Swimming is the hardest of the three sports for me to train. It's boring as shite and practices are held either at sparrow fart (5:30 am, 30 minutes from home) or evening (soon to be 9 pm) in DC. And there's this one drill that we do (swimming on our backs, arms stretched above our heads - the aim is to learn to swim streamlined and strengthen our kick) that I absolutely hate. I swim crooked, risking crashing into the others swimming down the other side of the lane, and I get water up my nose. My coach laughed when I announced that I'm "no good on my back." Oops!
Over the past 8 weeks, I've been dutifully swimming twice a week and I know that I've made progress. Swimming is something where form is everything. The smallest change in arm position, or hip rotation feels as though I've grown a second head or third eye. My shiningest moment came when my coach was telling us to press our chests to the bottom of the pool, pull in our stomachs and stick our butts up. I pushed off from the wall, muttering to myself "boobs, stomach, ass" which set everyone else off laughing. The strange thing was that I don't even remember saying it, I was so tired and trying to concentrate. But it does make it easier to remember to think of swimming form as being all "Tits and Ass."
But, tiring and difficult as it's been to gain a modicum of comfort in the water, there have been moments - 25, 50 yards at a time - when I feel supremely streamlined and as though I'm flying in the water. Those are the moments when I rock from side to side and move so fast that I turn my head just above the water line and breath in the air pocket formed by the wake of my forward motion.
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