Well, there was a span of a year or so, about twenty years before, when I had used a swimming pool and helped my children learn to swim. But time had moved on and the ageing process taken its toll. I could feel the difference this time around. I could feel the stiffness in my body and the lack of rhythm as I swam.
I persisted though. The idea of keeping myself fit was of course foremost in my mind, but I found swimming a very relaxing and in fact very soothing form of exercise. I also found new friends. Fellow swimmers, nearly my age but mostly younger and from different professions. After a swim, we would all meet and sit at a table in the club, have a cup of tea or two and some snacks and chat for a hour or so before going off in our own ways.
I started looking forward to these adda sessions, more so after retirement when time ceased to be a constraint and could be a bit oppressive at times.
Coming back to swimming, I found the initial stiffness gone after a few months. I was swimming normally, but just having a swim for sometime everyday was no longer satisfying enough. I needed something more, something to work towards to, to achieve.I decided it was never too late to learn and I would teach myself to improve my technique, swim better and more effortlessly.
I had no instructor at hand nor at my age, 60 plus already, I felt like going to one. Thanks to modern technology, I had other options. I turned to the Net. I searched YouTube and came across a number of videos on swimming lessons on different strokes. I screened all of them and finally selected some to download. These are excellent videos which I would recommend to any aspiring swimmer. Excellently shot from different angles, underwater or above water, sometimes in slow motion and with commentaries to explain the techniques, these videos were my instructors. I watched them for hours ( cumulatively over a period of time ) to understand the way these elite swimmers swam, their arm and leg movements, the body roll in freestyle, the double kick in butterfly and what not. And I was trying them out in water.
It is one thing to know in your mind how it is to be done, it is quite another to do it in practice. In swimming, and may be in many other activities where body coordination is required, driving for sure, the body has to know. The body has to absorb the knowledge.
The body finally does.
This is not a post about swimming lessons, but one thing I can not but share about swimming which I learnt a bit late in the day, though as a student of physics in my college days, I should have learnt it much earlier. It is the drag or the resistance of water which you need to reduce through streamlining the body and executing the strokes properly that gives the swimmer a greater advantage than trying to apply greater force mindlessly.
My adda also goes on. So also the back problem. That after all is life.
PS. Could not resist the temptation of embedding aYouTube video and giving a link to another. But there are many more for anyone interested including a two part video of Michael Phelps Butterfly with his Coach's commentary.
