For those of you who don’t know, I am an avid swimmer, and I can usually be found swimming laps at an indoor pool several times a week.  Recently at the pool, I finally went digging through the various swim fins and other equipment that the pool makes available for swimmers’ use.  Kickboards notwithstanding, the item that I’ve found most useful for my workout is a pair of short fins.  But amongst the various items in the big bin of stuff is a monofin.  The monofin looks like this:

The monofin
Image: Amazon.com

Basically, a monofin is just what it looks like.  It’s a single swim fin that holds both feet together, allowing both legs to kick together as a single unit.  And a surprise: in researching the monofin for this post, I was surprised that this thing runs in the $150 range as far as price goes – about the cost of a flogger of good quality.  I didn’t think it would cost that much.

I pulled out the monofin today at the pool with only the noblest of intentions.  I wanted to give this piece of equipment a spin to see how well I could swim with it, and see what it did for my workout.  However, as it became time to actually switch from the short fins to the monofin, I realized that I was starting to get a little bit excited about the monofin.  It was actually kind of embarrassing, because there I was in a public swimming pool, and my mind was having kinky little thoughts about the monofin without my consent.  Half of my brain was thinking, “Whee, self bondage!” while the other half of my brain was doing its best to have a serious workout despite the other half’s thinking about kink.

And to be quite honest, once I got the monofin on, it was a feeling similar to having one’s ankles bound.  The monofin held my feet together quite securely, and it wasn’t coming off by accident.  That thing was staying on until I took it off.  And to my surprise, I had some difficulty taking the monofin off, making it more like bondage than I initially thought.

Meanwhile, the workout with the monofin was more of a challenge than I expected.  I went into this with no instruction on how to actually use the monofin.  The closest thing to actual training was my seeing it and deciding that it looked interesting.  I had no idea what I was doing with it, and it showed.  Plus there was that one side of my brain reminding me that I was essentially tied up, and that was distracting.  But somehow I managed.

And then let’s not even get into Georgian-style swimming, one variation of which involves being bound hand and foot.  I think the kink center in my brain would be too distracted with the prospect of getting tied up that any actual swimming would really suffer…