ABSTRACT
For swimmers, their relationship with water is a powerful and affecting one. Many narratives relating to health and wellness attest to regular practice in specific indoor and outdoor locations. Yet many swimmers have uneven yet meaningful experiences with water across their life course. This chapter takes an (auto-) ethnographic approach to mapping a blue trace through personal and recounted life-course interviews of outdoor swimming. Primarily based in Ireland, the chapter describes encounters at a range of scales and periods across informants’ intermittent lives, including the author’s own. Those encounters include gaps, bursts of activity and family histories that show how body/environment are sustained through relational geographies. For many swimmers, its emergence as a non-competitive and disjointed practice runs as a blue vein through life. Personal health and wellness are emotionally expressed within blue space and the chapter argues that intermittent practice differs from the everyday in its affective and accretive power. An intermittent embodied consciousness can develop, as bodies and bodily relations with places change over time. A unique element of swimming is its embodied practice across the entire life course; one that never quite loses its value as an irregular yet repeated engagement with blue space.
