June 19, 2009
swimming
For 29 years I believed that I was a competent if not downright good swimmer. I based this belief on the following:
- I have not yet drowned. It's been years since I have flopped on the beach, heart racing and adrenaline pumping, panting and thankful to feel terra firma under my feet.
- I love to swim in the ocean, paddling around in water which is over my head and crashing around in big waves with abandon.
- I went to summer camp for 8 years and the people there told me I knew how to swim.
- I can cruise up and down the lagoon, even if I do need to switch to a new stroke every so often. (I tend to favor back and side.)
- See #1 above.
As it turns out, even with the incontrovertible evidence I've provided above, I was wrong. So, so wrong.
I am not a good swimmer. I am not an adequate swimmer. In fact I am a very, very bad swimmer. Not only was this realization disturbing to me on many personal levels but it is also a fairly undesirable quality when one thinks that one might want to become a triathlete.
And to top it off, not only am I a very, very bad swimmer but I am also a "sinker". I have never been able to float. At summer camp when called upon to float on my back I would position myself on my back and end up straight up and down, my head bobbing in the water like a little sort-of-blond-if-you-squint buoy, my feet scraping the bottom. Floating is not my strong suit and it never has been, and this has had little to no impact on my life since my final year at summer camp when my mom signed me up without asking first and I endured a week as horrific as a 13-year-old can make it. But floating does pop right back up to the top of the food chain when one is attempting to learn to swim. Buoyancy is your friend with respect to swimming. And I sure hope it's friends with you because it has always snubbed me rather nastily, totally without provocation I might add.
A non-swimming sinker. That's me. And I need to be able to swim in 7 weeks.
That is how I found myself sitting in my bathing suit at the edge of a pool hoping that the water wasn't too cold and keeping a wary eye on the 11 others sitting with me. (It wasn't. It was blissfully warm.) A weekend swimming workshop complete with underwater video of yours truly churning through the water as if her life depended on it.
I'd have to say that it's rather odd to sit around in your bathing suit with absolute strangers having strained conversations about stroke rates and body positioning. I know people sit around in their suits at the beach every day but there are some clear differences: you're outside, you can hide under your towel whenever you want, you don't have to make strained conversation, and there aren't any underwater video cameras. I've thought about this a lot since last weekend and I've decided this would make a good litmus test for potential friends: invite the new couple to your house for an all-day barbeque and let them know that it will be a bathing suit bbq. No fussy towels, no designer cover-ups—just you and your potential new friends in their swimsuits. There is no hidden innuendo in this either. It's just that sitting around for hours and hours in your bathing suit interacting with people you don't know very would might serve to strip away some of the artifice rather quickly because there's nowhere to hide and most everything you've got it all out there in the open. In a good way, of course.
I personally managed to sit around in my swimsuit with my new swim buddies (2 women, 9 men) for 2 consecutive 8-hour sessions without permanent psychological damage. I even learned something. Swimming is hard. There are about 17 things you need to think about with every stroke and you must think about them all simultaneously and you must actually move your body and do the stroke that you are remembering so carefully and you must maneuver your body through the water in some convincing fashion while not ending up on the bottom of the pool and you must remember to breathe whilst remembering your other points. Oh, and only breathe when your nose and mouth are bathed in oxygen, otherwise your stroke gets all messed up while you cough and spit.
I am sad to say that I did not learn to swim last weekend. I learned all of the things I must do to learn to swim and I practiced them each individually so that when I returned home I could begin doing the hours and hours of drilling required to learn to swim. So officially I am not yet a swimmer, even though the 3 instructors (who were very good) stated unequivocally at the end of the session that they were quite sure that I and the other 5 or 6 budding triathletes at the workshop with me could definitely swim the 800M required in our respective sprint triathlons. Why they said it I have no idea. I am still not a swimmer, and I actually do think that it takes a swimmer to swim 800M (approx. 1/2 mile) in an unfamiliar river in a melee of people, some of whom may at any given moment be kicking you in the head.
I am hopeful that I can claw my way to adequate swimmer in the next 7 weeks. I'll let you know right after I track down those summer camp swim teachers.
TMI:
The new-ish swimming method that is popular with many beginning triathletes (and swimmers in general) is called Total Immersion. It's popular because it emphasizes relaxed swimming (I can attest that it is very relaxing) and the relaxing nature allows you, in time, to swim farther than you thought possible without exhausting yourself. So far I am only "swimming" 25M at a time so I cannot attest to the whole distance thing, but I must believe it on some level or I wouldn't have taken the workshop.