Leap In

by Alexandra Heminsley

  For those first few weeks, you may curse him. Terry writes about swimming with an extraordinary level of enthusiasm: think Everard Digby crossed with a four-year-old describing the Lego they were given for their birthday. However, his book does not approach the basics of front crawl in a particularly accessible way. There are no clear stages for the absolute beginner in the stroke. Instead, his chapters have titles such as ‘A Whole New Way to Train’ and ‘Come to Your Senses’. There is no real entry point for the would-be swimmer who is still struggling to put their face in the water and say goodbye to the shallow end.

  I think Terry is ultimately right in his philosophy. It makes perfect sense, is absolutely doable and is particularly inspiring about the potential in each and every one of us. However, I would suggest using it as an addition, rather than a starting point for the beginner. Although it would be utterly overwhelming if used alone, from scratch, none of us should miss out on his joyful recommendations on how to use the water to our advantage, to feel grace when we’re in it, and to swim smart rather than simply exhaust ourselves.

  Below are the basics on which both methods agree. It is essentially ‘catch, pull, push’ once you’re moving, with three things to remember before that.

  Breathing

  As previously discussed, this is undoubtedly the hardest but most important part of swimming front crawl. It is not instinctive to plunge your head into water. It is not instinctive to exhale deeply when you experience a spike of anxiety. It is not instinctive to relax and become your most supple when adrenaline is coursing through your veins. But it is doable. It is well within your grasp. It is there, waiting for you to master.

  There are many techniques to help you become accustomed to exhaling underwater, from simply emptying your lungs until you’re sitting at the bottom of the shallow end to choosing two-syllable words to repeat underwater so that you find a rhythm. I wish I had an ‘only drill you’ll ever need’-type secret to pass on to you. But the truth is both more simple and more frustrating: you just have to keep at it. As with those first few childhood forays on a new bicycle, or learning to drive a car as an adult, it is only when you are good enough at each of the individual components of the stroke that the click happens and you are not thinking about what you’re are doing: you’re merely doing it. Decide to be relaxed, decide to practise exhaling, decide to invest a little time in working on the stroke: one day, the breathing will click.

  Body position

  You need to be as level as possible with the water’s surface. The snag is, when you are level, you often feel as if you’re swimming downhill – particularly if you are still holding air in your lungs (which can create the effect of having an inflated beach ball beneath your chest) or if you have strong, muscular legs that are more likely to naturally sink in the water.

  There is one simple thing you can do to remedy this: remember to breathe out, so that your chest is not a pointless sack of air but a slick, streamlined piece of swimming majesty, letting your legs rise and your heels lightly break the surface. This will leave you more parallel to the water. The more you exhale, the more confident you will be about putting your head in the water, the better your general position will be.

  But note! At all costs try not to stay in this position all the time. Good old Total Immersion Terry would have you imagine yourself as a beautiful yacht at this point, tilting from side to side at each stroke with a lovely roll. Of course, if you have one arm in the water pulling down, and one making its way up and over your head, you will slip through the water more sleekly if you’re slightly on your side than if you’re doggedly staying flat to the water. Terry has a point, but perhaps not one to trouble yourself with until you’re a few lessons in.

  Finally, don’t forget your head. Yes, you will have to spend a little more time looking around if you’re in open water, but for the rest of the time you need to be gazing firmly down. Your head is heavy: if you are constantly looking ahead, you will start to feel it in your neck muscles before long. (I spent a good few weeks thinking something had suddenly gone wrong with my pillows before I was told I needed to adjust my head position.) If you look down, you need only to tip your face slightly to the side when you breathe, as your head will create a beautiful bow wave ahead of you, just like that streamlined yacht Terry Laughlin likes to talk about.

  Leg kick

  Most people – particularly runners – will be inclined to kick from the knee as powerfully as possible once they’re in the water. It gives you the sensation of keeping yourself afloat nicely, thrusting forward. Sadly, that sensation is entirely misleading. When you’re swimming front crawl – particularly if you’re in open, salty water, or wearing a wetsuit with plenty of added buoyancy – your legs are used as barely more than a rudder. This is almost unbearably counterintuitive for the runner-turned-swimmer, but presumably a lovely rest for a triathlete. Either way, the truth is unavoidable – kicking like a toddler having a tantrum is a tremendous waste of energy and precious oxygen for very little return. You should aim to find the most efficient way of pulling yourself along, rather than pushing your airbag lungs and big heavy head from behind.

  Kick from the hip, your entire leg undulating, your ankles floppy and slightly turned in. Imagine holding a pound coin between your buttocks. You will feel your stomach and hip muscles engage as you gently tip yourself in the water, particularly if you’re in a busy pool with a lot of backwash, or open water with a bit of momentum. At first, it’s eerily stressful to be trying to get somewhere while using your legs as little as possible. Give yourself time – soon the floppy magic will reveal itself to you.

  Catch

  This refers to the angle at which your hand enters the water ahead of you, and what you do with it after that. For this part of the stroke, you want to create the biggest flat surface area, in order to have the biggest ‘paddle’, so that you can move as much water as possible from in front of you to behind you. Think of your flat, downward-facing hand and the soft underside of your arm from wrist to elbow as one single paddle. A lovely long, flat paddle.

  This paddle needs to enter the water fingertips first, slicing into it with your hand at about 30–45°. It then needs to keep travelling forward, underwater, reaching as far as you can. This reach, gliding forward under the surface of the water, is what will transform you from a thrashing, panicking maniac to a strong, elegant swimmer, with plenty of time to both breathe and admire the beauty of the tiny bubbles your hand makes, dancing against the light.

  There are a few things to look out for with this moment of entry into the water. Do not reach too far while your hand is still above the surface. This can cause either your hand to slap down on the water, having left it too late to glide beneath it, or your elbow to flop down and hit the surface first. Imagine you were standing with both arms outstretched in front of you: ideally, the point at which your hand should enter is parallel to the area between your opposite elbow and wrist. (Unhelpfully, your other arm is not there as a guide when you’re actually swimming.)

  While your hand is heading for the water, you also need to be careful not to let it tip inwards, entering thumb-first. This is another of the habits I had picked up as looking very swimming-y, and spent a long time trying to shed.

  Finally, you need to make sure that you keep your hands shoulder width apart. Again, when you’re actually in the water, it becomes horribly easy to misjudge what your arms are doing. After all, all the action is taking place above your head. When I feel as if my arms are shoulder width apart, they are actually almost crossing each other inches in front of my head. When they really are shoulder width apart, I feel as if I’m almost spread-eagled. Countless drills with a plastic pole being held in front of me, fingers skimming first one end then the other as my arms rotated, was what trained me out of this habit, and it’s still a battle to keep on top of it. It is worth the battle, though: staying nice and wide in the water is particularly useful for open-water swimming, when you’ll be rolling a little too,
akin to that beautiful sleek yacht, navigating the seas with grace and ease.

  Once you have completed that moment of glide, and your hand has surged forward as if you were trying to ease something off a shelf just out of your reach, it is time to catch the water. If you have just completed a lovely reach, it is tempting to keep that stretched hand and to push the water down. Tempting, but wrong! Tip your wrist a little, remember that pressing the water away is what propels you forward, and make sure you move the water back behind you, not beneath you.

  Pull

  If you imagine the 180° semicircle that the hand and arm moves in the water from entry to exit, the catch is about the first 45° of it. The pull is the middle 90°. This is a moment where it helps to really visualise which muscles you’re using: instead of just dragging your arm back from the elbow, you are using the power in your shoulder muscles to pull the water from in front of you to behind you, as you swim over it. Your hand and forearm should be working as a paddle again, your arm relatively soft at the elbow so that you clear the side of your body, taking a huge scoop of water with you.

  Water is a thousand times denser than air: think how heavy a bucket of water or a large, full watering can feels in your hand. This pull through the water below you is a big, strong movement, and you want to make the most of it. Getting your hand and arm position right is key to moving efficiently, preserving precious energy and becoming a happy swimmer, but it also takes time and practice. It was only when I was videoed underwater that I realised I was moving my hand right in to below my boob before moving it back out again. It felt like a lovely big swoosh of water I was shifting; I felt like such a swimmy swimmer! But there is no point moving water in an S-curve when you could be pulling it away from you with lots of traction.

  Push

  The last 45° of the underwater semicircle is easy to forget. You can no longer see your hand – it’s on its way towards leaving the water again – and by now your opposite hand is your focus, about to enter the water with a dynamic slice. But don’t forget that hand behind you! There is still more propulsion to be had here, and simply whipping your arm out without letting it finish the stroke can leave you more tired than you need to be. Remember, it’s not how many strokes you can do in a distance that counts, but the length and quality of each one. If you really use your arm, pushing the water away firmly with your hand as it draws up level to your thigh, you will eventually develop a lovely long stroke, with more time for starfish spotting and general meditative bounty.

  Arm recovery

  Finally, you need to lift your arm up and out of the water, ready for the next stroke. This is best done with a nice strong, engaged elbow, clearing the water around you. Some swimmers will leave their arm and hand lower, swinging it round. No one seems to have come up with any conclusive evidence that one style is better than the other, as long as the arm is engaged, not just flopping out of the water ready to slap down ahead of you. When you are tired – particularly in open water – not clearing the waves around you can cause you to judder and pause, messing with your rhythm and breathing, and only making you more tired. Training yourself to have a nice clean recovery is worth it for that moment in a swim when you start to convince yourself you’re too tired to go on: this way, you’ll always have a little more to give.

  I can quite imagine that reading this section all in one go might send you into a spiral of anxiety and confusion. There are a lot of tiny, intricate movements here that require a level of precision combined with a degree of grit. And, of course, it all needs to be done while you’re feeling delightfully relaxed. The single most important thing you need to remember is that this is within your grasp. It is not impossible, it is simply unfamiliar. Like learning a dance step, or the route for a new car journey, or simply mastering an over-elaborate TV remote, what at first seems to be an impossible amount of new information to absorb can, and will, become second nature with a little practice.

  And I do appreciate that ‘a little practice’ is an endlessly elastic turn of phrase. To be specific: I could not swim a length, and I took a year-long course of three school terms. There were twelve lessons per term and I missed at least six of them because of illness, deadlines, and perhaps that one time I discovered that all of 30 Rock was on Netflix. It took me about eight lessons to be able to swim. I was still not swimming terribly well, I was exhausted by the end of each lesson, and I wasn’t strong, skilled or confident enough to be swimming in the sea, but I was swimming, with the breathing working correctly. At that point I am sure I could have joined a club and worked with a group to improve, but I was lucky enough to have a good facility at a reasonable price near my home.

  Being taught as an adult can be a dizzyingly horrible prospect: it means surrendering to the fact that you can’t do something, asking for help from people who don’t know you, and trying something that might make you look foolish if you get it wrong. But a handful of lessons and a few hours of practice is a very small investment relative to the joy that swimming can open up to you.

  A good teacher will help you with drills and demonstrations for each of the components I have described to you, building your muscle memory so that the motions start to feel seamless, as one. And once you have that muscle memory, you can pick up swimming whenever you need to, regardless of age, confidence or fitness. Yes, water is a thousand times more dense than air, but that can be a positive as well as a negative: you will avoid impact pain, feeling support from the water instead; you can learn with far lower risk of injury from falls, trips or sprains; you can exercise even when feeling weak, sad or otherwise injured.

  The single best thing you can do if you want to swim well, or swim far, is to work on your stroke. I don’t mean endless aggressive drills or giving yourself a hard time for being less than eel-like after a couple of months. If you focus on aerobic fitness, speed drills or muscle capacity too much or too early on, you will only build strength and fitness around bad habits and set yourself up for working hard without getting as far as you could. Sure, it can be satisfying to train hard with some cardio drills, or to do shoulder weights to build your muscle mass. But it won’t hold your attention in the water over time.

  Instead, you want to pursue the moment when swimming starts to feel like one continuous, flowing movement. Your arms wheeling, your heart gently pumping, your hips and shoulders rolling in synch as your core muscles stay engaged, working with the water as your mind slowly becomes soothed by the beat of your breath: that is what I mean by working on your stroke.

  The purest joy that swimming offers is the delicious rhythm, the state of flow, that you can experience – particularly in open water, uninterrupted by turning. As the lovely Terry Laughlin puts it, ‘Pursuit of Flow, more than the willingness to train hard, is the surest path to swimming your best. What activity could be more perfectly suited to Flow State than swimming?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Your Body, Swimming

  Our anxieties around swimming are apparently infinite. But, as Patrick told me that first day, they are not always irrational. Swimming can be dangerous, it can be terrifying, and we should exercise due caution, understanding the risks we’re undertaking and working out how to overcome them. But what are myths and what are facts? And how can we most effectively help ourselves? What follows are the top ten questions that seem to come up time and time again, and the best ways to deal with them.

  1. I’m worried that swimming is very dangerous – don’t a lot of people drown doing it?

  There are many highly valid reasons to feel anxious about swimming. People do die in the water, and often they drown. The last available annual UK statistics, from 2013, state that 381 people died in the water that year. That seems like a lot: more than one per day. After all, it only takes 2–3 pints of water to drown the lungs.

  However, not all of the cases recorded were actual drownings. Some of these people will have had existing medical conditions, or emergencies such as heart attacks that could well have taken place
somewhere else; it’s just that they happened to be in the water. Some will have been accidents, such as tripping and falling unconscious before reaching the water, or people jumping in when intoxicated. And then there are the risks of cold-water immersion, which I will talk about later in the chapter.

  The fact remains that 381 is a scary-sounding number, and a startling one compared to many other recreational pursuits or ways of keeping fit and healthy: it is a valid reason to feel anxious about getting in the water the first few times. If you can’t swim properly, don’t get in unless you are in shallow water. Make sure you know how deep the pool is, or what the tides are doing. Swimming can be dangerous.

  But to put it in context, 1,700 people died in car accidents that same year. That is over four times as many people, but few of us think twice about getting in a car. Everything we do is a risk to one degree or another. I believe the benefits of swimming far outweigh the risks, especially to the sober, sensible and considered swimmer.

  2. Is chlorine bad for me, or will it ruin my skin, hair and nails?