So I hit the pool again today. My preference is for outdoor activities (there is a wonderful walking trail in town that parallels the campus) but the cold has chased me indoors. So it’s back to the pool—better on the joints and much less boring than walking laps in the gym.
I don’t want to say I’m a bad swimmer; I’m more of a mediocre swimmer. I used to confidently tell myself—“You could survive in the water if you had too”—but these days I’m not so sure. Another thing is that I’m not a trained swimmer and only in the last few years (read: maybe a dozen or so times during the winter months!) have I swam for exercise. Yes, I was properly “trained” during summer swimming lessons as a child but let’s just say I never paid much attention to form. In a nutshell, I’ve always swam for fun which mostly meant short distances and frequent breaks!
So I’m teaching myself to swim—somewhat scary, huh! And I was actually surprised today that I remembered a lot of the relearning I did over the past two winters. That said, I still have to concentrate intensively on the whole breathing thing. You see my version of swimming before this new era of exercise swimming, the fun swimming period, meant keeping my head out of the water unless I was deliberating swimming underwater—kinda like a beaver or river otter except that I couldn’t hold my breath as long as they do and, of course, I don’t have webbed toes. So I had to accept the fact that if I was going to lap swim my face had to be in the water. This then meant I had to figure out the whole breathing thing which was particularly hard with free-style with all the moving limbs and heading turning—great evidence that humans were not designed to propel themselves through water.
This is the crux of my breathing problem—I don’t want to exhale underwater. But that causes another problem. My head is just above the water for a few seconds and trying to both exhale and inhale in those few seconds is not easy and can end in an airy watery mess. For a guy whose form is suffering already adding gasping and choking definitely doesn’t help. I really don’t know what is the real issue. Is it the unnatural feeling of exhaling underwater and then waiting to inhale above? Is how all the bubbles make swimming in foggy goggles even more of a challenge? Yet when I do it right; when I breathe out underwater and emerge above the surface at just the right time to take in a full breath it feels right; it feels good. It makes me a believer—“Hey, I can actually do this thing without totally water logging my lungs!”
While I’m concentrating on swimming—what the hands and feet are doing, opening and closing my mouth at the appropriate times—I start thinking about how much of life is this way. It feels like we are doing all we can just to make it the other end of the pool. Yes, we know the basic techniques but getting it all together is not so easy. And there’s keeping track of the cement sides of the pools, staying in your lane, and negotiating the wake of the guy beside you. But it all comes down to the breathing. We can move our arms and legs all we want but if we can’t get the breathing down we won’t make it to the other side—much less kick off and come back again.
What is it that makes the breathing so hard? Is it letting go of that breath? We know we need that air; it’s what keeps everything going; so we want to hold onto it as long as we can. But yet holding out on exhaling keeps us from taking in all the new, fresh air at the precise moment it’s available. So then we get less for the next stroke and seemingly less and less for each one that follows until our feet finally find the bottom on the shallow end and we pull up exhausted and completely out of breath. It seems doubtful we’ll make it back to the other end again.
