Stranger No More

In terms of swimming, water and I have had a non-existent to uneasy relationship.

As a kid, my considerable girth, thanks to lots of overeating mostly the wrong things, helped me float in the pool, and I could kick fairly decently. But ask me to break into a stroke of some kind, and I would just smile at you quizzically.

Somehow, I managed enough pool time to develop a workable backstroke over the years, but traditional freestyle remained non-existent.

Flash-forward to my late-30s a couple years ago. I had become a certifiable but happy running fool for a few years, but one too many bouts with the dreaded iliotibial band syndrome had made me move to what I considered into a temporary journey into triathlon-training.

Biking would be challenge enough - I hadn't ridden a bike regularly since college, but I knew I would eventually pick up the knack again. And I would need to engage muscles that weren't normally worked during my running workouts, but that would come around eventually.

Swimming, however, remained the elusive, mysterious stranger. Yeah, I could backstroke, but not seeing where you are going is generally a bad thing during a race. Freestyle would have to embedded into my athletic lexicon somehow.

Those first few lessons were fairly laughable. That chubby girth that had helped me float on top of the water was no longer in existence, thanks to my running and better eating habits the previous few years. Another anti-swimmer "gift" running gave to me was the dreaded "runner's kick" - a whirling dervish of little propulsive value that would often times leave me thrashing in place or even traveling backwards, seemingly against the law of physics as I knew them. The 20-yard width across the local pool may as well have been the English Channel with how long it felt to get across sometimes.

Breathing resembled a clumsy, neck-wrenching whale breaching - I hadn't the confidence to breathe out into the water, like you're supposed to do, so I would try to breathe in and out all at once while my mouth was out of the water.

And those drills - they were supposedly helping aspects of my swim I thought I had knew everything about.

Rotation - Of course! That's what planets do on their axis.
Catch - That's something you do with a baseball, yep.
Pull - What, this ain't tug-of-war lessons, right?

Flash forward to this morning. The weather was nasty - dark gray skies which spilled cold rain and gusty winds, not the kind of weather you would want to be in, even in a warm jacket and water-resistant clothing.

But there I was, with a few other more of what I would consider the hardcore and higher-skilled triathletes, dressed in nothing but my polyester jammers, rushing to get my swimcap and goggles on so I could jump in the luxurious steamy-warm waters of the outdoor pool.

Once in, rain peppered the water around, but with earplugs on, the sound wasn't noticeable. The drops themselves splattered about me when I stopped by the side of the pool to catch my breath, or to check out the next routine of the first ever typed-out workout I've ever followed, an experience that was actually very unique, and if I say so, kinda' cool.

I'm still no speed demon in the pool, but I do feel I am progressing. My kick is still a weak point, but I can kick across lengths of a pool with no issue. During this workout, there were times that I could feel two or even three things click at once, if only briefly. In most previous workouts, I'd have a light bulb go off for one aspect at a time, if that.

And oh yeah, I swam over 3000 yards this workout, nearly one and three-quarter miles, and either over 700 or 800 yards farther than any workout prior. Sure, I didn't quite get through the whole workout as written out - yes, that darned slow speed raring its head - but said completion makes for a good goal in the future.

There was a time I considered swimming something of a three-month-stand. Now it's a lot more - I don't know if I'd call it my significant other or even very best friend yet, but it's gone way beyond the stranger status.