learn to swim better

I’ve totally accomplished this and I totally love swimming now. Learned a lot considering where I started, and looking back my goal should have really been “learn to swim” because now that I know what actual swimming feels like I see that at the beginning I started with essentially no skill whatsoever.
Now, instead of timidly accepting that the water as a fundamentally hostile environment, I look forward to diving in— that weightless gliding and feeling of peaceful relaxation of being completely immersed. I’ve crossed hurdles that I never thought I would alone, just by practicing it all eventually gets better.
I still have aspirations of improving my swimming, in the bay with the swells and in the ocean’s surf, orders of magnitude in difficulty beyond the clean an comfortable pool swimming I’ve been doing, but that might be a goal for another summer. I think I’ll not push my luck for now and keep enjoying my regular practice and the local pool.

At least for me it has been. I got a book on swimming which has been fantastic. (haha yeah I know what a dork) It provides a slow progression of steps from holding your breath underwater to back and prone floating, then kicking etc. leading up to the first basic crawl stroke. At first I thought it was overkill but going slow has FINALY taught me to stop getting water up my nose in just about any position and on the times it does happen it’s not enough to throw off whatever I was doing. This is huge and it didn’t even take that long. So now every time I start practicing I start with those exercises to get comfortable in the water. The more I do it the better it gets.
Now my actual crawl stroke is horrible. I might have to go to a teacher for that because I’m just not quite getting the coordination of all the pieces. I mean I swim from one side of the pool to the other, but that’s because I can do that without really having to breathe much, fitting the breathing in so I can keep going is hard.

Or rather I’m working on taking less steps and more floating. I worked on this a bunch last summer and it’s almost time to start again (I love summer and it’s rapidly aproaching) I took swim lessons when I was a wee one, but I didn’t get very far. I have a bad habbit of half-assing my way through things like that, coming up with somthing that’s just good enough to get by and then making it a habbit. My swimming has been like that for too long where I can handle being in a pool where saftey is close at hand and I’ve never needed to swim much more than 20-30 feet or so at a time. My lack of ability also makes me a bit unconfortable around water which I hate, and I’ve simply just avoided being in or on the water for the most part.
Now with learning to sail it’s become even more important to be a strong swimmer. I’m still kind of fumbling with technique but I know I’ve improved a lot now that it’s become a focus but it may be worth it yet to find some kind of lessons to find out if I’m doing it right before I practice much more.