Learning How to Swim Again

How to make a better life by teaching yourself how to self-learn

From yesterday’s swim practice when I shaved off 70 seconds on 4x500 meter breaststroke and came only another 70 seconds shy of breaking 40 minutes. Photo: Per Håkansson.

Knowing how to learn new skills can both solve personal challenges (distractions, boredom, loneliness) and open up your world to new opportunities. Everything from learning a new language to software programming or swimming.

Also, when we have secured our basic needs, our essentials, acquiring new skills sounds much more attractive than just consuming more of the stuff we don’t really need. It’s harder of course, but therein lies the challenge.

What you learn doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the passion and the process. And if you know how to learn, you can learn anything but, of course, not everything as you need to decide what matters the most to you.

Three months ago I joined the UCSB Recreation Center and shifted my outdoor kettlebell workout for a more intense indoor workout with heavier weights. I wanted to use the summer break to get stronger and fitter for surfing.

At UCSB they also have three pools and so I decided to get back into swimming on non-gym days to improve cardio, balance, coordination, and flexibility.

Since I had swum and played water polo in high school, I felt pretty confident that I could easily knock it out of the park and jumped into the pool with gusto for a quick 2,000 meter breaststroke swim. How wrong I was.

My first swim session took 56 minutes which is 2 minutes and 48 seconds per 100 meters. Just to compare, world record on 100 meter breaststroke is 56.88 seconds, set by Adam Peaty in 2019. I clearly sucked (even though it’s apples and oranges).

But being back in the water felt so good and brought me back to one of my best experiences during my teenage years, walking home from high school after a long swim practice and feeling happy, calm, and a deep sense of belonging.

I realized I needed to relearn how to swim breaststroke and began to self-design a learning plan that could eventually lead me to qualify for the US Nationals in my age class. Setting real goals can be very motivating.

I began searching for swimming and breaststroke training on Google and found the MySwimPro account on YouTube which has excellent training videos. Through watching those videos I identified how I could get better at breaststroke.

Here is my learning process: