Well, I'm not that quite rubbish a swimmer - I've been swimming breaststrokes since I was 5 - but front crawl is an altogether different story.... I never learned as a kid, attending 'swimming school' in the north of Sweden in the middle of May meant many cold and miserable memories and not much inspiration to learn more than the bare essential. As I've been running and cycling more over the last year I've started to dream about completing a triathlon so last September I enrolled at a swim course at the Central YMCA in London to rectify my non-existant front crawl. Poor coach Martin had to drill me over 8 weeks - and not only in front crawl! At the end of the course I had not only learned how to front crawl but also improved my backstroke and started with butterfly....the man is, in short, a miracle worker! My front crawl still wasn't great, especially not when left to my own device. Over Christmas I gave myself a break as my confidence was taking a bit of a beating in the pool just because I didn't feel like a I was making enough progress.
Yesterday it was the first session of the new swim term for coach Martin and getting back into the pool yesterday a bit nerve wrecking. Once in the pool it seemed like that Christmas break had made things fall into place, technique-wise, and I felt like I now could notice what I did wrong and also change it. This morning I returned to the pool for some practice on my own and despite only having time to do 16 laps I still felt like I did some good swimming and that maybe there is a (half-decent) swimmer somewhere inside me...
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