Within seconds of the first lesson, I was asked to lower my head face down into the water and float.
In an instant, the muscles throughout my body tensed. My arms froze, and my eyes fixated on the floor beneath the water. For a few seconds, all I wanted to do was turn back and run.
Searching for an escape, I looked to my left and right, only to see my fellow learners drop their heads in with ease.
‘No more running away’ I told myself.
Before giving my brain a chance to reconsider, I lowered my neck…
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12 months ago, I decided to learn how to swim. Here’s the concise version of how I reached this point in my late twenties.
In the UK, swimming is taught as part of the national curriculum. However, unsurprisingly, not every lesson we are taught as kids will stick. As it turns out – 1 in 3 adults in Britain cannot swim a single 25-metre length.
In my case, it was never a case of forgetfulness. Far from it. All it took was one story about another kid drowning to have a substantial impact on my life. Even now, I still vividly remember everything about the moment that would grow from seed to thorn bush over two decades.
This tale developed into a fear of the water. Playground nonsense I suspect, but it was more than enough to unnerve my naïve heart. From then on, my confidence in the water deteriorated. Whenever I would even be in the vicinity of a pool, I could not escape the thought that those breaths may be my last.
For 20 years, my inability to swim gnawed away at me. Only when you fear the water do you realise how many opportunities it opens. Kayaking, surfing, paddleboarding, wakeboarding – anything relating to water becomes a challenge. When 71% of the planet’s surface is water, becoming anxious next to it makes the world feel a lot smaller.
This is not a tale about how to swim. There are plenty of incredible teachers who are far better placed. Instead, this is my story about learning to swim. The last twelve months taught me far more than just the art of swimming. I learned how to overcome fear, how to consistently improve, and how not to give up.
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Overcoming a fear of water
Fear is a primitive instinct. It’s a critical tool in what we know as our fight-or-flight response. When the brain senses danger, it releases hormones into the bloodstream. These hormones carry messages to the rest of the body, triggering our heart rate to rise, breathing to quicken, muscles to tense and our pupils to dilate. All this makes us more alert, quicker and stronger.
All this happens within a fraction of a second.
The ability to sense danger has been a critical part of human evolution. Tens of thousands of years ago, we needed it just to survive.
In a 21st-century setting, those dangers have changed. Our brains do not discriminate between a sabre tooth tiger or a pool of water. Regardless of the threat, the brain still releases the same hormones and initiates the same cascade. In my case, merely the thought of being immersed in water, unable to breathe, with water flooding my lungs, sends shivers rippling down my spine.
What differs for us all is what we perceive as danger. Many of us will fear a predator weighing hundreds of kilos – but not all. Some will share my fear of immersion in water – others, I know, will be dumbfounded.
I can still picture the setting and the conversation clearly when one of my friends casually retold the story of how one poor child drowned in a pool. Truth or not, it was enough to crumple whatever confidence I had. It also led to me labelling swimming and the deep water as a threat. This label would breed a fear within me that would fester for 20 years.
In academic circles, this is known as conditioned fear. An anxious response to an anticipated threat – often born from something you have never experienced. It begins as a speck of experience in the vastness of time. But it leaves an imprint as the brain learns how to better prepare you for that situation in the future.
Every time I would stand by the edge of the pool, my amygdala would flutter into life. Even as I became familiar with floating, those old learned responses continued to fire in an all too familiar way.
The innate response to all of those signals is to fight or run. We make that decision almost instinctively. For 20 years, I would always run. To fight and overcome fear, it would mean taking an unfamiliar path for the very first time.
Fortunately, swimming pools are an ideal space to face a fear of water. Learning pools are only a metre deep, and there’s always someone watching when you screw up. Writing this, knowing what I know now – it seems naïve that I could have ever feared the water so much.
The only ‘cure’ for a conditioned fear is to re-train the brain. Two decades of running from the water will leave a deep imprint. All the brain is trying to do is keep us safe. Therefore, the solution is to stand and fight whenever our fear response kicks in – and demonstrate to our brains that there is no need to run or fight.
So how can this be done? In my experience – through exposure, consistency and perseverance. There is no quick fix. For me, fear of water had two decades to seep into the deepest crevasses of my mind. I naïvely thought it would take 2-3 months to cure. Instead, it has taken four times that long.
Staring Down Fear
Exposure to what triggers your fear is essential. To re-wire the brain, not only will it need to experience the situation, it will require patience to adapt and learn. The conditions for exposure were ideal in my first lesson. A shallow pool, a calm teacher, and a few other students who were going through the same experience I was.
The first exercise is always to lower the head into the water and float on your front. Even when faced with the floor a metre away, my fear response exploded into life. To push through it, I had no choice but to hold my breath, and drop my head in.
Those first few seconds of standing face to face with my fear were immense. To the uninitiated; picture yourself walking along a cliffside. Grey skies loom overhead, and the wind swirls around, creating a chill as you clutch at your sleeves to keep yourself warm. As you walk closer, the wind catches you from behind. In an instant, you are carried teetering towards the edge. For a moment, you catch a glimpse of the 30-metre drop. Instinctively, you retreat a few steps, returning to relative safety.
The sensation (I hope) you experienced as you looked down is the same I had when staring the water down for the first time. Logic takes a back seat – and instinct takes the wheel. Admittedly – these are two very different situations. But the body’s response to each is very similar.
So with exposure, the brain re-conditions itself through experience. As it learns there is no danger present, our response to the situation softens. If you were afraid of heights, this would be done by exposing yourself to greater and greater heights – with the safety of a harness.
With swimming, the solution is continued exposure to the water, only at greater and greater depths. It has taken twelve months. Once a week, for one hour. Now when I enter the water, my mind is calm. It’s no longer fight or flight – it’s just swimming.
The Art of Deliberate Practice
Sheer determination is not enough in isolation. Forcing yourself to go will only lead to frustration. Early on, I discovered the sense of accomplishment, and satisfaction resulting from it, were essential to change my mindset from resisting swimming, to instead embracing it.
For 12 months, I saw plenty of learners come and go. Some had been in the same class, at a similar ability level for years. Many drop out after a couple of months. A select few sailed through the classes and had learned to swim in the space of 6 months. The truth is – everyone learns at a different pace.
But I was curious to understand how those who seemingly breezed through the classes did it. Disappointingly, there was no shortcut. The secret was simple; they not only turned up every week – they stayed for an extra half hour to practice. When you are committing 30 minutes a week to lessons, staying for another 30 minutes doubles the amount of practice time you are putting in.
What they had was not an innate ability to float or swim. They simply had the perseverance and determination to keep practising. Gradually, over time, they were rewarded with progress, and that’s all that was needed to keep carrying them forward.
I adopted the same approach – but also wanted to apply something I learned from Anders Ericsson in his book, Peak.
The concept of deliberate practice differs from just practising for the sake of it. Learning a new skill is not simply doing the same thing repeatedly. Instead, the aim should be to focus on specific areas to improve during practice. So consistency is half the battle – practising the correct technique is the other (experienced teachers come in helpful here).
Here’s a question for you, reader – when you front crawl, how often do you focus on these? Relax your neck and drop your head. Relax your hips and bring your legs to the surface. Keep your legs straight, but not so tense that you are rigid. Rotate onto your side when breathing, rather than just lifting your head out of the water.
A great front crawl form requires the combination of all these components. Struggle with one, and the rest all seem to fall to pieces.
Your head for example is one of the heaviest parts of your body. When attempting a front crawl, the higher your head is, the lower your legs will be. The lower your legs, the harder it is to move forward.
So every week, I’d be reminded to relax my head. Allow it to hang in the water. It took months to become instinct. But gradually, with time, it became the norm.
‘Great – now I can move forward’ I thought to myself. Then you need to bring your hips into the equation to be able to breathe. Rotating onto my side, while keeping my head lowered to take in a breath, felt significantly more difficult.
I’d become so focused on my hips, that I would not notice my head was rising as I gasped for air. Frustration became inevitable. Then one week, it all came together like magic.
The lesson had been spent practising swimming on my side, keeping one arm out front to balance. Something about this caused a newly learned behaviour in my brain.
When I went to practice afterwards, all of a sudden, I found myself effortlessly rotating, breathing, and then returning my head to the water. By the end, I had completed a whole length without stopping. When I walked home that evening, it was hard to rub the smile off my face.
In the weeks that followed, I could then switch my focus to other areas. Arms, legs and hips. For some weeks, I struggled to complete the full length. Others, I would sail through the water. But it was the focus on the minor details that led to a greater whole with enough time.
Training to Persevere:
At every self-imposed milestone; happiness, pride and dopamine would flood through my system. This is what kept carrying me back to the pool. Most weeks it feels like you are going backwards. But there are a rare few where it all comes together. You reach a state where it all flows naturally.
Learning to swim requires patience and persistence. Like learning any new skill, moments of achievement are sporadic. However, there are also rare flecks in time that provide all the motivation needed to propel you forward. Self-doubt about whether to continue outside of these is inevitable. But every time it came, I’d remind myself of the sweet sensation I felt when first conquering the fear of the water.
There’s a good reason why so many New Year’s resolutions fail. We fail to find joy in the challenge we have undertaken. We set out with a goal – but with no way of appreciating the journey to get there.
Picture a skill or an activity you love. Why did you stick with it? Was it the friends you experienced it with? Was it the sense of accomplishment you felt when reaching a new milestone? Was it working towards a longer-term goal you desire? Did it just make you happy doing it?
Purpose is the fuel that allows us to continue learning a skill. Without it, giving up is inevitable. Without purpose, we become frustrated, impatient and disinterested.
Turning up on the good days is easy. Turning up on bad days requires discipline. To turn up on the bad days, remind yourself of why you started in the first place. Is it to spend time with friends? Is it to overcome a fear? Is it to feel a sense of accomplishment? Is it to prove you can do it?
Everyone has their good days and their bad. Those who persevere, are those that understand why they are doing it. When they awake in the morning feeling lethargic and demotivated, what gets them out of bed is having a goal at the end of it all.
This is what separates professional athletes from the rest of us. Come rain or shine, they are out there putting in the hours because they are driven by purpose.
From the past 12 months, there are three core memories I have retained; when I first put my head in the water, when I was able to front crawl and breathe once, and when I was able to front crawl and breathe consistently.
All the other lessons blurred into one. All that remains were those special moments when I overcame the obstacles that had most challenged me.
In those moments, the euphoria I experienced was all that was needed to keep bringing me back. Genuine accomplishment is immensely gratifying. Because they are so fleeting, not only do you treasure them – you seek more of them. A sense of accomplishment became my purpose. Whenever I questioned why I was doing it, the answer was simple; because I wanted to prove to myself I can do this.
Beginning to Swim at 28
I only ‘declared’ I could swim once I could confidently front crawl and backstroke without needing to stop. This was the goal I had set for myself 12 months before.
Even though millions around the world can do this – the goal was my own. Through it all, it taught me far more than just being able to swim. Learning a skill as an adult has a very different meaning compared to when we are young. Our time is more valuable to us – and we also have a greater sense of risk versus reward.
The older we get, the more set in our ways we become. We resist change because it differs from what we know and trust. Learning something new is intimidating and only grows more so as we get older. The barrier to entry appears to rise. We don’t receive the instant gratification that is more easily accessible to us than ever before.
It is never too late to learn something new. We are never too late to change. In those classes, I was joined by people of all ages, sizes, sexes, races and beyond. Everyone joined with the same look of fear and uncertainty in their eyes.
What we all found was just a group of people with a common goal – to learn how to swim.