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Not a "strong" swimmer

Despite my constant urgings that swimming as a workout would eliminate the many injuries he suffers from basketball and soccer, my husband, whom I'll just call Superboy (because he's my personal hero in all things non-swimming), doesn't swim. Or he didn't, until yesterday.

Last night I was just getting ready to go to bed when he said, "Do you have any extra goggles I can have?"

I spun around in my chair and looked at him, mouth open. "Whatever for?" I asked. I've been arguing with him as if he were my child (something I've learned a lot about lately) about the benefits of swimming over injury prone sports, for years.

"These things don't work," he said, handing me a pair of rubber foam goggles the likes of which I have not seen since sixth grade.

"I could have told you that," I said. "But why do you need goggles?"

"Got in the pool today," he said. "But these glasses things just kept filling with water."

I was beyond the glasses-glasses!?-goggles comment already and was glowing with pride that my very non-buoyant Superboy had gotten wet. I wanted to know just how far he swam and how it went.

He told me he went "back and forth four times" in the 25 yard pool. A single 200. Broken, it seems.

"I stopped to rest after each length or lap or whatever you people call it," he said. "Whew. And you realize," he continued, "I went through the deep end where I couldn't even stand up!"

At that point I just had to give him a big old hug. You gotta love the effort. To think that it was actually concerning to him to "swim" through the deep end was just more cuteness than I could take. Sometimes I forget how incredibly hard and scary it is to swim for a non-swimmer. Even a basketball playing soccer star like Superboy.

And so yesterday I swam my multiple multiple 300's thinking of how fortunate I am/we are to have swimming as something that comes so easily. It would be a whole different experience for sure if we had to fret whenever we crossed into deeper waters or whenever we took a breath (my husband is sure he'll take in too much water one of these times and flood his lungs).

Kudos to you all who have taught yourselves to swim later in life. I don't know that I would have had the sticktoitiveness to do it if I hadn't learned right along with reading and writing. It's not an easy process to glide through the water when you aren't used to it. I'd be interested to hear who among you took on swimming in adulthood and how the process went. Leave a comment!

Comments

Peter Borak said…
I took up swimming in college with a similar experience, it was harder than I could have ever imagined. I could only swim one length at a time, and had to stick my whole head out of the water to breathe. Forget about flip turns, I almost drowned from a combination of water up my nose, and ending up near the bottom of the pool. Twenty minutes was an epic workout, and the best part was, I thought the hundred foot pool was 50 meters.

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