Lap it up

Many a winter morning Sally Anderson grouses to herself, "What are you doing?" as she pulls on sweats, boots and parka to scurry before dawn to Sebastopol's Ives Pool. Once there, she's often greeted by frost glittering on the concrete outside the dressing room and steam rising from the outdoor pool. Many times it's raining.

"I try to tell myself that it would be worse if I lived in Minnesota or Kansas," said Anderson, who swims early morning laps four days a week.

Her 6 a.m. ritual allows her time to get home, shower and beat the commute to her job in Marin, but more than that she's convinced it helps keep her asthma in check.

"Swimming makes my lungs feel happy," said the 56-year-old medical librarian.

Swimming also soothes and stretches her back, injured when she was a teenager riding horseback.

Beyond the physical effects, she relishes the quiet solitude of swimming and the near meditative experience she compares to jogging alone on mountain trails.

Anderson is not the only early morning polar bear, either at Ives or many other community pools.

At the Sonoma County Family YMCA in Santa Rosa, aquatics director Alisa Nelson said there's usually a 5:30 a.m. line of regulars waiting for the lifeguard to open the door to the pool.

Crosstown, at Finley Community Pool, Jodi Alton, who works the front desk, reports "more and more people getting in their cardio first thing in the morning." After they clear out, Alton helps lead a water fitness class, which works on her own bulging discs and lower back bone spurs.

For these water babies, taking the plunge has little to do with recreation or the latest trendy sport. Swimming or doing water exercises is their workout of choice, which they do to stay fit, lose weight, ease a painful body part, forestall surgery or prevent future health problems.

Donna Burch, who teaches therapeutic water exercise at Finley, lauds the time-honored health benefits of immersing the body in water.

"The early Romans and Greeks used hot baths for healing and recreation. Hippocrates advocated water treatments for a variety of ailments," said Burch, who gets many of her students through doctor referrals.

Family physician Scott Chilcott swims four times a week at the Flamingo Hotel pool, which is part of Montecito Health Center in Santa Rosa. He considers water "one of the better options for getting aerobic exercise," especially for patients who have arthritis in their weight-bearing joints and other conditions that make land workouts extra painful.

Swimming is also ideal for those athletic types like Chilcott who've maxed out on their former regimens.

Chilcott, 77, used to run marathons and commuted to work by bike for 30 years. Since a hip replacement, he relies on swimming laps to push him to his aerobic limit.

He goes more by the clock than number of laps. "I don't care how far I go. If I'm swimming at my fastest sustainable pace, then I am getting the kind of workout I have to have."

Nelson at the YMCA, which offers eight water classes designed for people with arthritis, including one that incorporates tai chi, said swimming is the almost all-inclusive exercise.

"It's a low-impact activity with minimum stress on bones and joints," she said. "It's a great range of motion activity, because you're using your shoulders, hips, knees and spine. It's an aerobic sport, it's cardio, it works on your core and abdominals and is great for back health."

About the only thing water exercise doesn't provide is the weight-bearing activity needed to promote bone strength and prevent osteoporosis. For that, Nelson said, swimmers can add in specially designed pool weights -- but it's probably more effective to swim first and do your weights out of the water.

Don Hicks, recreation supervisor for the City of Santa Rosa's two swim centers, Finley and Ridgway, said doctors increasingly urge obese patients to get in the pool.

"Someone's doctor tells them to lose 50 or more pounds and they can't just start jogging or walking around the park. It can be uncomfortable if you're overweight to work out in a gym," Hicks explained. "But if you can get over being in a swimsuit and in the public eye, you'll feel more buoyant in water and there'll be less physical stress on the knees and the body."

But what about the getting-over-being-in-a-swimsuit part? Burch advises shy would-be swimmers to first tour the pool "and look at all the people of all different sizes and ages. You're bound to find someone bigger than you and smaller than you."

She also encourages the self-conscious to take cover under a long bathrobe to get the water's edge. And after that, "once you're in the water no one can see you."

In its 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, the Department of Health and Human Services states that adults need to engage in at least two and a half hours a week of moderate-intensity exercise or one hour and 15 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical. Swimming laps for 25 minutes three times a week is one way to meet the goal.

Santa Rosa author Ellen Boneparth started swimming in her 30s after she developed sciatica. "Swimming is the only way I could keep healthy and not spasm," said Boneparth, 63, who hits the YMCA pool every other day.

She has worked it out so that it takes a total of 45 minutes to get to the Y, swim laps for 20 minutes, wash her hair and be back home at her desk.

For her swimming is "a maintenance thing."

"I tell anyone with sciatica that they've really got to get in the pool."

Burch at Finley sees a range of medical conditions. "You name it. We've got it. Arthritis. Back problems. People trying to prevent back surgery. People getting ready for knee surgery."

Burch, who did her master's thesis on pre-operative water exercise and thinks of a pool as "a liquid weight training machine," specializes in therapeutic exercise. "It's like physical therapy but way cheaper."

She also teaches traditional swimming, which she believes anyone can learn, even those who've put it off for years.

Part of teaching an adult to swim is "more like a psychotherapy session," getting past the psychological barriers, which, she said, "usually always stem from something that happened to scare them off water as a child."

Anderson is a good example. She almost drowned in a friend's pool when she was very young and remained "deathly afraid" of water until her mid-30s, when a friend convinced her to take private swimming lessons.

"I thought only macho athletic people swam long distances," said Anderson, who graduated to swim across Tomales Bay, once when she was six months pregnant.

And while she describes her breaststroke style as having "the grace of a water buffalo," she believes that "everyone feels beautiful in the water." For incentive she points to a family friend, a longtime swimmer, who in her late 70s "moves like a 35-year-old."

Nelson at the YMCA can go her one better. One of her water fitness regulars is 97-year-old Ken Trumbley. Known as "Cannonball Ken," he begins every class by doing a cannonball into the pool.

Susan Swartz is a freelance writer and author based in Sonoma County. Contact her at susan@juicytomatoes.com.