I suck at swimming. I always have. There have been quite a few “I suck at swimming” posts on ST lately, and I thought I would share some stories of my lifelong battle with swimming. Forgive the length, but I hope that those of you who endure to the end, will find it enjoyable:
One of my earliest childhood memories is the absolute sheer terror I experienced at my first group swimming lesson. I was too young for regular swimming lessons, this is one of the classes where parents take their infants/young children to begin to get accustomed to the water. It was at the swimming pool, and I was with my grandmother. The lesson seemed to be one of torture and interrogation where the guardian would hold the child, thrust them up in the air, and then dunk them under the water, repeatedly. I think there was some sort of song going on in the background, 1-2-3 under the water! With my hysterical crying I swallowed a good portion of water and thus I had taken my first steps on the lifelong journey of being a horrible swimmer.
A few years later at the appropriate age, I was enrolled in swimming lessons. In Canada in the 80’s there was a color-coded swimming lesson progression, yellow, orange, maroon, red and so forth. Starting with Yellow, I worked diligently at the swimming lessons, and was happy that I had passed. There was a little report card and everything, with columns for excellent, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory. Swimming was fun and rewarding!
Now onto Orange. All of a sudden, treading water and floating on your back are really hard. It was a feeling I would experience later in life when going from high school to university: coming to grips with your own shortcomings. When my little swimming report card came back, there were several “unsatisfactory” columns marked. I had failed Orange, and I was being held back. I had never known failure in my young life, it was a scaring experience. I was re-enrolled in Orange, but I never did get the hang of floating on my back, and I believe I was giving a “mercy pass” (another experience I would have again in university), to move me along through the system. Seeing the psychological toll these lessons were having, my parents didn’t enroll me in subsequent lessons.
Throughout the years growing up, I somehow did manage to pickup the rudiments of swimming, and, should I needed to, I probably could have swam a few hundred meters to save my life should a ship I was on sank. But that was about it. Life went on, and I didn’t give much though to swimming, except as a means of exiting the body of water at the bottom of a waterslide park.
Quite a few years later, high school, grade 10 I believe, some friends and I enrolled in the local triathlon. We were all very avid mountain bikers and none of us had ever owned or ridden a road bike. But we were young, and in decent shape and wanted to give it a shot. We signed up as a relay team: one friend who was a decent swimmer (or at least had been one a few years earlier), another one as a biker, and me as the runner. I don’t remember any of us actually doing any specific training leading up to the race, I suspect we just did what we always did: gym class, a few team sports, and mountain biking 7-days a week. My nutritoinal training diet was one of about 8+ bowls of cereal per day. My god my parents must have spent a small fortune on mini-wheats, cheerios and forsted flakes and milk when my brother and I were growing up.
Well, the Friday night before the race, our swimmer decided to get into the booze, as young men are known to do, and called us at 6a.m. saying he would be unable to race. I spent the next hour phoning several friends, waking up their parents, and asking them to wake up their sons and daughters, trying to convince someone to be our swimmer. No one took the bait, and I had now annoyed all the parents of my friends, so I said, I will be the swimmer. How hard could it be? The fact that I hadn’t swam in years didn’t deter me.
So, I get to the race and we check in. I make my way to the pool and get in. I am wearing board shorts and don’t have any goggles. I did 50m of warmup, and collapse at the wall panting and exhausted. The swimmers were seeded in lanes based on their submitted time estimates of the 1500m swim, so I was in one of the faster lanes. The race starts, and I get passed nearly every lap. My arms get so tired that I have to alternate between breast, back and freestyle out of a legitimate fear that the intense burning in my arms is a sign that they will indeed fall off. I had no goggles, and my eyes are really starting to sting. Initially I was keeping them open under the water so I could swim straight, but after a while this technique was no longer sustainable. Swimming blind now, I was zigg-zagging haphazardly all over the lane.
I was worried about being a nusance to the other races at this point, but as luck would have it, they all exited the pool at about this time, so I had the lane to myself. After a few more lengths, more people start getting into the pool. They are getting ready to start the short-course swim. Into my lane drops my chemistry teacher, he is doing the short course as the swimmer on a teachers relay time. I really needed a break at this point, so stop and chat with him for a few minutes, then mention that I had to keep swimming as I was in the previous heat. I do another 50 meters and a race official stops me, and moves me and my lap counter to my own lane at the far end of the pool. It only has one lane-rope so the lane is about 20 yards wide, which really allows me to make my zigs and zags far and wide.
The short-course started and I was still swimming. I was very sore and tired, my eyes were bright read and I could barely see. I had absolutely no idea how far I had gone, or how far I had left to go. My hope was fading, would I have to quit? At some point would the lifeguards intervene and put a stop to this for my safety? At the end of every 50m lap, I would look hopefully at my lap counter, and she would shake her head. Finally, the moment came, I was done! 1500m of swimming behind me, I tried to get out of the pool. I couldn’t. My triceps were so tired and tight that I couldn’t lift my 120lb frame out of the pool. I ended up rolling and flopping over the edge of the deck like a wounded seal, and then rose shakily to my feet.
Although my heroic swim time of 40+ minutes over 1500m was by no means fast, to the crowd of cheering fans standing outside the pool, it appeared that I had a swim time of around 7minutes for the short course swim. With a rousing chorus of cheers I ran through them hearing comments of, “wow, that kid is fast!”. I ran up the hill to the transistion zone, tagged the biker, and he was off. He was riding a full-suspension mountain bike with knobby tires. Mind you, this is a mid-1990’s full suspension mountain bike (a GT I believe), not one of the light, Xterra/XTC ready cross-country FS bikes of today. This beast weight about 35 lbs and the rear shock was like riding a water bed.
As I awaited the run, I tried to compose myself. My arms were so tight that I couldn’t bend them, but, a few bananas and some stretches later, I was no worse for wear. My eye sight was returning, but my eyes would be bloodshot for the rest of the day. The biker returned, and I was off on the run. It was uneventful, except that this was probably 2x the longest I had ever run in my life, and I had to stop to water the plants a few times. The race was over, somehow we managed to win the high-school long course relay team group, I think there were only 2 other teams.
I did learna good lesson in sport nutrition and hydration that day. I wasn’t very hungry for the rest of the day, and didn’t eat or drink very much to recover. Later that day I developed a migraine, and spent a long cold night laying on the bathroom floor with cold sweats, shaking and vomiting. Experts will tell you that it was lack of hydration, electrolyte imbalance and overall poor carbohydrate intake. I blame the swimming.
Many years later, I took up triathlon again and am really working on my swimming. I joined a masters swim club and practice open water swims. Still, I suck at swimming. I haven’t yet done an open water swim race where a lifeguard in a boat hasn’t asked, “Are you alright?” to me as I go by.
The short answer to your long story: swim more.