Swim lessons were not a priority for my parents. My dad taught us some strokes when we would swim in the ocean. There were no indoor pools in the small town where I grew up, and we would swim in the local pool during the summer--which is where I had my only week of swim lessons, at about age seven or eight. I did not pass. Nevertheless, I always felt comfortable in the water and enjoyed fooling around, playing, diving, turning somersaults, swimming like a dolphin under the water.
This morning, just after 7am, I tried to swim. And I realized that short bursts of activity in the water have very little to do with the act of swimming. I also discovered that my limited technical knowledge is completely wrong. And this morning I learned so much--so much that is new!--that it's hard to take it all in and encorporate it.
My goal is to learn the crawl stroke. For this project, I've been relying on help from talented friends. My good friend M, who used to swim competetively, agreed to join me at the pool and give me some tips, without asking any questions (because I'm still not publicly talking about this triathlon idea)--we biked over together early this morning. M is no bullshit, but very very kind (what better teacher could I ask for?). She had me show her my strokes. I can do about eight strokes of the crawl before stopping with a panicked feeling that I am drowning. So, we started with a flutterboard and worked on keeping the face in the water, and then on keeping my face in the water and breathing to the side. Then on the arm positioning, then on the kick. Sometimes with flutterboard, sometimes just me flailing along in the pool, which thank God is shallow, so I could stop and rest. The pool length is 50m. I can't swim a third of it without stopping, and a full length has me breathing heavily and worn out.
And I thought I was relatively fit.
I know this is going to be much harder than anticipated. My goal now is to swim a length without stopping. I need to work on my breathing, my head position while breathing, my gliding, staying on top of the water (planing), using my core strength. My kick needs work too. I could easily pass an hour working on all of these elements. But whether or not I would improve greatly, I just do not know; nor do I know how often I would need to be in the pool practicing these elements before I would learn them well. M thinks I need to get comfortable having my head under the water, and the rest will fall into place. That will simply take time. I am so envious of my children and their familiarity with the pool. This one lesson has also given me enormous sympathy for their struggles and frustrations, my eldest son particularly, who looks ... well, who looks a lot like me when he swims, head bobbing up frantically trying to breathe, stopping in the middle of the pool to stand and rest.
Kid, I get it.
Strangely, I don't feel discouraged. I feel humbled, but not discouraged. And I am immensely glad that I started this project. I've always wished I could swim, but have never done anything to improve my skills. Why not? Why does it take an invented project to kick me into the pool, into doing something I've always wished I could do? That thought makes me a bit sad. What else am I not doing, where are other points of inertia in my life?
:::
My husband works in the rehab industry, and is very interested in the concepts of tolerance and endurance. He says there is no real way to measure endurance and tolerance, because both are different from person to person, and are dependent on outside rewards. For example, if you've been injured on the job and are in rehab recovering, and you are performing a test meant to measure endurance, two people with the same injury will perform differently depending on whether or not they liked their job. If you love your job, you can tolerate more pain and endure longer. You are motivated. If you secretly always wanted to leave your job, your pain tolerance and ability to endure drop.
How much of what we are able to do, these goals we set for ourselves, has to do with reward? I don't mean monetary or even other obvious rewards, but those ephemeral rewards that are personal, quiet within us, perhaps even unknown to us. You could work hard in a job you didn't love if you thought about your family relying on you to continue. You could rewrite a story tens of times over if you felt you must get it just right. You could do these things without any real external or obvious reward--without getting a raise, or without being published--simply because they are connected to something inside of you that matters. Maybe it's the spirit. Maybe what you're doing is feeding the spirit, and that always feels good, even when it's hard or unpleasant or unworldly.
What is my goal? Just to complete a triathlon? I feel it must be something deeper than that, something I can't put into words, and haven't ever expressed out loud. I want to test my limits (like, for example, the limits of my humility; it was a bit embarrassing, if I thought about it too much, gasping my way through the water, clearly an unskilled novice, for all to see; it is hard for me to admit out loud: I don't know how to do this, or, I'm not very good at this, or, even, can you help me out, please? Being able to go to these places has taken years of experience, and I credit particularly focussing on the rearing of my children, a very humbling occupation). I want to dig deep inside of myself. I want to do something hard, but not impossible. I want to see what my body is capable of. I am thirty-five years old, and I don't know how to swim, and I'm going to learn, and I'm going to swim 1500 metres in a race. (Exhale). It isn't easy to say that, not knowing whether or not I can do it. I am not filled with bravado. But if I don't say it, if I don't believe that it's possible, the only certainty is that it will always be impossible, it will always be out of reach.
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