Making Waves

Progress: I swam a 100 fly this morning.

I’m in DC now, visiting my sister, and I’ve been going to the pool with my brother-in-law, who swims every morning at 7:00. Yesterday I didn’t manage to get any farther than 25 yards at a time, but today I had a breakthrough.

Swimming the 100 wasn’t the breakthrough. Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting; I came very close to embarrassing myself thoroughly by shouting “Yes!” and pumping my fist in the air like an idiot, before a calmer interior voice prevailed and I chose instead to stand in the shallow water, hand perched on the side of the pool for support, panting quietly, while full consciousness returned.

But the breakthrough was finding a new level of integration in my stroke.

Since I was a little kid watching the Olympics on TV, I’ve loved watching people swim the butterfly, dreamed about being able to do it myself some day. But I’ve never had a lesson; no-one’s ever taught me how to do the stroke. I’ve learned what I know from gaping at other people, asking occasional questions, and studying Total Immersion (TI) videos, in particular the recently released BetterFly for Every Body, which has special tips for baby boomers, like me, foolish enough to think they can fly. (I don’t get a kickback for this, but TI makes more sense to me as an approach to swimming than any other method I’ve heard of, so I’m happy to spread the news.)

I started swimming seriously four years ago, when I turned 55. I had to do something. I was turning into a blimp, and just thinking about most other forms of exercise made me want to throw up. Two days after my 55^th birthday I joined a Masters team and started swimming two mornings a week, which I soon increased to three. I swam all four strokes, but my fly was a mess. It was good enough to get me 50 yards – I even did a 50 fly in the first meet I went to – but I was dead at the end.

About two years into my swimming “career,” I blew out my right shoulder, the result of 25 years of pushing around a little piece of plastic (otherwise known as a mouse) with my right hand while slumped at various precarious angles in a series of crappy chairs. I say my right shoulder, but it was actually a line of pain that ran from the top of my right jaw, just below my right ear, all the way down my neck, into my arm, then my hand and terminating in my thumb. It got so bad that I was unable to grip the steering wheel of a car or hold a sponge to wash dishes. The pain also had a second branch, which ran down along the outer edge of my shoulder blade to a spot on my right hip, roughly at the SI joint.

(Those of you under 30 who have not yet had this experience: I recommend looking into ergonomically sound work environments. And all that two-thumbed texting you’re doing on your phones, it’s going to catch up with you. I promise. You may think you’re invincible, but your body knows better. Our thumbs didn’t evolve to take that kind of abuse.)

As you might suspect, my “shoulder” pain made swimming the crawl somewhat difficult. Basically, all forward stroking was out, which nixed not only the crawl, but the breast stroke and the fly as well, although my physical therapist did say that I could do the backstroke in limited quantities, because if done properly, it would help open up my shoulder joint. So I did a lot of backstroke – for the record, I hate the backstroke – and a lot of kicking, and (this is where the fly comes back into the story) a lot of “body dolphins.”

A body dolphin is the basic body-wave motion at the core of the fly. Done right, it recruits the muscles that run along your spine, both in front and in back, and not much else. Exquisite efficiency. Think Flipper. In TI swimming, there are head-lead body dolphins, with your hands floating by your sides, and hand-lead body dolphins, with your hands out in front of you. In both exercises, your focus is on rippling your spine. TI focuses on pressing your chest into the water and releasing it, but I find it a more helpful internal image to think about the motion as starting from a spot about two inches below my navel. (No, not that spot.) This is also the spot from which, in tai ch’i, all motion in the body originates. And the spot from which, as the ergonomics expert I didn’t listen to 15 years ago told me, I should have been mousing. But if pressing your chest into the water works for you, don’t let me stop you.

When you start doing body dolphins, if you don’t know what you’re doing – I didn’t – you don’t go anywhere. There were actually a few occasions on which, in the early phase of my education, I went backwards. Mostly I remained stationary, or moved forward very slowly. But at least I wasn’t putting any strain on my right shoulder. Over time, I figured out how to wiggle my body through the water so as to achieve actual propulsion.

There was a catch, which I didn’t realize until much later, after my recent spinal surgery: wiggling your spine as a way of pushing yourself through the water involves two basic motions: flexion (the equivalent of bending forward, rounding your lower back), and extension (the equivalent of bending backward, arching your lower back). Because of chronic spinal problems that hadn’t yet made themselves fully apparent, my body didn’t do extension; my spine went from flexion to flat. If your goal is to swim butterfly, not being able to extend your spine, to arch your back, can be somewhat limiting.

Still, I did start to pick up the rhythm, the central wave, of the stroke. Or so I thought, until my shoulder got better and I tried to integrate my arms with what the rest of my body was doing. Then it all fell apart. I could do a wave; and I could do a stroke or two, but I couldn’t go back and forth. I’d push off from the wall, set up the wave, be cruising along just fine, hands out in front of me; I’d succeed in pulling my first stroke back through the water; but then, as soon as I tried to bring my arms up out of the water for the recovery, it would feel like I was dragging them up through a mile of concrete. The wave would fall apart, and I’d belly-flop down into the water, thrashing around for a while and hoping no-one was watching.

Fast forward: the breakthrough I made today was that I found a way to get from the wave into the first stroke without having the whole thing fall apart. I was able to set up a drill – three waves, then a stroke, three waves, another stroke – and keep the wave going smoothly as I transitioned in and out of the stroke, for the full 25-yard length of the pool. So while it may seem like doing a 100 fly was the day’s big victory, it was actually the minor accomplishment. The big victory was that I caught my first glimpse ever of the possibility of developing a fluid, fully integrated butterfly.

I think I’m going to celebrate with a mimosa. Maybe two. And then a nap. And it’s not even noon yet.