About a month ago, a message was posted on one of the kibbutz electronic notice boards, offering remedial swimming lessons for older people. As I have voiced to myself the wish to have someone watch how I swim and offer suggestions as to how I can improve, I signed up for these lessons.
Today was the first lesson of six; there are six of us, ranging from those who self report that they only have the strength to swim one or two lengths, through to me (20 lengths) and another lady who swims more than I do (she's also at least 10 years younger!). It seems that prior experience is not necessary, although of course swimming stamina helps.
To me it felt like going back to when I was 13 and we had a swimming lesson once a week at school; although I knew how to swim, this was the first time that I was taught and so I learned properly how to swim crawl. This is also the plan of our teacher - to swim crawl properly. Our first exercise was to swim with our heads facing down to the bottom of the pool, raising the head only to breathe. If this is 90° to my body, then it seems that I swim most of the time with my head at about 60°.
The second exercise was floating: hands straight ahead, touching the ears, and legs straight out behind, no kicking. I found that I could float about a third of the pool this way, but also that my body had a tendency to roll to the left.
I can see that I'm going to have to practice kicking with my legs and bringing my arms over my head. I haven't swum crawl for the past 50 years! More importantly, I have to practice my breathing: this seems to be somewhat different for crawl than for breaststroke. One is supposed to exhale through the nose while the head is still in the water then one turns one's head to the side and inhales. The picture below is an example of how not to breathe properly: the head has turned too much.
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