Swimming

 

Swimming was good fun yesterday, and the decision about continuing lessons and/or being in the same group as my friend has been taken out of my hands. I was moved up to the next group, the improvers, and I did my first lesson with them instead of being with the beginners. It is a lot more challenging!

We were working on front crawl, which was lucky for me as that's the stroke I've been learning! In this lesson the technique for side breathing was broken down to the basics of head position, reaching with arms, rotating body, etc. and for each part of the technique we completed specific exercises, swimming between 4 and 6 lengths (actually about two-thirds of the pool as the beginners learn in the remaining third) each time. We then gradually rebuilt the stroke with the aim of improving our ability to breathe properly. It was good ... easy to understand, not quite so easy to do! There is a lot more swimming happening in this group and bearing in mind that I'd only ever swam one length before, I surprised myself by being able to keep up ... I definitely knew I'd had a good workout by the time the 45 minutes were up. 

I've signed up for the next course and will continue learning with the improvers, rather than hold back to learn with L, always assuming she decides that she wants to do it. Next week's lesson will focus on backstroke, which I've never done so that will be interesting, and the following week we'll be learning survival techniques which is something that they do once in every twelve week course of lessons.