This week I did something I that has been on my to do list for a long time - probably 12 years or so. I learned something called drown proofing.
First a bit of background:
Most times in the late fall and early winter I'm trying hard to rack up miles on my bike to meet my goal of always beating my prior year's bike mileage. This year with Eldon and my ride to PA, I'm going to pretty easily beat last year's 4000 miles and I don't want to get too much more than 4000 or I'll make it really hard for myself in 2011. Still I wanted to do some exercising so I decided to try to learn so swim. I used part of a $25 Border gift certificate to buy a book called Total Immersion.
I have two problems that make it hard for me to swim. The first is that I don't have a lot of fat which makes me float low in the water. Then the second and more significant problem is that when I flutter kick, I go backwards. Not being interested in adjusting my stroke to also go backwards so we're at least working together, I thought the kick would be the first thing to work on. Now you have to understand that the Rec Fitness Center where I'm trying to learn early in the early morning is populated by people doing laps at about 20 mph and a life guard that probably is 40 years younger than me and looks fascinated by this old codger thrashing around. I'd much rather do this in private somewhere.
Then in addition there's the unfixable problem of being 58 and having Nafziger-Kennel genes which I must have some kind of mutation that prevents being good at any sport. (Remember that broken nose resulting from sprinting toward an easy line drive coming straight at me at a Hess family ball game and my brain miscalculating the trajectory by about an inch so the ball came over the top of my glove?)
So after a couple frustrating attempts and not making much progress, I remembered this ancient goal I had to just learn to stay afloat for 20 minutes. It's also called a dead man's float. The proper technique is supposedly to lay face down in the water and every 10 seconds or so get upright enough to gasp for some air and go back to floating. From the drown proofing website, I learned to just stay upright and every 10 seconds or so push my arms down to my side and while my mouth is out of the water to a quick exhale, and fresh gulp of new air and relax back into the water for the next one. It worked! I stayed afloat for about 25 minutes in about 5 feet of water. Next I want to try it in the deep end.
