What's a goal?

Recently I watched the Four Corners program about how professional athletes and sports players end up when they don't or can't any longer do sports, through injury, mental illness or their personal future change. I know about that.

In my childhood I swam often. Mum and Dad would take us all to the Hamilton swimming club at the Municipal Pool and we would train, compete and enjoy. I learned diving too. I swam the first mile when I was about 10. I even learned rescuing people in the pool. We'd go on weekend fun days to beaches – Mt Manganui, Waihi, even Raglan in the other direction. Once, at Waihi, I was hit above my left eye with a surfboard. I managed to get back to shore but dad picked me up from the beach and carried me back to safety. I ended up with a swollen eye, but that didn't stop me from swimming.

We went to Mt Maunganui for a family holiday when I was 12. We visited the aquarium on the side of Moturiki Island, accessible from the beach, and my older sister and I looked longingly at the 4 dolphins swimming in the pool. We were the first kids allowed to swim with them! There were also 3 seals and 2 stingrays whose barbed tails had been cut off – thankfully. Our next holiday there was when I was 14, and my sister and I spent so much time in the surf, body surfing into shore. One day there was a warning screamed along the beach that there was a shark out in the sea, close to the shore. My sister and I beat most other people into shore!

At school I played tennis, netball and hockey. Tennis and hockey continued into high school, but I stopped playing hockey and netball when I left school. I swam after school, still in competitions (I won a bottle of sparkling wine when I was 18!). I still played tennis, and learned squash – that was a useful sport in the Army when I enrolled!

A few years later, after leaving the Army, I joined the Masters Swimming Club. We trained in Hamilton, had competitions in Hamilton and in Napier, a bus journey away. I joined a swim from the Tauranga Pilot Bay harbour around Mt Maunganui and finishing on the ocean beach – 4km, apparently! Each swimmer had to have a supporter on a boat not too far away from them. My ex had his boat, but the motor stopped about two thirds around the mount. I kept swimming, but I ended up having to give it up. Very frustrating for me! There are still competitions doing this race and they have a Facebook page.

I gave up all my sports after my first marriage crashed. I lived in my government house for 11 years, single parent supporter of my two kids. They skated – on ice, their competitions and one Christmas event choreographed by me including the hockey ice team skating to Born to be Wild. My son got roller skates when the ice rink shut down. My daughter did jazz and tap dance – I choreographed her competition dances.

Before my second marriage I joined the Les Mills gym and began workouts which worked for me – treadmill for 2kms, then into weights. I became excited with Body Combat - activities from combat set to music. I would go to 8 sessions every week! My present job was just across the road from the gym and I had a split shift, so lunchtime I also went to the gym. My new husband and I moved to Australia in 2005 and I found the Body Combat sessions in gyms in Brisbane, so I went again. In the end I walked away from the new group – not Les Mills – introduced by my then-gym, Healthworks at Sunnybank. (I just checked their website – and they're back into Les Mills Body Combat!)

In 2010 I joined the AJs gym – they had 3 swimming pools! I began swimming again; my laps got up to 80 which was 2 km. I would end up in the larger inside pool most of the time, but occasionally I would have to move outside because there might be a school competition inside. It didn't bother me – I had a goal: Vanuatu in the next few months. They had competitions in the ocean, but the websites I have linked to use their present write-up. It may not be too different from 6 years ago. I would enter the Port Vila program which is in May: “Up to 10 days of varied, tropical swimming and adventuring in Vanuatu”, or Espiritu Santo in June - 2.6km “swim across the Segond Channel, from the main island of Santo to Aore Island”.

I took my oldest grandson to AJs to learn how to swim. He started scared of the water – he'd never really had any swimming lessons in NZ – but he became a real young swimmer in the next few months.

I was still swimming after my grandchildren were moved back to NZ without me being told. I swam throughout the time that my ex went to NZ for christmas and told me, on his return, that we'd finished. I swam during my CT which identified my brain aneurysm. I swam almost right up until I ended up in hospital in April 2014.

Then I stopped swimming.

In the last 3 years, since my brain aneurysm surgery and my stroke, I have had a few swims – at the Dolphins Health Precinct in Redcliffe I swam up to 40km and had weekly aqua classes for a few months. The fitness carer from CBRT had come with me and I joined the gym, but I only stuck to it for a few months. Depression controls you. At the Bethania Retirement Village where I moved to mid-2016 I joined the aqua class at Kingston pool – the only one I could find around this area which was covered. After my extreme depression caused by the retirement village (different story) I moved out. I'm now in Eagleby. It's not a good place – maybe that will be in my next blog – and their swimming pool (with aqua class) is outside. I haven't been there.

What's a goal? Mine was – is – swimming at Vanuatu. I would have to wait a year if I wanted to swim in the races. Perhaps, for that long time, my brain would mess up again. Forget Vanuatu. Forget swimming. Forget forget forget.

The people interviewed on Four Corner felt the same way that I do, but for different reasons. They're a long younger than me. What's a goal? I still have mine. I need to remember it.

Note 1: The Hamilton Municipal Pool was built in 1912. 100 years later, in 2012 it was closed for fear of safety. The HCC voted in 2015 to demolish it. Very sad.

Note 2: I found a Stuff article in Hamilton, NZ dated 17 February 2014. It seems that Hugh Speirs, who used to have the first Hamilton ice skating rink, is proposing a new one. This will be looked at in a future blog.