Swimming – Day 1

It’s like this.  I can swim – kind of.  I had lessons when I was at school, but  those lessons were next to useless.  They took place in the local echo-y, Victorian, swimming baths.  I hated the noise, and I also carried with me some unpleasant memories of family visits from somewhere in my distant past.  The teacher was an old man with a walking stick (you know how every adult looks ancient when you’re 9 years old), and we were all terrified of both him and his booming echoing voice, not to mention that bloomin’ stick.

I eventually learned how to swim by watching and copying other people, and as a result I can do an OK breaststroke.  However, my crawl (freestyle) never really moved forward from the point when I stopped having swimming lessons, and overall I considered/consider myself to be a fairly weak swimmer.

Fast-forwarding to 2014.

I need a way of exercising that doesn’t involve balance or impact on my left leg and hip.  I eliminated all the other possibilities until all that was left was swimming (and the gym – more on that later).  I suspected that the leg action of breaststroke would cause pain, and I know that  climbing backwards down a ladder  is a problem, as is sitting down on the floor (or the side) in order to slip into the pool.   Then, once I’ve finished swimming, I’ll need to get out… Now, glossing over those issues for the moment, the challenge is to become a better swimmer and to improve my front crawl technique.

It has taken me over a month to get from that first, “I am going to do this thing” moment, to actually going to the pool, and in the middle I had a little (tiny) health scare. As expected, it turned out to be nothing, but it was enough to make me more even more determined to get myself fitter and more mobile.

So. Yesterday, I went to the pool – my only plan was to actually ‘get in the thing’.  I chose a local 20 metre pool, one that I know is accessed via gentle steps, rather than a pool ladder – it’s the one where I used to take my children swimming so I know it well.  Walking into the pool was easy, and being in the water felt great, with pain-free movement.  However, I was still a little unbalanced – stopping swimming looked more like drowning, and the breaststroke kick wasn’t great… that was probably unbalanced too.  So I spent about 40 minutes working on starting, stopping and treading water until I rediscovered my balance in the water.   My attempts at crawl were an improvement (I’ve been watching lots of youtube instruction videos), and I could manage the breaststroke, at first, until I tried to adjust my kick and found that pushing myself to do the kick ‘properly’ was painful.  I didn’t try to swim more than 10 metres at a time.  By far my biggest problem was breathing out underwater, which I need to work on.

Then I had to walk out of the pool, and I was suddenly back to the reality of a painful left leg and the balance insecurity that is causing me so many problems – and there was nothing to hold on to – not very elegant.

A successful outing,  I think.  I’ve taken the first step.