“So the pool becomes a reminder of my own fallibility, my own human-ness, and simultaneously an escape from it. “Swimming is about living in the present and against the tide of age,” writes Kate Kellaway in her review of Al Alvarez’s Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal. Eighty-something-year-old Alvarez–poet, novelist, critic–is, she writes, “an arthritic old man determined to free himself of age in the city’s waters.” But I don’t think only the elderly do this. I swim ostensibly for the future: for a stronger heart or the ability to fit into a snug pair of jeans–but also, perhaps primarily, for the present: for the hope, I think, that I can be briefly free, briefly and powerfully in place–never mind the future, the weight gained and lost, the pulse quickening and slowing. I do it to improve myself, but primarily to be myself. To be myself in my present. At 26 or at 86.”