Learning to Run Before You Walk

Well, I went and did it again.  Those of you who know me won’t be at all surprised to hear that I’ve bitten off more than I could chew again.

  The assignment was to learn something from an ‘expert’ (someone who can do what I wanted to learn) that could only be learned interpersonally.  Well, my first thought was about how I’ve always wanted to be a better swimmer. Now, to be fair, I’m not a hopeless swimmer.  My freestyle stroke actually has some thrust (although it’s the only stroke I know), and my build makes me about as buoyant as a bobber (or a duck, for you Monty Python fans).  To make it even more interesting, I thought that learning a more intense stroke would be good for me, for working out and trimming up, so I picked a real doozy, as they say.

I already knew that my roommate was on his high school swim team, so I asked him if he would mind terribly teaching me how to do the butterfly.  He said he wouldn’t mind, so we decided that we would do it on the next clear day.  That was almost a week ago.  Finally, with the deadline in sight, we decided we would just have to brave the elements, and we were just lucky enough to catch a break in the rain, so we went out to swim. Here's how we started:

Well, as you might have realized during this clip, I have very little aptitude for this.  Aaron (my roommate) gave me a brief explanation of the technique, then we headed out to the pool.  By the time I was at the pool, I had a definite deer-in-the-headlights sort of a feeling, but there was no turning back now! I got in the pool and started flailing limbs around wildly, and *somehow* got my head out of the water enough times that I didn’t drown. 

After maybe twenty minutes in the pool, I managed to get a pretty good hang on it, all things considered.  Aaron had some really good ideas to help me get the hang of moving my feet and body in time; he made me practice swimming with just my feet with my hands on a basketball, and at one point he actually laid down on a chair and demonstrated out of the water what my body was supposed to look like as I moved through the water.  I would rate him as an excellent teacher, and myself as a…how can I put this gently…slow-to-average learner?  Maybe the most important thing I learned from this experience, though, is that I ought to *maybe* learn how to do more than freestyle and floating before I try “one of the hardest swimming strokes.”