A Brief History
Swim4Life started out more than 25 years ago as a “gay friendly and inclusive” social swimming group, “Different Strokes”. Twice a week we would meet in the morning for an hour of lap swimming and routinely as well, would swim on Sunday evenings followed by a meal in North Adelaide. About 20 years ago the group gained a very skilled and experienced coach. She was in her own right a Aussie Master world champion and had won several medals especially in backstroke and butterfly. The acquisition of this delightful woman and her unique coaching and teaching style, attracted many others to join the group as they saw us having so much fun at the Aquatic Centre in North Adelaide.
As the group expanded it became obvious to us that we were all-inclusive, made no distinction between identification of individuals in terms of their gender or sexuality and so we decided to have a name change and “Different Strokes‘ was rebadged to “Swim4Life “. For all of these years we have regularly swum three times a week in the morning 7 am to 8 am – in the summertime at the Norwood outdoor pool and in winter time at the Aquatic Centre in North Adelaide. In 2021 February our delightful coach moved to Canberra and initially we were despondent and devastated but with every cloud there is a silver lining and at the time of writing, we are blessed with two enthusiastic brothers who share the responsibility of coaching our ever expanding group. Like all things in life, they proved to be a little different than our previous coach and whilst initially we were a little apprehensive, it rapidly became obvious that they had a delightful and somewhat different approach to coaching. But always we have fun, it’s a mixture of high intensity training and certainly once or twice a week some of our sessions are spent on stroke correction and improving generally our technique. You would be surprised if you saw us in the pool and recognising the age range of the group to see that almost all of us can manage butterfly! Many of those who joined initially could not swim at all or at least half a lap but now they swim with enthusiasm and confidence and endurance. In February 2022 we participated in an open water swim from the Brighton jetty.
Swim4Life 