Swimming
- all it
takes is careful
breathing
| BELMONT RURAL: LEISURE |
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Swimming
- all it
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NOTE: The picture is a freebie from a clipart collection and does not exemplify good crawl technique. The head is insufficiently submerged and the arm is far too high. Not that it matters, but the perspective is weird - the pool appears to be a mile long. Retirement may mean an end to work but not an end to exercise. The options, however, can be discouraging. Jogging can wreck knees, hips, perhaps the whole shaky skeleton. You could try one of those machines at the gym if they didn’t hint at chickens and rotisseries. Bestride a bike and you become BMW fodder while tennis boils down to wandering about the court and picking up balls. Walking’s OK but – be honest – is it really exercise? That leaves swimming. The non-damaging form of locomotion where the body glides to greater health. Can’t be true, can it? Any municipal swimming pool during the working week will confirm that it isn’t. Those people are just messing about. No one gets fit floating on their back. But you can get fit by rolling on to your stomach and swimming consecutive lengths. Trust me, I did. Buy yourself a pair of goggles. You may look like a proto-jock,
capable of swimming through brick walls, but swimming pools are disinfected
with chlorine and chlorine is poisonous. You now face your first big test. You’ve decided on consecutive lengths which means touching the end of the pool and turning round to swim back. So you opt for the part of the pool roped off for length-swimmers. And you’re quickly disappointed. Some people do swim lengths but only one at a time. In between they cling to the rail and chat, impeding your turn-round. Why don’t they do their single lengths in the main pool? Because they feel above those swimmers who are just messing about. Others (ladies mostly, I fear) indulge in stately breast-stroke, head well out of the water, one half of a chatting pair. In Formula One this is known as a mobile chicane. Trying to overcome these handicaps I had a bad session and bumped into a couple of other swimmers. An unforgivable boo-boo at the pool. One woman attacked me. Afraid of being done for indecent assault I gave up the municipal pool and went private. During the daytime club pools are used by the elderly and mainly by like-minded length-swimmers. Lanediscipline is informal but there is little messing about. Or rail dangling. You are free to concentrate on technique. The big decision - breast-stroke or crawl? Here I must come out of the woodwork. Nothing wrong with breast-stroke - if anything it uses up more energy. To do it well requires serious co-ordination. And, if it worries you, you can keep your head out of the water although this reduces your efficiency. But once I’d set myself a target of half a mile a session I felt crawl was the way to go. Not for nothing is crawl a synonym for free style. Crawl looks easy but isn’t. Take another glance at the municipal pool. Notice the barrel-chested youths who set out in a flurry of fast crawl then stop half-way through the return lap. To float or do back-stroke or whatever. Why have they broken off from their macho display? Because they haven’t worked out the breathing.
Eventually it begins to make sense. But then comes an unexpected problem. You manage to string together two or three lengths of crawl only to be overtaken by a rising sense of panic. You haven’t lost your puff but you’re convinced that you will! So what? You could touch the bottom with your toes if you wanted. But the panic is real and debilitating. Let’s break off for a moment. Why are we in these uncharted waters? Well, we’ve decided to swim because swimming doesn’t aggravate the arthritis, etc, that often goes with retirement. We’ve accepted that if swimming is to enhance our fitness we’ll need something of a regime – a set number of lengths, later a number of lengths against the clock. And because regimes by definition are boring we’ve opted to swim crawl because it’s the most sensuous way of passing through the water under our own steam. Though the panic attacks are far from sensuous. Alas there’s no instant prescription for overcoming that very special type of panic. It’s probably triggered by an imperfect mastery of breathing technique and it will disappear as mysteriously as it arrived. Have faith. Crawl is worth it. Were you alarmed at that reference to swimming lengths against the clock? It isn’t vital. My first attempt at half a mile (37 lengths in the municipal pool) involved 60% breast stroke, 20% very intermittent crawl and – for all I can remember – dog paddle for the rest. The first time I crawled all 37 lengths the endorphins (so my wife explained) raced inside my body like fireworks. I knew I’d made much better time and on my next visit I used the stop-watch on my £5 Casio (good down to 50 m though I wouldn’t know). I admit to becoming obsessional, and saw an original 35 min cut to 21 min 59 sec where it has stayed ever since. A great improvement? For me perhaps, but not in the real world. As a guideline Olympic swimmers do 800 m in just over 8 min. Now I no longer bother with the stop-watch. Instead I concentrate on smoother turns, a lower head twist on breathing, more horizontal leg action. Occasionally I pass into that state of mind that leaves me wondering what happened to the last two lengths. Last birthday was number 71. Earlier this year I snorkelled off the island of Karpathos in the Dodecanese. Snorkelling is crawl without having to think about breathing. Doodling about I found I’d covered about 1½ km parallel to the cliff path. No big deal except I’d used less effort than I did walking it the previous day. If only I could swim to Tesco to buy the paper. PS. Unable to go faster I decided a few weeks ago to go longer. A mile instead of a half-mile. I'm marginally more tired afterwards but the main problem is keeping track of the lengths. The pool I use is oddly shaped - a length in the centre is 18 m, lengths at either side are 15 m. Not wanting to obstruct other swimmers I stick to the side which means 107 lengths. It's easy to miscount. Best time so far is twice the half-mile time plus a minute. It seems I'm definitely a one-speed porpoise. (May 16, 2007) |
During
much of the crawl stroke the head is submerged. You breathe in by twisting
your head to one side and gulping air in quite quickly; you breathe out
underwater. This is far from natural. An unthinking process is swapped
for one based on a relentless rhythm. Initially it’s hard to take
in sufficient air and to get rid of what you’ve used. You lose your
puff.