Swimming helps recovery

Swimming is so much more than recreation to 77-year-old Bob Lee.

It is a way of life, it is a form of therapy.

Last year it helped him rediscover a sense of wellbeing after a serious back injury.

He fell off the back of a tractor during Barrhead’s August street parade, damaging the first lumbar vertebra. As with any spinal injury, the difference between permanent and temporary immobility can be measured in very small distances.

Fortunately, the location of the injury gave him a fighting chance of reclaiming his active lifestyle and he was determined to take it.

“I was in a lot of pain and put on morphine, which sent me into la la land for a while,” he recalls with a smile.

“I was later told that the best thing I could do to get me up and about was to swim.”

It was advice he followed. Combined with a passion for walking and cultivating his back garden, swimming restored his mobility.

Now – nearly a year later – he is in the improbable position of showing how far he has recovered by participating in the Alberta 55-plus Summer Games, the first time he has ever been in such an event.

He will compete against four others in the 75 plus category for breaststroke and freestyle, both at 50m and 100m.

Believed to be the oldest Barrhead competitor, he is proof that age and injury need not be impediments to a full life.

“I’m feeling pretty good right now,” he says.

Lee, one of the Kinsmen who helped build the town’s pool, started swimming in the 1970s. He was then in his late 30s.

It was not a sport he took to immediately. Just the opposite.

“I was scared to death of water,” he says. “I started coming to the pool to take a few lessons.”

One of his many instructors was Bill Lane, now a Barrhead County councillor.

The lessons led to a lifetime habit of swimming regularly, but he never considered entering a competition until two years ago. The performance of a lady athlete in the 2011 Fairmont Games persuaded him to have a go.

“She inspired me,” he says. “I thought if she can do it, why not me?”

Lee, whose brother Bill is Barrhead reeve, found he had more than injury to overcome; he also had to learn to dive again.

“I hadn’t dived for 30 years,” he says. “It was hard. At first I pretty much just fell into the water.”

With coaching from Liz Kletzel and Jennifer Thistle, Lee began to rediscover the long forgotten technique.

Although he has spent much of his life in the public eye – he was a Town councillor, on the hospital board and involved in children’s services – Lee says he will be nervous on the days of competition.

“I am going to do the best I can,” he says. “I’ve never been in a competition before so I have no idea what to expect.”