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I've been taking swim lessons. I learned to swim when I was very, very young and was a passable swimmer when I was eight or so but as an adult I've found I have shitty endurance and I've known my form was terrible. So, you know, the solution is: find a coach, have them teach me better form!
My endurance is still shitty but things are getting better. One of the things that she hasn't mentioned explicitly but has implicitly a few times, and the thing that has helped the most so far aside from fixing my arms so they're not hideously inefficient, has been relaxing.
It's hard to relax in the water! You're in water! You could drown! You need to keep swimming! You need to do fifteen things at once! But yeah, actually, it makes the rhythm and movements like eleventy million times easier if you're overall relaxed and let yourself move around a bit in the water.
But probably I wouldn't have gotten so far as figuring that out, without someone coaching me. Like, none of this is shit that I couldn't figure out for myself, but -- then again, it is. It's all stuff I know in pieces, not stuff I know how it looks when it's put together.
Once I can swim a couple laps at a time and not want to curl up and diiiiiiie, I'm going to be looking at diving lessons. I was a gymnast once, and I loved the acrobatics. My joints are arthritic and cranky, these days, you know. Diving seems like lots of fun and like it might not completely destroy my joints.
My endurance is still shitty but things are getting better. One of the things that she hasn't mentioned explicitly but has implicitly a few times, and the thing that has helped the most so far aside from fixing my arms so they're not hideously inefficient, has been relaxing.
It's hard to relax in the water! You're in water! You could drown! You need to keep swimming! You need to do fifteen things at once! But yeah, actually, it makes the rhythm and movements like eleventy million times easier if you're overall relaxed and let yourself move around a bit in the water.
But probably I wouldn't have gotten so far as figuring that out, without someone coaching me. Like, none of this is shit that I couldn't figure out for myself, but -- then again, it is. It's all stuff I know in pieces, not stuff I know how it looks when it's put together.
Once I can swim a couple laps at a time and not want to curl up and diiiiiiie, I'm going to be looking at diving lessons. I was a gymnast once, and I loved the acrobatics. My joints are arthritic and cranky, these days, you know. Diving seems like lots of fun and like it might not completely destroy my joints.