Diving In
Friday March 26, 2021 | Filed under:
With another year underway, I did something that might surprise a few of you. I signed up for swimming lessons. That’s right: I never learned to swim. No matter how sweltering summers got in my Indiana hometown, I gave wide berth to rivers, ponds and swimming holes.
All that’s changed.
I signed up for swimming lessons three times a week, determined to prove to myself that I can do the one thing I think I can’t do. It’s part New Year’s resolution and part defiance.
I tried to learn to swim, decades ago, signing up as part of my college’s physical fitness requirement. The class consisted of 30 students and a coach, who asked the first day “Who can’t swim?” The only ones to raise their hand was a kid from Ethiopia and me. Everyone else was allowed to jump in the pool, demonstrate their swimming strokes and get automatic credit without taking a single lesson.
It’s not that I’m afraid of water. I’m just too uncoordinated to master the backstroke, or any other stroke. My college coach compromised, allowing me to demonstrate that I could tread water like a champ. He also spent two weeks teaching me how to dive, which I somehow mastered. Without actually learning to swim, I finished the class in 1982 – and continued to avoid water at all costs, despite frequent vacations by beautiful oceans.
Below is my graduation picture after 12 swimming lessons. I’ve moved from pool Luddite to being able to free-style and backstroke, float on my back and face across the pool, dog paddle, and successfully sink and sit in eight feet of water and then resurface like a wonky World War II submarine. The plan is to take another 12 lessons to figure out breathing and inch away from an embarrassing style.
Meantime, college buddy Amy Richardson Brown trekked to her attic to recover 40-year-old Ball State photos of us in Swimnastics 101, a shared phys ed elective and likely my last “professional” time in a pool. (It was dress up day for some forgotten reason.)
Sometimes we let aging become a kind of hall pass to avoid new experiences, saying far too often, “I’m too old to…” With these recent lessons I proved I can try something I’ve never done, get proper coaching and strive for success. Who knows what I might try next?
