Today I went swimming free style in the Limmat for the first time and I’m super happy to have discovered another way to enjoy this river. Going for swimming was so relaxing that it motivated and inspired me to write this short blog post.

I’ve jumped in the Limmat many times. It’s not a secret that I love water and that the Limmat is one of my favorite places in the city. I live in walking distance to it and one of the things I enjoy the most in summer is going for a run along the river and afterwards to take a plunge in it to refresh, but it had never crossed my mind somehow to actually go swimming.

There’s a river Badi (a “Badi” is the swiss the word for an outdoor pool) very close to where I live and even though it’s free to use it, it has all the infrastructure of a paid swimming pool. It has a 400m long stretch of the river to swim in, showers, bathrooms, hair driers, sun umbrellas, lockers to store your things and quite a few lifeguards. The location is beautiful and it’s quite central, most of people go there to chill on one of the many sun loungers. I saw a few people going for a swim in the morning and thought why not, that actually sounds so good!

Swimming

Swimming was wonderful. You swim against the current and there’s a beautiful 400m stretch of water. Water in Switzerland is quite clean so you can see the bottom quite clearly and also even a few fishes. I’m not a particularly fast swimmer, so it took me about 15 minutes to swim these 400m. I would then float a bit with the current to recover my breath and start over. I was wearing a wetsuit and that makes it really effortless to float on your back. It was very relaxing and peaceful to just let the river take you for a minute. I swam for a little over 40 minutes and was then ready to go back home.

Logistics

The river is 22 degrees at the moment which is actually quite pleasant, however since I was planning on swimming for 30+ minutes I knew I’d eventually feel cold. Luckily I have a wetsuit I got back in 2014 that comes in handy for these situations. It’s a bit overkill for 22 degrees as it’s a fullbody wetsuit with 3/2mm thickness (3mm on the core and torso area, 2mm in the arms and legs).

According to O’Neill, the brand of my wetsuit, the wetsuit thickness I have is actually suited for water which is 12 to 17 degrees. Indeed, maybe not too surprisingly I was the only one swimming in a wetsuit (granted there not many people actually swimming though; most people just go for a quick jump in the water and out). I didn’t feel like I was overheating at all, so I’m not too concerned about it being overkill.

The river is about a 10 minutes walk from where I live, but I prefer biking because that cuts the travel time to only about 5 minutes. I also want to minimize the amount of things I need to bring with me when going swimming. So I went biking there just wearing my wetsuit, a pair of flip flops, keys and a padlock so I can lock my stuff in the locker. No change of clothes and no towel. Today was a bit windy and air temperature was around 20 degrees when I got out of the water (lower than the water temperature), so I was happy to still have the wetsuit when biking on the way back home as otherwise I’d be cold without it. Because it’s a little bit on the thick side it protects me against wind. I can imagine however that on a sunny day that I’d want to take it off.

I’m already looking forward to next time! The Badi actually only opens at 9am and I’d like to go earlier than that, so I’m thinking about logistics. I think I can get rid of the flip flops by replacing them with water shoes, so really the only thing I’d need to store are my keys. I need to check if there’s some tiny waterproof bag (maybe it doesn’t to be waterproof at all, it’s just keys anyways) that I can take with me during the swim. Alternatively I can walk there and just hide the key to my place somewhere.

I’m also a curious to learn if I will eventually find it boring. I really like swimming, but my main issue doing laps in a pool is that I feel like time does not go fast enough. Doing it in the river was exciting because it was a new thing, first time I’m swimming against the current and first time I’m really doing free style for a long time in the river. Hopefully it remains fun the next times too! Otherwise I was thinking about getting underwear, bone conducting headphones.

A note on blog post frequency

It has been a while since I’ve written a post and I’ve been thinking about how to change this. I have another post that I started drafting more than a month ago which I haven’t finished. Some posts take me a very long time to finish and I think that’s maybe OK. But this really shouldn’t stop me from starting a second post parallel to the more time consuming ones. I also think I need to stop taking these posts so seriously and just write about anything, really. It doesn’t matter if it’s mundane like this post.

Addendum (24th of Sept)

I’ve gone swimming 11 times in the Limmat this year, a success! I have a new setup with a small drybag that fits just keys inside. I can tie around my neck and then put it inside the wetsuit, on my chest area. Most of the time I was swimming around 35 minutes, either at a constant pace or doing 1 minute sprints (followed by 1 minute breaks). It’s really cool to be able to go swim in the ‘wild’ like this, for free! I also have a long sleeved, thin wetsuit, that works nicely for temperatures starting from 22 degrees. I also went in the river when it was 20 degrees with my 3/2mm wetsuit and felt nice and warm, so it probably would work even at lower temperatures.