Light at the end of the pool

Before today (with apologies to Everything But The Girl), I couldn't point to anything in my swim regimen as progress. I was flailing. I wasn't making any kind of distance. The only positive, if you can call it that, is that I've become less uncomfortable in a shower room full of naked men.

I had to come to grips with the fact that, if I am not simply afraid of water, I am at least frightened of drowning to the point that makes swimming impossible.

Shane, my boss, recommended the breast stroke. "I can go forever on a breast stroke," he said. (BTW, I have also coerced Shane into registering for the triathlon. He's already done one, about two years ago, which means he's done one more than Brian and I combined.)

I'd already dismissed the breast stroke as too inefficient and slow. Then the thought crossed my mind: Probably, no one's ever won a triathlon swimming breast stroke; on the other hand, no one's finished a triathlon after sinking to the bottom of Lake Ontario. The object being finishing, not winning, I gave breast stroke some reconsideration.

I was won over by a video from a clinic called Swimming Without Stress (just the name made me feel better). Ian and Cheryl Cross run this British swimming school for aquaphobes and others trying to improve their performance in the water. The video demonstrates the basics of the breast stroke, all with Ian's soothing narrative ("Look up at the hands ... hello ... kick and glide").

I watch this four-minute video probably half a dozen times a night, and I'll even sneak in a peak or two at work. It's almost hypnotherapeutic. It convinced me that I can swim.

So, I slipped out at lunch to the pool at the Y. I didn't really have a plan, just to work on the basics. First, I swam about 120 metres. Ten metres at a time. I walked as far out toward the deep end as I could, swam back to the side of the pool, and repeated. It made me comfortable in the water and gave me a chance to refine my technique from flailing to something resembling swimming. Then I swam a couple of lengths.

Interesting difference from trying to swim a front crawl. First, I was more comfortable diving slightly under the surface of the water, whereas with the front crawl, it was a struggle to get my face in the water at all. Diving under also "presses your buoy," as Emmett Hines says -- pushing your full lungs down balances you in the water. My technique was not flawless -- there were some double sculls with my arms when I mistimed a breath, and some double kicks when I didn't get the glide quite right -- but it was definitely swimming. And when I was done, I was looking forward to coming back to the pool. Before, I was dreading it.

The conditioning is still a problem. I wonder if I might have left it too late. Not that I've cut it too close to the race, you understand. But that I've left it too late in my life -- too late to stop smoking, too late to resurrect my physical fitness after so many years of a sedentary lifestyle. I've got 17 weeks left to answer that question.