Drinking Lake Tahoe, or Learning to Fly, Part II

Here’s the good thing about swimming butterfly in Lake Tahoe: when you inhale water (more on this in a moment), it doesn’t taste like chlorine.

Here’s the bad thing about swimming the fly in Lake Tahoe: the lake is 6225 feet above sea level. You might consider this another good thing, because it’s in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by magnificent granite peaks. And if all you’re doing is admiring the scenery, that too is a good thing.

If you’re swimming, however, maybe all that mountain scenery isn’t such a good thing. Because, unless you head for one of the local oxygen bars, there’s significantly less oxygen available at 6200 feet than there is at sea level, where I spend most of my life – and do most of my swimming.

I began my dip in the lake with a little breaststroke, a little freestyle. Delightful. The water was a refreshingly cool antidote to the hot, sunny, early fall afternoon. I graduated to a few short butterfly drills, nothing too strenuous. All seemed fine.

Emboldened, I took off, flying out into the heart of the lake, as if I could swim the entire 12-mile distance to the opposite shore. I cruised for maybe 30 or 40 yards, concentrating on form, gliding underwater as far as possible after each stroke, eyes open, admiring the patterned reflections of sunlight shimmering in bright yellow ribbons across the sandy lake bottom, and marveling at the straining back muscles of the athletic young guy rowing a kayak that flashed momentarily into view as I breeched the surface for air.

Then I realized my mistake. No, not getting distracted by kayak guy. My other mistake.

The reason doing the 200 fly is a challenge is because the breathing is hard. You can butch it up and force yourself to do 50 yards. Maybe even 100. But not 200. You run out of air, plain and simple. What you do after that can be described in many different ways, but it would be stretching the definition of the sport to call it swimming.

Up above 6000 feet, you run out of air a lot sooner than 200 yards. At least I did.

Fortunately, the shoreline at Sand Harbor Beach drops off gently, so after a brief thrashing spell, I had propelled myself far enough back toward shore to touch bottom. I don’t think the guy in the kayak even noticed. He was too busy showing off for the pair of bikinied young women he was towing through the water behind his kayak.

The reason I was drinking lake water, however, has to do with my second lesson with Shinji, my Total Immersion instructor, in which he taught me how to integrate breathing into the butterfly.

For starters, Shinji had me stand in waist-deep water. “Now bend over,” he said. I bent over, stopping a few inches from the water.

“All the way over,” he said. “Until your nose and lips are touching the water.” I bent over further.

“Now breathe,” he said. I drank pool water.

“This is where your face should be when you breathe,” Shinji said, reinforcing his point, making sure there wasn’t any misunderstanding.

“But I get more water than I do air,” I said.

Shinji wasn’t overly concerned. “You drink about a liter of water every time you swim,” he said. “That’s normal,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

Maybe. But it’s going to take a while before sticking my face in the water and inhaling feels normal.

I tried various approaches and found one that worked. Sort of. I put my nose and lips on the surface of the water, stretching my lips back as far as I could, so that they were closed in front but open at the sides, and sucked in air. I shared my discovery with Shinji.

“Good,” he said.

Then he taught me how to integrate the breathing with the rest of the stroke. Theoretically.

It’s simple really. All I have to do is to execute the power portion of my stroke, while simultaneously “snapping” my legs, so that I “rocket” my upper body far enough out of the water to lift my shoulders clear of the surface (which sets me up properly for the recovery), but as my body rises upward, to point my head downward, toward the water, so that my nose and lips graze the surface. Then it’s a simple matter of remembering, in the fraction of a second during which all this comes together, to inhale through the corners of my mouth, but to ignore, as I suck in large quantities of water, the mental alarm bells that warn me of impending death.

It’s a good thing it’s only October. I’ve still got eight and a half months to pull this off.

And by the way, according to Wikipedia, the elevation of Cologne is a mere 121 feet above sea level.