ladyofastolat | Swimming

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Swimming

I can't swim. The reason is quite obvious to me. Neither of my parents can swim, so I was never brought up to be happy in water. They didn't want me to be like them, so they did send me to swimming lessons when I was 8 or so, but then I'd already had 8 years listening to my Mum's terror of water. "You can never trust water!" is one of her most common sayings. She won't say, "Oh, look at that lovely babbling brook!" just, "Oh no! Step away! There might be a flash flood!"

I had a series of lessons, but in the end, the teacher threw me out of class. "I wash my hands of her," he said. "She can swim, but thinks she can't." Looking back at it, this seems quite shocking to me. I hope it wouldn't happen nowadays, and that children like me are given the help they need to build up their confidence, and aren't cast out in shame. He was on to something, though. In Primary School swimming lessons, my teacher noted that I could swim (well, sort of; it was a frenzied doggy paddle, since I didn't want to risk getting my face wet) when wearing flat armbands that I thought had air in them, but couldn't swim without them. She found this quite amusing, but didn't follow it up.

We had swimming lessons at secondary school (aargh, those memories of easing my painful way into that hideously cold outdoor pool!) and the teacher was similarly unsympathetic. (Not surprising, this. This was the same teacher who snapped to my Mum, "she's an intelligent girl; of course she can play hockey.") She once decreed that nobody could go to lunch until I'd swum a width, and made the whole impatient class watch as I flailed in my desperate doggy paddle, half my upper body out of the water. I did my width, but it certainly didn't fill me with any desire to ever get in a swimming pool ever again.

I remember being on the Arthurian North Wales pilgrimage in 1993. It was gorgeous weather, and we all went down to the beach at Harlech. Everyone else ran out on the long sands, into the shallowly sloping water, and out into the distance, to swim under the blue sky. My fellow non-swimmer and I stood watching them, and both said that this was the first time in years that we wished we could swim. I almost felt the same yesterday, when having lunch down on Ryde Sands, a similarly shallowly sloping beach.

Maybe I should try to learn to swim. Pellinor keeps offering to teach me, but the trouble is, when you can't swim, you're not used to wearing a swimming costume - I don't possess one - or appearing in public wearing one. Society decrees that as a woman, I'd have to shave myself in annoying places. I'd have to learn in a public place, where everyone else would see my desperate flailing. I shudder at the memory of the horrible cold of it, and the smell. There's just so many reasons (excuses?) not to. But maybe I should...

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To be fair to your hockey teacher, Morris Dancing is a kind of rhythmic hockey, so she had a point.

I quite sympathize re. the swimming, though.

but it's lovely once you're in...

more seriously, round here there are adults only lessons and even one to one coaching which should be less scary.

I hated sport at school and only discovered I liked and was good at it when I went to university. ho hum.

G can't swim - well, like you, she can more or less struggle out a length in an interesting one-armed front crawl style (she's a bit better on her back). School have washed their hands of her (they just kept sending me plaintive messages saying "get her extra lessons" - which she's been having for almost a year now). She really doesn't enjoy swimming lessons, though she is actually quite confident in the water and enjoys swimming with us, just not anything that involves acquiring some kind of coordinated style which might enable her to stay afloat without expending vast effort.

At the moment we're trying to decide whether to force her to continue with the extra lessons, or to agree that since she's had a year of them, and can now swim 25 metres unaided, that we should all give it up as a bad job.

I'm not sure quite how this is relevant - except maybe your lack of ability isn't entirely because of your parents (B and I are both moderately good swimmers) - some people obviously just find the whole thing really difficult.

You have my sympathies. I too have a checkered past with swimming lessons.

When I was young, maybe 7 or 8, my mom signed up my sister and I for swimming lessons at a public pool. I don't remember much about them, except being tossed into the water and told to "Swim out to the teacher!" And actually, I take it back. I remember stark terror.

I figured I would just never learn and that was fine by me. Then in my first year of high school, as part of our P.E. class, everyone had to take swimming. And everyone had to pass. The first day we all got in the pool and the teacher told us to swim down to the other end of the pool. I looked up at him and said, "I can't." He pointed to the far end and said, "Swim down there." This little exchange got repeated at least one more time that I remember, and then finally I set off. I imagine it looked a lot like your desperate dog paddling, and I very definitely kept my head and face far above the water.

I was fortunate, though, that my teacher wasn't a complete ass. He agreed to coach me in private lessons during my study hall. So for a few weeks I went to the pool instead of study hall, and he taught me several swimming strokes.

If you can find someone to give you private lessons, I highly recommend it. I still don't swim "right" (i.e., with my face in the water) but at least I can swim and I do enjoy it.

Learning to swim is a great idea! Particularly when you live on an island!

You'll look a damn sight better than me in a swimming costume and I gallumphed cheerfully into the sea yesterday. No doubt there were random hairs but hey, I'm a woman in my 40's. Nobody was looking at me, and in the water, all seals are grey anyway. Sundress off, into sea, swim, hop out, towel on.

You could even wear a swimdress with a little skirt if you are worried - there are some quite cute ones about?

School PE teachers were the pits. I do hope they have improved.

Ugh at that teacher - I hate teachers who bring the students into it like that. It makes things harder for everybody.

Personally, I think swimming is great, mostly because I find it really relaxing as an activity (unlike most excerise which I view as faintly stressful) So I would say learning to swim might not be a bad idea - and obviously, it is a good emergency skill.

I never shave anywhere and I still go swimming - screw the public (although nobody has ever commented once on my hairs, most swimming pools aren't full of people who really care) If you decide you want to learn and you don't want professional lessons (which could be out there, there are adult swimming classes sometimes), go early or late. Hardly anybody is there early or late, so fewer people to be staring. Check out the swimming pool of your choice, find out if they have classes or anything (some swimming pools also have adult only times which can be very good.)

I think there must have been an academy for evil PE teachers, with a mission to put children off sport for life...

I think it's never too late to learn. A friend (in her 60s) recently had some swimming lessons with a tutor who specialises in helping people overcome a fear of water.

Yeah, but when we do stick-clashing dances, it is not at all uncommon for me to fail to make contact with my partner's stick, and have to shout a belated "BANG!" Fortunately this only results in general laughter, and not in an irate games teacher telling me I've let the team down.

I know loads of people who hated PE at school, but have ended up doing at least some "PE" activities for pleasure in adult life. It's really not a good advert for school PE lessons. But, then, I've also talked to lots of people who hated history at school, but have really got into it since then, by way of TV, novels, family history or whatever, so it's not a problem unique to PE.

I'll take a look and find out what adult only classes are offered locally - although I'm certainly not committing to anything yet!

Swimming 25 metres unaided counts as being able to swim, in my book, at least! It's enough to allow you to struggle to the lifebelt if you've accidentally fallen off a ferry, anyway.

Eek! I don't think swimming teachers (or some swimming teachers, anyway) understand the mentality of someone who can't swim and is actually afraid as a result. Fear is a barrier to learning. (I see this when teaching older computer novices who are terrified of the machines.) How is forcing somehow to feel real terror for their life going to achieve anything other than trauma and further loss of confidence? Grr!

Sea swimming definitely appeals more than swimming pool swimming. On a hot day, with a non-scary sea (i.e. gentle sands, no scary breakers) I do sometimes feel the call of the water. Swimming pools I just find quite hideous in every way.

Although hopefully the "living on an island" thing won't become relevant, and I won't end up having to swim to the mainland as the only way to escape some hideous island-based apocalypse.

I can never understand why some teachers - PE teachers, in my experience, but my Mum tells similar tales about her maths teachers - feel the need to publicly humiliate pupils. How on earth can that ever be conducive to learning?

Apparently our nearest swimming pool is closed at the moment for refurbishment, but I might (might) investigate their classes once they open. But maybe I should get a swimming costume first and get out on the beach, to get past that first little hang-up...

That sounds like a good idea. My childhood experiences show that I definitely needed gentle handling with a teacher who would work with me to overcome my fears. Pellinor's offered, but I fear it would end in tears and recrimination.

I love swimming now, but I was a very poor swimmer for a long while - I still hate getting my face wet and I can't/won't jump into water. I have to hold my nose if I duck under, and I try to avoid where possible. We had swimming lessons in the juniors, and I was thrown out of the pool for refusing to jump in the water. The teacher told me to, I said no, he shouted at me, I said no again (I was terrified!) and then he threw me out of the class. I was pretty upset, but I got changed and read in a cubicle for the rest of the lesson!

Truefact: I was a very good swimmer when I was little, but one day Mum took to my regular swimming class and I absolutely refused. I seemed to suddenly lose my ability to swim, and it took many years for it to come back.

I hated hockey.

But you might fall *off* the island while walking, when it crumbles randomly into the sea, and have to swim round to a bit that is more solid! (she says, ghoulishly).

I see what you mean about pools - they do tend to be crowded and noisy and the chlorine... On the other hand, they never have fish in, which I always find a bit disconcerting, and they are pretty much the same temperature all the way down, whereas in the sea you can sometimes get that odd thing where it's comfortably warm on top, but much colder about a foot down! Or odd and worrying currents, or seaweed...

Although - do you actually need to be able to *swim* to go to the beach? Most people at the beach never seem to go in deep enough that they can't touch bottom at least between waves (I prefer not to myself). Maybe you could try it just floating along within easy reach of the bottom, and see if you like it? I'm sure Pellinor can swim well enough to hoik you out if necessary.

It's a great pity Butteller is so late this year, I'd love a chance to go to the beach with anyone that does not sit there on the shore clad in elegant pale linen that subtly expresses the emotion: 'PFFT, HOW CAN YOU SWIM IN THAT???' (Pp *can* swim perfectly well. But he does not Do Swimming Outdoors, except, presumably, in the event of an emergency...)

I tried to learn to swim at school for five years, but it always seemed an odd thing and I never trusted the water. I wasn't frightened of it as such (at least not until I was pushed in by a frustrated teacher) but I still have a problem with it intellectually. Is it atmosphere, or surface? My reaction on getting into the water has always been to curl up, to the puzzlement of those who think one should stretch out. Of course, in any swimming costume one feels dangerously exposed.

Perhaps a combined solution to the problems of a) the sea being cold, b) wanting to look cool, c) wanting to look as if everything is, how shall I put this...neat and tidy and d) not wanting to get sunburnt is to go swimming in a wetsuit. Most of the people you see swimming and surfing in the sea around here do it in wetsuits rather than bikinis and the like except on the very hottest of days.

Not that I'd ever do this in a million years. I'm reasonably happy to swim in a heated indoor pool. In fact, there was a time when I would often go swimming in hotel pools when working away. I can swim pretty well. But I do not get the appeal of swimming in the sea.

I think if a cliff fell off when I was on it, I'd be a bit too busy being dead to worry about swimming. :-O

Fish, crabs, rocks, stones, slimy things, bitey things, stingy things and so on are indeed a worry in the sea. But I find it very hard to resist the visual appeal of sunlight sparkling on water beneath a blue sky. And I love the sound of waves, and hate the sounds of a swimming pool. I sometimes go paddling in sandals, but I don't imagine it will work so well if I was trying to swim.

I guess I have two issues: the being unable to swim issue, and the wearing a swimming costume in public issue. I probably need to get a swimming costume and do some non-scary paddling in it, to get past that part of it. But not in November.

It's reassuring to hear that it's possible to be a keen and competent swimmer without getting your face wet! My problem was that whenever water splashed on my face unexpectedly, or I unexpectedly found my face underwater, I gasped with surprise, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

I don't intellectually accept that it's remotely possible for things to float. It just cannot happen. But, then, I have an even worse problem with flying. I just have to accept that planes CAN fly (magic, surely) and that boats and most other people CAN float. It's just that when I'm in the water myself, I can't believe that I can float.

Lots of people go into the sea wearing wetsuits round here, too, but they're usually young men with bulging muscles and long hair, and they do so while standing stylishly on surfboards. Or trying to. They do try very hard, but we're not quite California here.

That was our reasoning for setting 25 metres as the bar. I think I'd sort of assumed that once you reached 25 metres, you'd basically got it licked and the rest was just a matter of practice and stamina - but watching G swim 25 metres makes me feel exhausted.

Thinking of it, there is now a reasonable market in "modest" swimming costumes for muslim ladies (at least there is in Manchester). They look a bit like wetsuits only less stiff and unwieldy. They wouldn't remove all the potential embarrassments associated with swimsuits, but would at least remove any embarrassment about showing off your body hair.

Good suggestion Philmo! I went into the sea in a wetsuit just yesterday. (I have long hair but am not a young man with bulging muscles.) Re self-consciousness, I get the problem but you do just have to tell yourself the truth, which is that No-one Else Cares. Even a tiny bit.

I went swimming in a pool fairly recently, and it turned out to be "women only night". I had previously had the impression those are a fairly new thing mainly due to demand from Muslim women, and indeed there was one Muslim (I assume) woman there, having a 1-on-1 novice swimming lesson in a burkini, if that's the word, but also lots more very overweight women than you would usually see. I wondered if they would usually have been put off through self-consciousness and felt more comfortable in this all-female session.
-N.

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