Swimming Lesson #18

Swimming Lesson #18

At the weekend, while my wife was buying shoes and I was wondering if the cheeseburger I’d eaten was going to kill me or not, I bought a swimming hat. And yesterday, when I gave up looking for my bobby dazzler goggles, I bought a new, less glam pair. So my appearance has altered slightly.

The goggles were a necessity because if you’re going to spend half an hour with your head under water, it’s a bit unkind on your eyes not to protect them. I did that once, and had a mystical aura obscuring my vision for the next hour, so no thanks to that.

The swimming cap might look like a ridiculous pocket of silicone slipped over my head, but it performs the useful task of stopping my hair flopping over my face and blinding me between each attempt at breaststroke. It’s also best to tuck it over your ears and not under them – the things you find out from taking lessons, eh?

Now, the swimming cap does keep the water off your hair, but since I now work up a bit of a sweat swimming, and Singapore is humid anyway, I’m not sure how much difference that makes. I suppose it would be good for the girls to protect their hair from the vagaries of chlorine, although good luck to anyone trying to get a swimming cap over either one’s head…

Today I did four laps of kicking, four laps of freestyle, four of breaststroke, and then a lot of backstroke, which was what I was looking forward to. I’ve exercised every day since Saturday (cycling, climbing, strength work, climbing, strength work, and now swimming) and lying on your back is unsurprisingly relaxing.

Unless you’re panicking about sinking, which I generally am, as I live my life in a constant state of panic, and that means I don’t relax, which means I sink, which means I panic more, which means… well, you can figure it out.

However, it turns out my backstroke is my best stroke (after only two lessons!) despite my lack of shoulder strength and flexibility. I just windmill my arms (still getting the hang of how I move my hands, so the thumb leads as you bring your arm up from waist level, but you swivel the wrist so your little finger edge cuts the water as it goes back in) and make inexorable progress from one end of the pool to the other.

It was raining hard today, the sky a worrying tinge of orange, but even with a bit of rain head blunting my mood things went well. I can’t quite manage a full length of an Olympic pool doing backstroke without having to stop, but it’s getting there.

Other things I keep forgetting: try to come up for air before you’ve exhausted all the oxygen in your lungs. And when you’re doing breaststroke, kick downwards, not just horizontally. I average about one good kick in 3.

For the warm down, it was 12 more laps, three of each style, as slowly as possible. Only then, in the warm down, do I seem to be smooth and find things easy, rather than a constant watery battle. I guess there’s a lesson there, of sorts.


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