Learning to swim

Memoirs of a little girl who cannot swim

My black bathing suit with ‘Carleton’ across the front doesn’t really say ‘Carleton’.
What it says in neon letters 12 feet high is, ‘I can swim!’ I don’t really believe it yet, but it’s a start.

For almost a year now, I have been a member of the Carleton University Masters Early Birds. I am easily identified as by far the slowest of the slow in the slow lane. I provide passing practice to others.

"After the first couple of weeks, I thought you’d leave for sure," a member of the group told me last fall. She was giving me a compliment. "So did I," I replied.

I have never felt so intimidated, scared and out of my depth in my life, as I feel in the Masters’ swim group.

I wear my waterproof watch and obsessively sneak peeks underwater to see if it’s over yet.

So why am I there?

Because for the first time in my 57 years I could dream of it. Terrible swimmer that I am, I could be close enough to try.

Until I watched the Varsity swimmers training in the morning before our Masters group started, I hadn’t even known what "real" swimming looked like.

It is not a part of my heritage. Among my early memories is a jerky black and white home movie of my family and me at the concrete swimming pool at the Di Lido Hotel in Miami Beach. I am splashing and dogpaddling, head above the water pretending to swim. My parents are nearby, my mother in the same padded and boned blue Esther Williams-type bathing suit I remember her wearing for 25 years. The same for my father’s beige bathing shorts. They never wore out, because they never went in the water. I never saw my parents in the water.

When I was old enough to go to the beach myself, I walked with a friend to Brighton Beach on the Rideau River, and we’d lie on towels, read junk and fantasize about the lifeguards.

At summer camp, I flunked my Junior Red Cross, as well as the "lengths" test to be allowed to swim in the deep end at general swim. More lying on towels in the sand.
And for years onward, swimming just wasn’t something I did; it was something I pretended to do - until May, 2000.

As her Mother’s Day gift to me, my then 20-year-old daughter agreed to take me into the pool at the Y and teach me. I had never worn swim goggles or swum a lap before. I didn’t then. I’d collapse, hugging the wall, half way down a lap.

Shortly after, I went to the pool for the first time myself. Avoiding the lifeguard’s sympathetic gaze, I swam a pathetic lap and then while panting at the side, noticed those floaty belts in a bin. Aha! I figured if I wore a floatation device, I wouldn’t worry so much and would be able to work on strengthening my arms and legs. I didn’t even know how to keep track of how far I’d gone.

I signed up for Learn to Swim adult classes at the Y.

It was a milestone day for me when I did a whole swim lesson without putting on the floatie belt.

Fresh with enthusiasm - or oxygen deprivation - I signed up for a Try a Tri Triathlon that May.

On May 26th, 2001, I finished the Somersault Early Bird Try a Tri Triathlon. After two laps in a 50-metre pool, the biking and running was just an afterthought. Totally spent from the pool, I couldn’t believe that other people swam further.

That winter, I also took a triathlon training course at the Y - lots more laps, but little improvement. I still remained stationary while kicking a flutterboard, and went backward while attempting the breaststroke.

The training began easily enough, but like cakes on a conveyer belt, it kept coming faster and faster and soon I couldn’t keep up at all.

During that year’s Early Bird Sprint Triathlon, when I exited the 100 metre Carleton University swimming pool after my 500 metre swim, there was no one else in the pool area at all. I was a sea creature crawling onto a barren land. When I hurried in the pouring rain to my bike, it stood out in the transition area all alone. But no more "Try-ing", I had done it.

On to the next step, a terrifying Carleton Place Triathlon in "open" albeit shallow, water in July. Unimaginable, and once again last, but once again I did it. Just.
It was time to get better.

And that brings me back to my Master’s group, 7:30 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, and optional Saturdays. On my first day in the pool, what I didn’t know could fill an encyclopedia. The daily workouts on the blackboard were from a foreign country.
For instance, I didn’t know that IM was individual medley - fly, back, breast, free; I thought it was Ironman. As I bumbled along, I said "sorry" so many times it blended into one long apology to my fellow swimmers.

I would arrive at work afterward, late, frazzled and famished.

As for the bathing suits, last fall, coach Lynn Marshall asked who wanted to participate in the order. Well, for such a badge of honor, I decided to hang on in class at least until the suits arrived. I waited.

The man who had taken the original order died. A re-order went in.

Waterpolo suits came by mistake, and were sent back.

While I waited, my flutterboard and my breaststroke actually began to move forward.

And as this fall’s swim season begins, I’m still in the group, hanging in as tough as the Polyester in those bathing suits.