So today I went to my first ever swimming lesson. I’m also 28 years old. I found out that there’s a learn to swim center a 1.5 minute downhill (ordinary, not electric) bike ride away from my house, which is awesome. The only catch? It was designed for children and they do adult lessons, buuuut you end up in a pool filled with happy, scrawny, screamy little kids. That all swim better than you.

Turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong, swimming I mean. I happily did two lengths of the 12.5m pool with my head out of the water and my legs barely above the ground 0.9m below the surface.  That made me tired, and I know enough physics to know why but have never been able to figure out how to breathe properly.

Luckily the nice swimming coach showed me a thing or two, and when I freaked out about getting water in my ears she also suggested I consider a swimming cap and goggles (aside: I am really struggling to type “goggle” on the first try instead of “google”).  I shall consider that.

Anyhoo, turns out I’m really tense and uptight and uncoordinated when it comes to this breathing thing, although I totally get how it works now.   I probably did about 10 lengths of that little teeny pool in freestyle with a flutterboard, a chunk of pool noodle (the kind that if the pool was a human and the noodle was a noodle, you’d be all like “dude, you’ve got a bit of… On your chin… A little to the left… Back to the right a bit… No it’s on your CHIN… Ah don’t worry it’s just a speck really) and then without them, and maybe 4 of backstroke.

So all up, maybe 175m?  Now I have this goal where I want to learn to swim properly and a long way, and continuously and fast and stuff. So I thought I would start a blog to document my adventures, and hopefully to add some accountability.

My Goals in Top-Down order from most grand and unattainable to least grand and hopefully attainable:

• Swim 1000m continuously Freestyle breathing properly
• Swim 1000m any strokes continuously
• Swim 500m continuously Freestyle breathing properly
• Swim 500m any strokes continuously
• Swim 250m continuously Freestyle breathing properly
• Swim 250m any strokes continuously
• Swim 100m continuously Freestyle breathing properly
• Swim 100m any strokes continuously
• Swim 50m continuously Freestyle breathing properly
• Swim 50m any strokes continuously

In my posts I’ll put little progress bars to show how far I got.

The big goal:

The first one: