The more we talked about what a good stroke was supposed to look like, the more I realised that what I had based my own Frankenstein’s monster of a style on was a messy amalgam of swimsuit advertisements, music videos and Instagram posts. I had never really stopped to study what someone moving fast in the water in front of me was doing – largely because of pool etiquette, but also because I had fallen for the same trick that I had with running: I had believed what the most dynamic, glossy-looking images presented to me had suggested. With running, it was a series of promotional pictures – daft photographs of six-foot models flying through the air in jewel tones and hi-tech fabric, often landing aggressively heel first, their faces a picture of total serenity. Trying to copy this was about as practical as it would have been attempting to give birth based on what I had seen on a soap opera.
Unpicking my problems – both mental and physical – seemed a ridiculous undertaking that first week. But the instructors assured me it was doable in time. Julia herself, a beacon of calm on the side of the pool, told me that she had started as a student on this very course only a few years ago before going on to become an instructor. It became clear that in order to break the cycle of the old, incorrect and inefficient muscle memories that I had randomly stored, I needed to take on a series of tiny, broken-up pieces of information, introduced to my body (and mind!) slowly, week after week. Unlike running, where I headed out one day and didn’t look back until I hit a wall of injury, this time I was going to have to destroy and rebuild from the very beginning.
It was a long autumn. As the summer of our wedding turned slowly into a bleak, rainy and windswept winter, once a week, whatever else was happening, I turned up for my swimming class. Almost without fail I would arrive consumed by a sense of dread, convinced that this would be the week I finally admitted defeat. I would dither whenever I could, playing for time, clinging to the side of the pool to catch my breath and sip my water. But I always left the pool convinced that I was improving. And it wasn’t just the stroke that started to feel important. It was the feel of the water, the way it held me where it never used to, the slippery sensation of being nearly naked despite the onwards march of winter, the curious roar of underwater as I let my head plunge in length after length, regardless of my misgivings.
The variety of drills we did now seemed infinite, but week in, week out, the basic structure of the lesson remained the same. We started with a ten-length warm-up (much of which I swam breaststroke for several weeks), followed by a series of exercises that took front crawl entirely apart then slowly put it together again until what had felt utterly alien became something closer to automatic.
In those first few days of learning to run, it had been all about fitness: in order to run further, or faster, I just had to keep doing it, consistently, and the results began to reveal themselves. With swimming, fitness was secondary to the art of making things easier for myself: by developing a better front-crawl stroke (or indeed one at all), I was nurturing the skill of needing less effort as I swam. This time, fitness could come later.
For the first few weeks, most of the lessons focused on what we were supposed to be doing with our arms. The process of staying alive during this almost vertical learning curve was helped enormously by the use of fins. Like the sort of flippers worn on holiday for snorkelling, but shorter and stubbier, they helped my legs stay up and my body to keep moving forward, so that I could undertake the various arm drills without exhausting myself too much to either concentrate or even continue.
We would swim on our sides, fins on, to get used to the tilt of our bodies in the water; we would pull our arms up along our bodies as if a zip between thumb and side was being undone from thigh to mid ribcage; we would swim holding a plastic pole in front of us to keep our hands spread apart instead of tipping inwards towards each other. We would roll our shoulders forward, one then the other; we would practise breaking the surface with our hands tipped at a slight angle, before stretching even further in front of us under the water, as if reaching for something at the back of a high shelf; we would practise just shoving our hands back along our sides to our hips to make our stroke as long as possible.
I could usually manage these drills, thriving on using new parts of my body, finally surrendering to the fact that learning as an adult was not admitting a weakness but developing a strength. I loved the curious sensation of having my feet in fins, almost divorced from the process of the muscles in my arms, which were growing and learning with every passing week. And once I was strong enough, I loved the help provided by the mysterious float I suppose I had always seen by poolsides but had never really noticed before: the pull buoy. Designed to be wedged between the top of the thighs, giving your legs and bum balance and stability in the water, it slowed my stroke down enough that I was able to swim without fins, while also harnessing my ongoing instinct to kick as hard as I possibly could, endlessly exhausting myself.
As I had suspected, my legs were my nemesis. Every time I lifted my head to breathe, my thighs would start to sink and drag me down. Despite getting my arms moving as they should, I was struggling to put them together into any sort of cohesive movement with the rest of my body. I reminded myself of my new baby nephew, so often caught with one leg wedged beneath him as he struggled to use his core to push himself forward into a crawling motion. He could see he needed to reach, he could feel the strength in his legs, but he just couldn’t quite make that tip into a single, seamless movement rippling from head to toe.
I was learning to love the water, I was learning to trust my arms, and my new muscles were growing – helped now by consciously working on them in the gym to develop stronger shoulders. But I just wasn’t learning to breathe. Again I reminded myself of my baby nephew. Too young to talk, he would nod and smile when we said words at him, but no matter how he shaped his mouth, he was too small to copy us and speak himself. I too was able to listen and nod as I heard how important it was to get my breathing right, but, unable to make my body follow suit, I felt paralysed for much of the lesson: specifically the bits when the fins or floats were taken away and we were asked to swim normally.
As I stood in the shower after a particularly frustrating session, I remembered the conversation I’d had with D the evening of that one-day course. We had been discussing my panic and fury during that day, and I’d tried to understand why even though he wasn’t an especially great swimmer, he had been left unruffled by plunging his head into the water and getting going.
‘Once I’d got the exhaling, it seemed to click into place,’ he simply stated.
The exhaling. It struck me that this was at the root of my problems. It wasn’t the breathing, but the exhaling. I could breathe in; I was desperate to, even if I hadn’t finished breathing out. But here was the problem: the exhaling. Memories of yoga classes, meditation apps and even the simple act of trying to calm myself down before exams, meetings or dates floated through my mind. I thought of running, or having run. Being crouched over on the side of the track, gulping for air, after sprinting practice three years previously.
A deep inhale was instinct. But I was going to have to learn to exhale.
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning to Exhale
Within days of this revelation, thoughts and memories of breathing out consumed me. Whenever I had a moment alone, I would try and think about my exhaling, how it felt, what I was doing and how it connected to what else I was doing. Before this, the most time I had ever spent thinking about breathing was during my ill-fated yoga phase. I’d turned up, week after week, longing for limbs like a pretzel and my own personal slice of calm. I enjoyed the breathing, and was in no doubt that it helped me concentrate and achieve more than I would have been able to otherwise. But in the end I had given up, exhausted not by the exercises, but by the urban hustle of being in rooms packed to the rafters in order to increase revenue, endlessly emailed about loyalty cards and new products, and fed a slow, vague drip of nebulous philosophy about inner peace and miraculous r
ecovery from injury. In short, the vibe of corporate millennial yoga meant my lip now curled at most talk of exhalation.
Yet I thought about it all day, every day. And all night, every night. I had to learn to do it if I wanted to be able to swim. Biomechanically, our heads are the heaviest part of our bodies. At the moment, every time I took a breath in water, I needed to lift my head up, high and long enough to finish exhaling and then to inhale, wasting energy that could have been spent on gliding through the water.
So I would sit, on the train, in cafés or waiting for meetings in corporate lobbies, thinking about my breathing. I’d move my head around, to remind myself how heavy it was – no wonder I was finding it a faff to lift it out of the water long enough to get everything done. On the bus one day I became so entranced by my own breathing that the lady next to me asked if I was okay, or if I was about to pass out. While running, I took to leaving my music at home so I could listen to my breath alone, and learned how much faster I could run while keeping each inhale and exhale steady with the pum-pum, pum-pum, pum-pum of my shoes hitting the tarmac.
While flicking through old photographs with my sister, I saw one of myself when I was still a smoker. I was with a group of friends in a pub, back in the days when smoking inside was perfectly normal. My eyes were smiling at the camera, but my face was turned away and up, exhaling smoke from the cigarette in my hand. I could remember the evening perfectly: a shared birthday party for my sister and me in a pub in an upstairs room in Notting Hill. It was during the brief period that we lived together, both of us single, both of us carefree, both of us smokers. Those few years now seem like madness – today, even walking past someone smoking on the street makes me queasy.
But looking at that image that seemed both so alien and so immediately me, I realised that there was one thing I had always loved about smoking: the exhaling. The moment of quiet when you silently pulled the cellophane wrapping from around a new packet, tapped the end of a cigarette on the box, lit it, and then, after hearing the fizz of the tobacco burning with the inhale … the exhale. The purse of the lips, the sag of the shoulders, the release of the smoke.
When I first moved to Brighton, I had started smoking again for a brief few months. My small flat, from which I could see a corner of the sea, was accessed via a little garden. I would sometimes go and sit out there, particularly during the lonely summer that I moved to the seaside. I’d had my heart broken within weeks of arriving in the city: my new boyfriend turned out to already have a girlfriend, confusingly also called Alex, and was attempting the almost admirable feat of juggling two identically named, very similar-looking girlfriends, in two different cities.
The evening of the day the other Alex emailed me to let me know of her existence (hot tip, adulterers: if you own a house, and therefore a bank account, with someone, don’t expect them not to wonder why you’re frequently withdrawing cash in Brighton all of a sudden), I sat on the stone steps in that little garden, listening to the seagulls above, and opened a fresh packet of cigarettes. I had spent most of the afternoon piecing together a fabric of timelines and lies, slowly realising just how many of the decisions I had made over the last few months had been based on empty promises. As I lit the cigarette, my hand was still shaking, adrenaline pulsing to my very fingertips. The first exhale, and my shoulders slumped. That’s it, no going back, I thought. I couldn’t move back to London, and I would never see that man again.
As my eyes rested on that twelve-year-old photograph, and I remembered that now historic heartache, I saw my relationship with cigarettes for what it had really been. It never was – it never is – about a passion for inhaling toxins. It was about tiny moments carved out of a life pulsating with chaos and uncertainty, a chance to go and quietly let out a deep exhale. A socially acceptable, and understandable, cool-looking exhale. At bus stops when I was fretting that my bus would never arrive, outside pubs when the throb of the music over heightened chat or quicksilver flirtation was getting too much, and on those cool stone steps as I felt my heart softly implode. Each drag, on each cigarette, an exhale: a release.
It was no coincidence that within weeks of starting training for my second marathon, I gave up smoking again – this time for good. I have not had a cigarette even touch my lips since the night of my birthday party over seven years ago. A party where, I now realise, I spent most of the evening outside smoking, as an excuse to talk to the good friend who was to become my husband. That night we both smoked; that night, we were good friends. We had no idea that within eighteen months we would be non-smokers and all but inseparable partners.
The decision to give up was never really taken. I was unwell the week following my birthday so I didn’t smoke, and when my health returned, I never really felt like having another cigarette. Since developing a closer relationship with exercise and my body, it had started to feel increasingly odd, jarring even, to have cigarettes in my life: to feel the exercise-induced burn in my lungs as they cried out for air, to feel them expand like a pair of bellows after a longer-distance run, and then to reward myself by filling them with cigarette smoke. I didn’t want to do it any more, so I didn’t.
Perhaps this decision was made easier because by then the sense of exhale, of release, was occurring as an unconscious response to the deeper inhalations I was taking as I trained and became fitter. Perhaps, like my future husband, the exhale had been there all along, consistent and reliable but as yet going utterly unnoticed for what it was.
No matter how romantic this realisation was, it did not help me in my attempts to exhale in the pool. Increasingly desperate for advice, for anything that might prove to be the magic nugget of wisdom, I endlessly nagged a good friend and neighbour for inspiring hints and tips. We had known each other for years, time during which I had happily assumed he was a committed hedonist and devoted ignorer of exercise. When, to my consternation, I discovered that several times a week he would get up at the crack of dawn to knock out one hundred or more lengths in the local pool, I became convinced he would be able to impart some advice that would change things.
More fool me. The best he ever came up with was to tell me that ‘the only way to swim is to swim’. You can imagine my delight. I was particularly annoyed when I realised that he was only really quoting me back at myself. The previous year, his wife had gone through a running slump, and I had encouraged her to persist, reassuring her that she would definitely feel more comfortable soon. ‘The only way to run is to keep running,’ I’d told her blithely. Yet it seemed impossible to translate those words to the water, even though I knew that clinging to the air – and therefore the carbon dioxide in my lungs – was effectively clinging to damaging toxins.
Another friend recommended trying to hum or shout under the water as a way of pushing the air out with active force. I gave humming a go, but it only reminded me of the years I owned a Vespa and used to drive around London singing loudly under my helmet until a bicycle courier parked next to me at a set of traffic lights pointed out that he could hear me.
I had already given shouting a try, back in the summer, when I would repeatedly attempt to swim alone under the watchful eye of the beach lifeguards. One afternoon, as I was trying to work at home, D had returned early meaning any hope of further work was over. I stomped to the beach before hurling myself into the sea. Unable to swim properly, I spent time treading water before flinging myself into brief, angry attempts at crawl, accompanied by the noise of my shouting as loud as I could under the surface. It was an unsuccessful afternoon all round.
I even confided in an old boss, who I bumped into at a work event. Inspiring and terrifying in equal measure, she had been someone I was almost too scared to speak to in my first job, fifteen years earlier. When she asked how I was, and I told her about my aquatic struggles, she surprised me by confessing to being an avid swimmer herself. Again I begged for advice. This time I thought I was on to something: she suggested that I practise the act of exhaling while not in the water itself. ‘Get a was
hing-up bowl, put it on a table, and practise exhaling while you’re seated in front it,’ she advised. I went home vibrating with excitement about trying my new trick, but the glow didn’t last. Maybe it was the height of the table, maybe it was the size of the washing-up bowl, but I simply couldn’t replicate the sensation of putting my face into a pool, or the sea. The experience led to little more than a fresh insight into a once unknowable boss, and a lot of splashed water to clear up.
Another swimming lesson passed, and still the struggle to fully exhale continued to dog me. At first I had been trying to breathe every second stroke, consistently turning my head to the right. It wasn’t working: the frequency of the breath meant there was almost no time for my much-sought-after glide. As for the idea of finding a small pocket of air in the bow wave created by my head, it was laughable. I was in almost constant flailing motion, legs tipping and head twisting, despite my arms now having a semblance of proficiency. The wave I created was not yet the luxurious, streamlined curve of a plush yacht; more a jacuzzi of panic.
Kim and Julia, who were teaching the beginners’ lane, suggested that I try breathing every fourth stroke instead. Perhaps the fitness I had built up running meant that I didn’t actually need to be taking in oxygen every couple of seconds, and trying every fourth stroke would give me more time to work on my body position and movement in the water, while allowing precious extra seconds to fully exhale. After all, a huge part of the problem was that I still wasn’t ready to snatch an inhale when my head tilted. I promised that next week I would give it my best shot.
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