Lessons From Teaching Swimming

The best way to learn something is to teach it.  As a part-time swimming instructor, I know how to swim, but in teaching swimming there are certain principles that I must relearn for life out of the water.  Principles that make me a better person.

1. Prioritize breathing. A woman I was teaching once would swim a few strokes, then stand up – swim a few more strokes, then stand up again.  Each time she stood she’d be panting and wiping the water from her face even before her feet touched the bottom of the shallow pool.  My first assumption was that she tired easily.  But when I talked with her, I found that she was actually out of breath.  During those few precious strokes before standing, I saw her breath, but she wasn’t getting enough air with each breath she took.  Keeping her brief swimming rhythm was more important to her than breathing.  I told her that it’s more important to breath than it is to stroke.  I told her that eventually she will be able to do both well, but for now, she should prioritize breathing.  If she needed more time to breath, she should take the time, even if it meant her rhythm was uneven. Take the time.  When she did, she swam longer.

Every day I sit in front of my computer screen and bang my way through email.  Sometimes I skim through and deal with the more important items first.  But I easily get a sense of urgency and just jump in and slash away – first come first served.  Invariably I get myself bogged down in one task or another, one email request or another, one remote emergency or another.  I stop thinking and just go.  And when I do that, I forget to breath.  I stand up and cease effective work, complain about fatigue, and all too often avail myself of any number of distractions on my screen.  But if I remember to breath through my tasks, breath through my email strokes, breath through my day, I won’t have to stop nearly as often.

2. There’s no rush.  Another woman I was teaching was performing swimming strokes as if she was being chased – a little frantic and clearly faster than was comfortable.  Then when she stopped at the other end of the pool, she would gasp for air.  Some people think that if they don’t swim as fast as they can, they’ll sink.  But swimming isn’t a race, it’s a dance.  You flow through the dance with the water.  And when you flow nice and easy, the water will support you.  It’ll hold you up and keep you going with little effort.  You can swim fast or you can swim long, but you can’t swim fast for long.*  Let the water support you.

When I was a young parent, I worked all the time – at my job, at home with family duties, at home with take-home work, then as a parent in grad school, plus grad school homework.  I can’t keep that frantic pace anymore.  But I know that there’s a balance to find in my life now where I can be more efficient and effective with less overall effort, relying a little more on experience.  No doubt hard work is important.  But it’s also important to understand that one can work hard or long, but no one can work hard for long.  Unless you’re being chased, don’t rush through life.

3. No drowning.  On the first day of a series of private lessons with a 6 year old who loved being in the water, I found that he especially liked swimming under water.  I know this because he showed me at every possible opportunity.  This was fine, but there were a few surface skills that he needed to master first in order to move up to the next swimming level.  One of those skills was treading water.  The problem was that this kid’s little legs and hands where not yet efficient at keeping his body up and head above water.  Which for him was fine, since he was comfortable just sinking under water.  But what his instructor saw when he attempted to tread was the waterline start at his neck, then rise to his chin, then move up to the back of his ears.  Standing in 4 and a half feet of water, I was able to calmly reach out to him, grab him under his arm and guide him over to the wall.  “First rule in my class,” I said, “is no drowning.”  His puppy dog eyes looked up at me.  “OK” he said.  

I am now the parent of adults who are all out on their own.  I have no pets I have to walk, feed or groom.  While I value my day job, it’s not one that has me developing products or services that are vital to life.  There is in fact no other place in my life where I get to say, no drowning and actively mean it.  My day job pays the bills, but teaching swimming teaches me that I can still make a difference. 

* Adapted from a common saying of cycling trainer Bobby Mac of Quad Cycles. 

** All images taken from the American Red Cross "Swimming and Water Safety" manual.

Breath

Have you ever looked at swimmers or any athlete for that matter, and said, “I wish I could do that.”  They don’t need to be a top athlete, but just a average Joe on a team, or not on a team, doing what they do, working their way through their sport, not at the bottom, but also not at the top.  You might see some small technical thing they do that you recognize only because you’ve tried to do that very same thing unsuccessfully – a particular arm swing during a high jump, the angle of a wrist during a pitch, a catch on the run, or a flip turn.  That happens to me a lot – Man, I wish I could do that!  And often it comes down to breath. 

Last year I was at the gym sitting in the hot tub – I LOVE hot tubs – and I was watching an older gentleman also in the hot tub as he watched a young man swimming laps in the pool just a few feet away.  The older gentleman was probably in his late 60’s, was rather thin and wearing a Speedo.  I’ve noticed that older guys don’t wear Speedos unless they wore them for a legit reason when they were young.  And they wear them now whether they’re in the same shape they were in 30 years before or not.  Gut – what gut?  Sometimes that Speedo of today has an awning it didn’t have during their younger athletic days. 

The younger man doing laps was in his 20’s and was chugging along freestyling at pretty good clip, doing fast open turns at the walls and an occasional flip turn – lap, after lap, after lap.  The older man stared at him with a fascinated look and I wanted to know why. 

When the younger man stopped, the older man said, “Hey, so are you a triathlete?”  “Yeah, how’d you know?” the younger guy asked.  “You’re breathing.”  “Oh yeah, on both sides?  It really helps,” said the younger guy.

The older I get, the more I see how much of life comes down to breath. I knew of that thing the younger guy was doing – bilateral breathing.  I read about it.  But man I wish I could do that.  My regular right hand breathing seemed so comfortable.  Why should I learn another way to breath?

When I first learned to use a mask and snorkel, I found the whole practice was mostly about breath.  If you’re in the ocean, you can distract yourself with cool things to see, but when I’m in the ocean or pool, my mind is focused on my breath.  What it sounds like while I’m forcing air in and out of a plastic tube, how I continue breathing even with the occasional intake of salt or chlorinated water, what it feels like to hold my breath when I dive below the surface, how much force I need to blow water out of the snorkel when I resurface.  Snorkeling is not about swimming, it’s about breath.

When I learned SCUBA, I had to relearn to breath and control my breathing no matter what.  “Never hold your breath – always breath,” my instructors would say.  Completely surrounded by water, exploring a strange new world that you are just visiting at best, SCUBA claims to be about fun and safety.  But when you’re down there with your life strapped to your back, everything you see is silent and the only thing you hear is the rhythm of your own breathing.  Be calm – in and out.  SCUBA offers a level of inward focus that would be helpful on dry land.  Because down there, when you get excited, you hear your life rhythm change and it engulfs you.  Be calm – breath.

During WSI training the instructor said, “OK, now I’d like to see you breath every third arm stroke.  Bilateral breathing.  It makes you swim balanced.”  He said it as if to say, of course you know how to do this and have been doing it for years.  So go do it.  With the image of the young man at the pool in my head, I just did it.  I did it!  Another hurdle of WSI overtaken.  I can breath balanced!

One might say, So what? Everybody does it. What’s the big deal about breath?  The most common thing is also the most precious.  Perhaps it’s for more than the obvious reason that if we don’t breath we die.  We are made of breath.  When we don’t breath, we reject who we really are. There is that bible verse in Genesis that says, “…the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

We are more than flesh, we are made of sacred breath.  Being in water helps remind us how important that is.

copyright 2010 Kevin Brooks