industrialized and concrete and ugly and polluted everything gets. What a waste of seaside!)

I used the 'Maps' function on my iPhone to figure out how to get to the pool GPS on my shopping bicycle, hooray! I love my fancy gadgets, but I also love my old mamachari.

From what I could tell on the Maps app it would be fastest to go by road, but I thought it would also be hotter, and it would probably be nicer to go the long way and cycle along the Mukogawa river, where i used to take a lot of my bird photos. I had not been there for a long time. Maybe I could even take some pictures. After all, I had two baskets. I could carry my swimming gear and a camera, no problem.

It was sunny on Monday, perfect weather for swimming, less perfect for cycling. I prepared carefully. I slathered on sunscreen (I was planning to use my parasol, but I know from experience that there is often some wind down at the river and that can be awkward), and I prepared a litre of cold tea. One bottle was mugicha (barley tea), and the other was a Chinese herbal blend that is supposed to be good for coping with heat. I also took a bottle of water.

By the time I got to the river I had already gone through one bottle of tea and all the water. I bought another bottle of water at a vending machine, and went down to the riverside. There I stopped to have a little break under a tree.

Even the cormorants looked hot.

It felt a little cooler under the tree, and I relaxed there for a while. There were a few birds, and when I went to take out my camera I found, down the bottom of my bag, a thermometer. I had forgotten it was there. (I had it in my bag so I could measure the temperature in my classrooms at the end of semester. I was pretty sure the air conditioning wasn't working properly, and that it was too hot to study. I was right. 32C is not a suitable temperature for a classroom.)

When I took the thermometer out it told me that the temperature in my bag was 45C. I put it on the ground beside me, in the grass, and waited for it to go down and tell me how relatively comfortable it was under the tree.

I drank some more water, and took a couple of very bad pictures. I was feeling quite flustered and hot despite the shade.

The needle on the thermometer went down. Then it stopped moving. I waited a bit longer, and it continued to not move.

The weather forecast on Monday had told me that the temperature would be 32C. They also said, at the end of the day, that the high had been 32C. Where do they take those measurements? WHY DO THEY LIE?

I set off again along the river, now with a towel draped around my neck (to soak up sweat) and eventually my GPS told me I would need to get back onto the streets. It felt a lot hotter when I was back on asphalt, but I did not take out my thermometer. I thought I would probably get heatstroke just looking at it. I put up my parasol again, instead.

Eventually I got to the pool. (You can find it by copying this into Google Maps: "尼崎スポーツの森, Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan," and see what a desolate, hot, concrete wasteland it is set in.) However, as my informant had told me, the facilities were wonderful. There are several pools and a water park, and lots of space, and nice showers, and so on. But when I was in the changing room I happened to see myself in a mirror and was aghast at how dreadful I looked. My face was flushed, my eyes were bloodshot and I looked as though I were about to collapse.

Actually, I felt like that, too.

I sat down and drank some more water.

Then I went to the pool, and got into the 'walking lane.' I thought I should probably walk a bit and cool off before trying anything energetic, like a slow crawl. (A slow crawl is the only kind of crawl I can do.)

I stayed in the pool for a couple of hours. then cycled home again. It seemed even longer going back, and seemed to take forever.  I felt a bit like this turtle.

I drank another litre or so of water and tea on the way, and also stopped at a coffee shop to have a sandwich and coffee and several glasses of water. I got home around six, and did the washing. I was not hungry yet, and there was a lot of washing to do.

I had dinner quite late, and it wasn't until around nine o'clock that I realized that since I'd left the house at about one o'clock I hadn't peed, or felt the slightest urge to. Also, I had a headache.

Did I really sweat that much? (And if not, where did that two or three litres of water GO?)

I drank mugicha until my bladder started working again, ate dinner, and discovered the headache had disappeared.

That was a good ending to the day. I celebrated with a glass of wine, and promised myself that if I went to the nice pool again I would take the bus.

Riding my bicycle would not be very clever.