I Found A Pool!
When the pools closed in 2020 I lost a lot more than muscle tone.
I truly miss my 3 days a week meet up with my 50 or so closest friends…(ha ha) in the Peter Hemmingway pool.
I’ve been doing aquasize for over 30 years as it’s the absolute best thing for me to get exercise despite my arthritis. And I’ve been to many many different pools in Calgary and then around Edmonton, Alberta. But I was truly surprised at the kindness and caring of the large group I met at Peter Hemmingway.
Within minutes of my first entering into that pool a woman swam up to me and actually said,” I know everything about you and your husband.” I was slightly taken aback as you can imagine. But she turned out to be our former church secretary AND she had read Terry’s book!
Elizabeth is one of my close friends now and after our years of joyous silliness in the pool with most of the whole pool attendees and meeting afterwards for coffee eventually with a few of my favourites, we really got to know each other well.
Terry and I had folks over for an annual Christmas party at our home. Karen and Darrell had many of the entire pool friends and spouses over to their home for an annual summer bar-b-que in their back yard.
And then: Covid closed down the city. When the pools started to reopen, ours didn’t because they decided to do a major renovation. I had the blessing of working out in a friend’s condo pool for a long time and I can’t tell you what a blessing that was to me. No fear of Covid because I was by myself!
But when Anne’s pool closed a few times for structural/electrical etc. difficulties I was out of luck. Every pool I looked at was either booked up fully whenever I looked online or it had no accessible entrance/ washrooms, too shallow, and on and on.
A friend mentioned the pool at Grant MacEwan University and I didn’t even KNOW there was a pool there.
I was nervous to check it out because I can’t walk far and I had NO idea how far it would be from the entrance or how to find out the information I needed as the information I located online wasn’t helpful and the person I called at one of the front desks was not clear.
So, finally finally I have committed to doing aquasize again and I’m so excited!
