Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
By the time you read this, I will be in recovery following my heart valve replacement.
I’m grateful I was able to go into surgery relatively fit. It will help my recovery.
I’m even more grateful that we finally had some good weather and I was able to go for a bike ride on Friday.
And I’m especially grateful to this amazing group of women, my swim club lane-mates. I couldn’t ask for better pals and can’t wait to be back in the water with them.
Last Tuesday, I tuned 64, a pretty innocuous age to become, but I celebrated it with gusto. Here are the numbers:
I love birthdays– mine, other peoples’, the general concept– I’m all in. I mean, what’s not to love? There are cakes, cards, sometimes presents, often games, people, often interesting food, and generally more hugs than usual.
Some of my favorite birthdays have involved activities. I’ve had skating parties, bowling parties, outdoor games parties, beach parties, and several swim parties. I’m now bullish on swim parties because it’s fun for all ages. My friend Rachel brought her 3-year-old Teagan, and my friend Roz brought her daughter Roxie. Because we spent all our swim time in the kiddie pool area, children and pool toys were swirling all around us. I personally enjoyed both to the maximum extent.
I’m also bullish on a birthday party game that’s new to me but a standard in lots of other places: Pass the Parcel. It involves wrapping one regular present, then adding layers of wrapping, with little gifts or sweets or messages in between the layers. You pass the parcel around with music playing, and when the music stops, the person with the parcel unwraps a layer. It’s a standard kids’ party game in the UK, but (like the swim party), I think it’s good for all ages. I plan to implement it at my nephews’ birthdays in June.
The addition of dogs at my birthday celebrations was new but most welcome. I met a new dog (hi Bindi!) and got to reunite with the others (Dixie, Ruby and Wylie). They patrolled the area for dropped food items, came over for pets, and looked very happy to celebrate with me.
Seriously, I think we underplay our birthdays in adulthood. It’s so nice to plan a fun break from the usual routines (or let others plan for you) and focus on the pleasures of the moment, enjoying the sweetness in all its forms.
So, in case I forget, dear readers– Happy Birthday to you all (in advance or after the fact unless it’s today).
The swimming pool where I was hired as a lifeguard closed in June 2025 for renovations. Tuesday we opened for the first time.
It was a bit chaotic as our head guard couldn’t make it in, and our Aquafit instructor had sent an email saying they couldn’t come, but it was on the long weekend so no-one saw the message and arranged for a replacement. Kudos to my boss, who became head guard plus Aquafit instructor for two classes, on top of her day job. All the equipment that had been put away months ago needed to be set up again. But we made it.
Being back is wonderful. There were so many people joyfully catching up with each other. So many huge smiles, hugs and “welcome back!” greetings.
There were people I have seen at other pools where I work; they had been anxiously checking in on when we would reopen. There were people I had missed and wondered how they were doing. And there were people I had completely forgotten about until they walked through the door. It felt like a big family reunion.
Welcome back everyone! I’m so happy you’re here.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. You may be thinking, but I feel like I just cleaned up from the last manatee-appreciation blowout I hosted. Well, time does pass quickly when you’re a manatee fan (like I am).
The most fun I had in 2025 was with manatees. My friend Gal and I went swimming with them at Crystal River, Florida. During the winter, the manatees head in from the Gulf of Mexico (no one there uses any other name for it) looking for the many warm springs, all comfy-cozy at 72F/22C year round.
You have a bunch of options for communing with the manatees:
Gal and I took the third option, and boy was it amazing. That day happened to be warm, so there were fewer creatures to see, but the ones we saw were massive and cool-looking.
I’m definitely going back, hopefully to see a large aggregation of manatees (that’s what google says we should call them). I highly recommend this for you, your families, your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors, your creditors, your old flames, everyone.
If you’re interested in some of the posts in which I sing the praises of manatees, here you go:
Catherine’s manatee-intensive vacation: the director’s cut
Six things I’ve learned about manatees
Succinct Sunday: things to do with manatees
Not-very-wordy Wednesday: manatees are here to save your day
I’ll leave you with this selfie of Gal and me at daybreak in our wetsuits, ready to see manatees. I admit that I inserted the baby manatee myself– it didn’t actually pose with us. But it’s awfully cute.
Happy Manatee Appreciation Day!
Nobody is looking at you. Everyone is too busy figuring out their own stroke.
And the water genuinely does not care.
The people who have said something about your body are not in the pool doing the work. You are.
That automatically makes you the athlete in the room. Not them.
Get in the water. You belong there.
These words of wisdom come from Aishwarya Jagdish, an Indian triathlete on Threads.
I came across her post shortly after a particularly busy shift at work. All three pools were packed because it’s March Break in Ontario.
I was scanning for safety but couldn’t help but notice how relaxed people were about wearing what made them happy, instead of what media tells you is “right”. I admired the huge variety of people wearing everything from tiny bikinis to swim dresses, T-shirts and leggings on all different bodies.
Most were there to play with their kids rather than swimming in the lap pool, but the principle holds whether you are training for a race or building sandcastles at the beach.
Forget those images of lifeguards and swimmers with teeth sparkling white in their tanned faces. Apparently, swimmer’s teeth is a thing.
What is it and how does it happen? Apparently the chlorine and other pool chemicals can change the ph in your mouth, leading the discolouration, tartar, and even softened, cracked teeth. A swimmer friend brought it to my attention, and the consensus in our little group is that it can be a real issue.
All three of us have more than normal tartar at every dental check-up, and one has issues with discolouration and cracking. I’m curious about how many members of our respective swim clubs also suffer from it.
I have written about cycling and dental health before. A quick search shows that it appears to be an issue for runners, and athletes more generally, as well.
The advice to manage it all seems to boil down to: brush your teeth, especially before exercising; drink plenty of water; avoid sugary drinks and snacks; get to the dentist regularly.
This is good advice for everyone, so I’ll tuck this information away, keep up with my dental hygiene, and swim as often as possible in lakes or rivers.
A woman in a grey bathing cap and goggles shows off her smile from a pool with dark blue water.
I’ve been near and in water for as long as I can remember. I learned how to swim when I was age 4– my teenaged aunts took me to a local creek, put me in the water and taught me dog paddling, lying on my back and front, and how to hold my breath underwater. By age 6, I was able to swim in the deep end of the pool by myself with some confidence. My niece and nephews followed the same pattern: early swim exposure and lessons, and lots of trips to the pool and ocean. All my family are comfortable swimmers.
But not everyone is. In this article in the Economist, we read a short history of the race, class and income gaps that divide swimmers from non-swimmers. Here’s a graph they created from data gathered from the Centers for Disease Control (in 2023, the good ol’ days for the institution…)
According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, black children aged five to 14 are more than five times as likely to drown in a swimming pool as their white counterparts. Black adults are more than five times as likely as whites to report that they cannot swim.
Many colleges and universities used to have swim tests as a graduation requirement, but that has been in decline in the past decades. The most recent Ivy League school to drop the swim test is Dartmouth College. This spring will be the first year their graduating class will not consist entirely of people who either passed the swim test or passed a swim class. Why?
It’s complicated.
In addition to the cost and inconvenience if running a swim program for all students, the large racial gaps between swimmers and non-swimmers among college students make some college administrators uneasy. Here’s a quote from the article:
Williams College found that between 2013 and 2019, 81% of those who failed its 50-yard swim test were students of colour. After a university committee deemed this “problematic” in 2022 the faculty voted to scrap the requirement, citing its “disparate impact” on minority students. “You’re reinforcing systemic oppression in some ways,” the school’s athletic director told the Chronicle of Higher Education. When Dartmouth eliminated its own swim test later that year, school administrators offered a similar explanation, noting that those who failed were “overwhelmingly students of colour”.
At the same time, some colleges are leaning into the swim test as a way to “right historical wrongs”, in their view.
In 2024 a Cornell faculty committee voted to retain the university’s swim requirement. In its resolution the committee acknowledged racial disparities in swimming ability but argued that the test should remain precisely in order to help narrow them. “By providing formal swimming instruction”, the committee concluded, “Cornell is doing its small part to help right the wrongs of US history and close the racial gap in accidental drowning in this country.
MIT (my alma mater) has retained the swim test as well. Here’s what they have to say about it:
“We have a very intellectually bright population,” [MIT Director of Physical Education] Sampson Moore said. “Sometimes either they don’t have the time to do it as they’re growing up because they’re really focused on their studies, or they didn’t have access because they were an international student and it wasn’t as common.
“All of our students, I would bet my paycheck, are going to be leaders of something, right? Whether they’re a leader of their family or they’re leader of a department or a corporation, they can influence those around them,” she continued.
Is mandating a swim proficiency test imposing an undue burden on students who have been unduly burdened all their lives? Or is it a benefit, helping non-swimming students learn a valuable life skill?
I talked with a friend who is on Team NO-SWIM-TEST, citing how it can stigmatize and burden non-white students. I am on Team SWIM-TEST because, as a public health ethicist, I really want fewer US children, teenagers and adults to die from drowning.
And I admit, as a lifelong swimmer, I want everyone to have the chance to discover the joy of being a water creature, even temporarily.
But I see the complexity here.
If you find this topic interesting (as I certainly do), check out the book Contested Waters It’s a cultural and racial history of swimming pools in the US, documenting and analyzing the shifts from large numbers of public non-segregated bathing pools in urban areas to private, restricted recreational suburban pool clubs.
What do I wish we could do about this? Look to Australia– they have school-funded swimming and water-safety programs all over the country. However, even in Australia there isn’t full access to and implementation of swimming lessons for all school-age children. This is both a shame and a danger for people living in a country with 34,000 kilometers of coastline.
Readers, what do you think? Obvious, national funding for learn-to-swim programs for children would be a great solution. But in lieu of that, what about learning to swim in college? I’d love to hear from you.
Today I turn 65. I already belong to a Facebook group called Senior Lifeguards.
I just finished my skills of the month which are basically the same as the fitness tests for my National Lifeguard certification. I redid that qualification a month ago.
It sometimes seems like a crazy thing to do this job, but I love it. Happy birthday though me!
I recently needed to do the recertification exam for my lifeguard qualifications. It’s mandatory every two years and not really a big deal since I practice the skills regularly at work.
As usual, I was much older than almost everyone else there. Again, no big deal. I’m used to being – by far – the oldest lifeguard wherever I work. But apparently that is weird to some of the other lifeguards.
Following the fitness portion of our exam, one of the youngsters asked how old I was. When I told him, his response was “you’re in really good shape!”. I could almost see the thought bubble over his head “compared to my grandma.”
Kiddo, I have to do the exact same tests as you to hold the exact same job. I’m not unusually fit. I’m merely someone who has chosen to be visibly active in a way that you happened to notice.
The incident amused me because there were no real consequences. When I was trying to get hired, it was more of an issue. Same when I’m dealing with medical questions. I’m going to try and ignore them for the moment and enjoy my little giggle about the thought bubble. And remember that women far fitter than me have been called “grandmother” without acknowledging their remarkable achievements. Amy Apelhans Gubser I’m looking at you!
And for good measure, here’s a picture of me (a grandmother) with a group of my grandmother friends.
Like Nat, I’m back in the pool.
I’m taking Monday evening adult swimming lessons at Making Waves Swim School in Guelph.
There was a lot of snow and blowing snow on the first night and I thought classes might be canceled. They weren’t but we ended up with a pretty small class. Just one instructor and three adult students. We’re all women and I would guess our age range to be 30 and up. (I’m the up.)
The pool is lovely. It’s also warm, 90 degrees.
Everybody could swim, sort of. But none of us could do lengths of a recognizable stroke.
I spent the first half of the class working on front crawl with the help of the instructor who had some good tips. Take it slow, take relaxed breaths, worry about about speed later.
In the second half we learned elementary backstroke to practise our whipkick. It was when the instructor was teaching us the arm movements that I remembered they mostly teach children.
It’s chicken, moose, butterfly.
I’m looking forward to my next class. Will let you know how it goes.
