So You Think You Can Swim

Do not try and learn to swim by reading about it in a book.

You will drown.

I can't make up my mind what's more confusing, the diagrams or the descriptions.  Fortunately, I already know how to swim so I recognize how ludicrous it is to think you can read a chapter on freestyle and then go dive in the water and do it.  Can you pick up a few tips on fine-tuning your stroke?  Yes.  Will you learn enough to keep you from dying a slow, horrible death?  No.

The swimming leg of the triathlon is the one I'm most nervous about.  As I mentioned, I can swim, quite well in fact, but I've never swam competitively.  Growing up, my mom often encouraged me to do so since I would play in the water far longer than my best friend (poor skinny thing had no body fat like me to keep him warm) and I loved every second of it.  Here's the thing though, my little secret;  I'm fairly terrified of water.

Swimming in a lake or pond is scary, of course, because of the murky water and the weeds brushing your kicking feet.  Just thinking about it gives me the willies.  Remember the underwater task from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?  I imagined grindylows decades before JK Rowling's chilling descriptions.

As for the ocean,  when I was about 12 my family was vacationing at the beach house of family friends.  One morning I was out joyfully jumping waves (all by myself since I was the oldest child and, once again, the best insulated against the screaming cold of the Pacific Northwest coast) when, out of nowhere, a distorted, black face appeared in the middle of a breaking wave thirty feet in front of me.  I was petrified, confronted by a real-life sea monster.  I couldn't breathe.  Probably only about 20 seconds passed before I figured out it was a seal, but those 20 seconds have haunted me ever since.

It doesn't help that I'm obsessed with shark attacks.  And crocodile attacks.  And alligator attacks.  Can you picture becoming a meal for one of those creatures?  I can.  In technicolor, with slow motion, and multiple camera angles.  (Damn you, Discovery channel.)  Horrifying.

You might assume I feel safe in a pool, but I don't.  You see, there are these drains....  Yes, it's true, the drains are, at most, a foot square, but their small size offers no comfort as I swim over them, my active imagination conjuring up all sorts of leviathans wriggling up through the drain holes.  Yes, I realize this is ridiculous, but there you have it.  It doesn't help that exerting myself in water causes panicky feelings as I struggle to take each gasping breath.  Amazingly, despite all this I do enjoy swimming in a pool.  It's fun.  And I'm rational enough to know if some nightmarish sea monstrosity did emerge from the depths of the pool drain, the chlorinated water would probably kill it before it had a chance to devour me.

Probably.


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