Adult swim.

I wonder if the reason I'm having trouble writing blog posts lately is that my two older sons have started setting an alarm so they can be downstairs playing Minecraft before I wake up.  Even though, as the parent, I technically have the right to say "Begone, wretches!" and shoo them away so I can sit down with my coffee, I tend instead to wander off to the schoolroom for my iPad and settle down in the rocking chair with it.  And although I can blog from my iPad, it's not quite as comfortable.  On marginal mornings this might just be enough to destroy the muse.

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Jamie asked me yesterday if I would write about swim lessons, so I will.

I was made to have a few sessions of swimming lessons as a child, which left me able to mess around in a pool without drowning.  And that was good enough for me until after I'd had two babies.  

Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA.  I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time.  As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.  

Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise.  It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering.  And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles.  And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do?  swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January.  Also, I didn't know any swimmers.  I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again:  "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies... as long as I could... but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one.  I can't really swim though."  I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"

And after a while I thought:  Indeed -- why not?  We were going to the YMCA at least once a week anyway.  I could have a swimming lesson and Mark could make sure the kids were settled (the one-year-old did not always like staying in the YMCA child care).  It would be a real once-a-week appointment to get some exercise, if nothing else.  I asked Mark if he could commit to it, and he happily agreed, and so I picked up a schedule for swimming lessons at the front desk.

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At the time, the YMCA had two kinds of adult swim lessons:  the one for people who are uncomfortable or fearful in the water, today called Basic Water Adjustment, and the one for people who aren't afraid of the water and who have some ability to maneuver around in it.  I was the latter kind, so that's what I signed up for.  Today that class is called Stroke Development.

I dug in my out-of-season clothes and found a swimsuit.  I didn't have goggles or a swim cap, so I didn't bring any.  I changed self-consciously in the locker room -- not because I was unused to changing, but because I was unused to putting on a swimsuit.  I felt that everybody could tell that I was not really a swimmer.  (Imposter syndrome had, apparently, followed me home from graduate school.) 

 

There were two other adults in my first class, both women.  The instructor was a woman who also taught children's lessons; I had seen her in the pool when I brought my four-year-old to the pool deck.  The first thing she asked us to do was to swim from the middle of the pool (just before the bottom started sloping down towards the deep end) to the shallow-end wall so that she could see what skills we already had.  

From that ten-yard swim, the instructor could learn that I remembered some of my childhood lessons:  I could put my head in the water, and I had the basic idea of what a front crawl should look like.

 But I learned something even MORE important:  this department-store swimsuit was not going to cut it.  I do not remember much from that first lesson except that I spent it alternately trying to follow the instructor's instructions and trying to stuff myself back into my suit.

(Perhaps the imposter syndrome was, er, truthful in this case.)

One week later I appeared at the swimming lesson with a brand new Speedo suit from the local sporting goods store.  Also a pair of goggles, which I did not know how to adjust.  Things went better after that.

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I took swim lessons from the YMCA for a year.  By the end of that year I had a passable front crawl and backstroke.  I had had three different instructors.  They had all tried to teach me breaststroke, and I could do each of the pieces (pull, breathe, kick, glide) but I could not put them together more than three times in a row before getting mixed up and decaying into thrashing and sinking.   I also gave up on learning flip-turns after it became clear that I always came off the wall pointed downwards, which hurts the ears in the deep end and the head in the shallow end.  

But I was now able to swim laps, which I'd always wanted to do.  It was time for me to start practicing and learning on my own. 

.... and I think I'll write about that in another post.

Comments

[Patty]

Love this. As a returning swimmer myself, I can't wait to hear more.

[GeekLady]

We had to take on "health and fitness" pe class in college, and I picked conditioning swimming, because I basically knew how to swim and thought I would hate it the least.
But...! In order to stay in the class, you had to be able to complete the president's fitness test,which I think was twenty laps in ten minutes? I don't remember. And I only managed 13 before I had exhausted myself. But because my stroke was okay, the instructor didn't realize I didn't meet requirements until it was too late to change courses. There wasn't anything else that fit my schedule and I'd put it off till my last semester (typical), so I cut her a deal that. Would be able to pass the required fitness swim test by the end of the course, and she agreed. I got a little speech at the end of the course saying if there was any student she wished she could give an A, it was me, because of all the effort I put in and the improvement I made.
Swimming is awesome. The downside is you need to have a pool available, and that costs.
David on the other hand, hated swimming up through May this year when he had a meltdown at a little friend's pool party. Then we went to a pool party at one of our D&D group's house, and he mysteriously started loving the water. He went from consenting to be enthroned in one of the floaty rafts to self initiated paddling around the pool in his float jacket and laughing over dunkings in an hour flat. Very weird.

[Jenny]

Swimming...

This is one of those things that I think I would enjoy. The girls have taken swimming lessons in the summer and I usually arrange to go to one of the sessions to watch. When I'm in there, the temperature is warm. I smell the pool and watch the lap swimmers and think I would like to take up swimming if I only had the time. I dream about not having to go to work every day and how, if I were home, I could take the kids to a weekly swim appointment, and what a grand life that would be.

And then I come back to reality and understand that to go swimming means to put on a swimsuit. Which I have not worn in fourteen years. And the problem with the swimsuit is not really the garment itself, but the personal maintenance it takes to wear one. Razors, friends. Razors.

[bearing]

After a while you realize that the people at the pool don't care about your body hair. I'm too busy to look at theirs; ergo, chances are good that they are too busy to look at mine.

[bearing]

(As a side comment, possibly TMI: I actually think I accomplish more shaving as a regular swimmer than I did before, since now two or three of my showers every week happen while the kids are in the Y's child care and I can take as much time as I need to.)

[Kelly]

It seems common, from the people I know who used to be on the swim team when they were in school, to not be able to tolerate flip turns now.

My oldest son really took off in swim lessons this summer and is now swimming 4x a week with the ambition of making a local competitive team. It is a big time commitment for us. I'm usually pretty minimal on activities. But I've learned a lot by watching the systematic way they teach the classes.