Swimming lessons

For some reason I woke up at the ungodly hour of 6:30am this morning and decided I'd go swimming at the gym before the pool got too crowded. I love swimming but I've always struggled to swim a "relaxed" front crawl that I can maintain for longer than a single pool length, and so I've been taking lessons for a few months now to try and improve my technique. (I've often wondered if I should refer to the lessons as "swim coaching", as most people assume you only have lessons if you can't swim at all.)

I'm learning the Shaw Method of swimming front crawl with a great teacher called Linda from Swimtime. This has consisted of practising individual exercises that relate to small parts of the stroke, which are then built up to the full stroke at the end. So you only really get the benefit if you can stop yourself trying to swim the full stroke and instead be disciplined enough to keep repeating the exercises in between the lessons (which have been pretty infrequent really - I think I've had six since February).

The learning process has had its ups and downs. The patten seems to be that new exercises are initially frustrating and difficult, since they modify the patterns mastered in the previous step. Slowly they become easier through repetition, and the next set of exercises are then introduced and the cycle begins again. Looking back, I think that I've found this step-wise "stop/start" approach quite challenging at times, since it doesn't give always give me the feeling of continual improvement - instead, progressing to the next stage (starting a new set of exercises) can initially feel like a step back rather a step forward.

Standing back though, by diligently practising the exercises several times a week, over the months I clearly have made progress - I'm nearly up to swimming the full stroke now. It has reinforced an idea that I really do believe in (and which Kyle touched upon in her post yesterday), that for most things you've got to put the hours in if you want to see results. Or, as someone else has put it more eloquently: "Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."