When Cindy was about 7 years old, she was standing on the edge of her grandmother’s dock on a canal in southern California. It was a family summer fun day and she was looking at the murky water filled with weeds and big fish. In the background she could hear her mother saying, “I gave Cindy all those swimming lessons and she won’t even go in the water.” Cindy had really liked her 2 summer sessions of swim lessons, 1 each of the last 2 summers, but the only way she wanted to move across that canal water to the small swimming beach was in her inflatable canvas surf mat! She spent hours in the canal and riding waves in the ocean on those surf mats. Just plain swimming was much nicer in a pool!
Camp Roberts, an army base midway between San Francisco and Santa Barbara near the coast of California, became the family’s center of existence when Cindy was 14 years old. The base had an Olympic sized swimming pool which was open regularly for the enjoyment of base families and the troops training there. Cindy was often babysitting some of her 8 siblings, but she still got in some actual swimming. The 50 meters was intimidating, so she swam the width now and then.
Her high school also had a swimming pool, so during the warmer months the physical education classes were mostly swimming and water polo. The college she attended also offered swimming classes, which Cindy did for 2-3 semesters. For these classes, she recalls some low intensity guidance in all strokes, including an introduction to the butterfly, back, and breast strokes. She got strong enough from all the practice that when she saw a pool she would sometimes feel a “craving” to swim laps.
After that time of her life, there wasn’t as much opportunity to swim. She got married to a scuba diver and thought one of them should stay above water and have a better chance of surviving to raise the children to adulthood. Besides, she didn’t have a babysitter. When the kids were grown, she became a certified scuba diver. Scuba is NOT the same as swimming, though. It was a struggle to move at the surface of the water with all that equipment, which sometimes needed to be done to locate and get back aboard the dive boat. Scuba diving has it’s allure and reward, but all of the ocean currents and wave action made swimming on the surface of the ocean less than pleasant. Once, Cindy was nearly lost at sea during a night dive, due to a strong current that kept the boat from being able to get close to her.
Over the past few years, Cindy has occasionally swum laps at the local gym. She has also been snorkeling and scuba diving in Hawaii a couple of times. She likes swimming still, but it is not a priority. It is more inconvenient than other exercise, due to things like limited lap lanes and not wanting to run post-workout errands with wet hair. But she has been interested in my pool.
There was recently the right combination of warm weather and schedules for her to come try it. The 80°F water matched the 80°F air temperature, so it was easy to slip into the water. At first, she just swam around in the still water, seemingly hesitant to turn on the current generator. I guess I hadn’t made use of the remote control clear. When she did turn it on, she started to laugh. I informed her that was a normal reaction. So far, everyone has done it.
Cindy’s swimming looked smooth and relaxed to me, but she said she initially felt a little struggle to stay in the current. She attributed this primarily to her hand entering the water too far out to her side when she was stroking. This resulted in her “pull” not matching the force needed to propel her body against the current. As she tried to compensate for what she sensed, her body would turn the wrong way.
All of this did result in an initial slight sense of nausea, but after corrections were made, this dissipated and was not a problem again. One thing that helped was “pressing” her head into the current so that it was not jostled so much. She was still on the surface of the water enough to breathe well to the side.
She also noticed that it took more concentration at first to breath adequately for the steady pace necessary. However, she didn’t have to think hard to get this figured out and says all the adjustments were almost subconscious. Within the 10 minutes of swimming, she found herself making automatic changes.
Satisfied with this first effort in the Fastlane, Cindy hung around in the pool to help me set up the equipment for vacuuming it. Then, she floated around while I stood on the deck and hunted locust tree flowers on the bottom of the pool with my long handled vacuum. She noted that if she stood with the mirror between her and the sun she felt radiated warmth. She says she wouldn’t mind at all being invited to swim in my pool again.
