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Swimming Social: Chicago has 91 park pools and I’m swimming in all of them
The Chicago Park District operates 91 pools. Forty-nine of them are outdoor, 28 are indoor and 14 are in public high schools. I’m going to swim in all of them and then write a review. If I do one a month, it will take me about 7.5 years to finish this project. I’ll be 63. Down the road, I might modify the timeline. But for now, that’s the plan.
I am on a masters swim team named the Swedish Fish (SWED). I started masters swimming in 2012, the year the team decided on the name, and the team’s head coach, Billy Cordero, began his magic, which included authoring our team’s motto: “Building relationships through swimming.”
When I say I’m going to swim in every park district pool in Chicago, it’s not going to be a little dip. I’m swimming laps. No less than 1,000 yards. Blogging about the experience will be part of building relationships with the city’s public pools and the people who swim in them.
Luckily for me, my dear friend and teammate, Ronna Feldman, agreed to join me in this project. Ronna is a founding member of Swedish Fish. She had the foresight to know that adults would want to join a swim team. She, along with the team’s founding coach, Matt Wever, and a few others had a “build-it-and-they-will-come” vision.
And come we did. The first year I swam at the Illinois Masters State Meet, it was 2013, and I think we came in 13th. We have steadily risen since then. Last year, we came in second and this April, we may be able to take first.
2019 began with a major life transition for me. Getting laid off when you are in your 50s sucks. I contemplated my next steps and decided to do things I love. I love swimming, writing, and social activism. First step was becoming a swim instructor at the local YMCA.
Teaching swimming, to me, is socially useful work. Drowning statistics among children in the United States are abysmal. According to the Centers for Disease Control, drowning is responsible for more deaths among children ages 1 to 4 than any other cause except birth defects. For African American children, drowning statistics from ages 5 to 19 are anywhere from 5 to 10 times higher than white children. While a number of factors contribute to these tragedies, drowning is…
