Part 2 of From Drowning to Triathlete Lifeguard

“Hello, are you here for your children’s swim lessons?”

“Uh, no, I am the lesson. I mean—I’m the one signed up for lessons today.”

“Oh. Well, welcome!”

And so began my journey for learning how to swim as an adult.

Looking around, it’s not surprising my instructor thought I was there for my non-existent kids. (This is extra ironic given my desire to remain childfree). Every other person there over the age of 12 was a parent bored on their phones.

It was so odd to find myself alongside children of all the ages when I almost died by drowning. But hey, here I was. Looking around, the kids were making it look easy. They were happy and laughing. The youngest ones were focused on floating on their back, the older ones lapping back and forth. The pool was indoors, the air was warm, and the humidity (or was it my nerves?) had me sweating.

Remember Your Why

Let me back up. Why was I learning to swim in the first place? Well, a group of friends and I wanted to do a trip to Kauai. As it turned out, most people in the group were already scuba divers. And they naturally wanted to make diving part of the trip. Diving was a novel experience that had always appealed to me. But I had also thought of it as something terribly expensive and unaffordable, like skiing ^[1]. Now that I actually had some money as an adult, I was excited to float alongside sea turtles and see coral reefs up-close first-hand.

But of course, to be a diver, you must first become a swimmer. After all, you’ll be in the middle of the ocean! That was my carrot.

My stick was what I thought every time I went to the beach: “I could die here”. Or at the pool: “Man, I wish I could join them in the water”. There was an entire aquatic world that I could not safely enjoy. My childhood near-death experiences had left me wary of the water. I did not want that to hold me back for the rest of my life.

It’s Never Too Late to be a Beginner

It still sucked to go through the learning process. I felt so awkward, like my kid-self was suddenly thrown into my adult body. Here are your new arms and legs. Everything is out of place, and somehow too long and too short at the same time.

And Jesus, I could not breathe! 25 yards (the standard length of an American pool) felt like forever. How was I supposed to get to 200 yards ^[2], the swim requirement for Open Water Diver? And we have to tread water for 10 minutes too?

I showed up to lessons every week (pro-tip: private one-on-one lessons greatly accelerate the learning process but are hilariously expensive). And once I could safely do so, I swam on my own time as well.

A lot of people who don’t know how to swim (~15% of US adults) are embarrassed about it. They feel like it’s like something they were “supposed” to have learned as a kid, like riding a bike (~6% of US adults).

But it’s actually a known public health gap. It’s not individual laziness. Not every community has easily accessible pools or low-cost swim lessons. Not every school has a pool. And much of the US does not mandate swim lessons anywhere in K-12. No parent wants their child to drown. But if you don’t grow up with swimmers in the family, then it’s easy to underestimate the value of swim lessons and overestimate their cost.

In reality, children can drown anywhere they can end up with liquid covering their mouth and nose: bathtubs, buckets, toilets, fountains, and so on. Swimming lessons are a crucial line of defense. They give self-rescue skills and extend the time available for additional help to arrive. In open water (e.g., you fell off a boat on a fishing trip), lifeguards are usually not available at all, and swimming skills are the difference between life and death.

Appendix: Learn One Motion at a Time

Here’s the best introductory video for breaking down the front crawl stroke (what most people call “freestyle”, which is technically a swim event where any stroke is allowed, but most people choose front crawl): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBuoMkJsMsA

The key thing is to isolate individual movements and make each one automatic before combining them. Training aids (pull buoy, kickboard, swimmer’s snorkel, etc.) handle some movements for you until you’re ready for them.