I’ve recently started swimming while my son has his lessons. It makes me really grateful to the person I was 12 years ago who decided, aged 30, to get over the embarrassment of not being able to swim and have adult swimming lessons. I can swim fairly well now and I’ve even swum the 3.8km of an iron distance triathlon, but that wasn’t the case for a long time.
I wanted to share something about that period, because I know I’m not the only person who reached adulthood not being able to swim properly. There’s a chapter in the book I co-wrote that describes me learning to swim, so I’ve included an extract from Tricurious below.
Taking the plunge: Learning to swim
When I was about five, I used to like swimming. My mum tells me that I used to swim quite happily as long as I couldn’t touch the bottom. I liked the deep end. Then I didn’t go swimming for a long while and seemingly forgot how (or at least lost the confidence) to swim. Undeterred, I would splash around quite happily in the shallow end, until one day when I was about eight. I’d gone swimming with my friend, Annie, and her older sister. I jumped into the pool where the water was deeper than I’d expected. My feet reached out for the bottom but it was too far away and I swallowed mouthfuls of water as I panicked and tried to keep above the surface. The lifeguard extended a long pole towards me and I grabbed hold of one end as he hoisted me out. I remember sitting by the side of the pool next to the lifeguard, catching my breath, feeling embarrassed and scared.
Deciding to do my first triathlon meant getting better at swimming. I only swam when I was on holiday, so that was a total of about 10 hours swimming in the past three years. And that wasn’t so much swimming as paddling in slightly deeper water. I didn’t need to consult Katie (co-author and triathlon guru) to know that this was short of the amount recommended by most triathlon training schedules.
I told people I was having lessons because I needed to ‘get better at swimming’ but what I really meant was ‘learn to swim’, because what I did when submerged in water was not so much swimming as trying not to drown. I couldn’t put my face in the water because the chlorine would burn my nostrils and so, when trying to do front crawl, I’d turn my head from side to side above the water, trashing about wildly with my arms and kicking my legs awkwardly beneath me. There was a lot of movement going on, but none of it seemed to be pushing me forwards particularly quickly. My breaststroke was even worse; I almost went backwards. When I finally did make it to the other end of the pool, I was so worn out I’d have to have a long rest before swimming back. I’d run several marathons without stopping and yet swimming 50 meters in one go was beyond me.
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