Swimming progress

I guess it must have been my dad who first taught me how to swim. He wasn’t a particularly good swimmer, so you can imagine what kind of swimmer he made of me.

Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time in a pool during the summer months as I grew up in Victoria, Texas. We lived just a quarter mile of so from what was the only public pool at that time in Victoria. It was called Pleasure Island; much of the pleasure was buying frozen candy bars at the concession stand with whatever nickels and dimes my brothers and I had managed to pull together. If you found one of us at the pool, you likely found all three brothers at the pool, and I guess in retrospect that is a remembered pleasure.

My first “real” job was as a basket boy at Pleasure Island, working for 25 or 30 cents an hour for Coach Gilstrap. Pool patrons were issued numbered baskets in which they put their clothes and other belongings. The basket boy took care of the baskets while the swimmers swam. It wasn’t a bad job. It was in the shade and I got to swim free on my days off.

You would think with this much early experience around a swimming pool I would be a swimmer. But again, the only instruction I had back then was from my dad. I never really learned a proper stroke, though I prided myself in swimming long underwater distances on my elastic lungs. I swam less in high school, maybe Pleasure Island had closed by then, so my next experience was a semester or two of swimming at UT Austin during my freshman year. The coach wasn’t much engaged, though we did come away with a vague understanding of a crawl, a backstoke, the breaststroke and the butterfly. Mostly we thrashed in the pool at the old Gregory Gymnasium playing a lot of water polo. Final exam was to swim a mile.

That was more than a third of a century ago (it’s scary when I think of it that way). During the intervening years I have rarely done more than swim across a pool now and then before opting to lounge at poolside. Thus my reluctance when this triathlon thing came up. How in the world would I manage even the relatively short distance of 750 meters in a sprint triathlon? The first few times back in the water brought to my mind the image of a turtle swimming with its head high out of the water, while the frantic thrashing of my arms was like a windmill. Be calm, I said to myself, and see what comes. I have gotten a few bits of advice (still need more) and have watched with interest other swimmers of varying abilities. I like to believe I have begun to print that mental image of the good swimmers upon the physical reality of my thrice weekly swims. My distances in the water have increased at an encouraging pace. Yesterday I duplicated that final swimming exam at UT all those years ago, and I suspect I may even know better what I’m doing today than I did in 1967. That’s some progress.