Swimming is fun?

While we may use the tagline of “swimming is fun” there is a deeper meaning. 

From the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pursuit of happiness is not found in pleasure activities like roller coasters, parties or buying things. Happiness is found through satisfaction, from achieving a difficult thing or feeling like your life has meaning. If we find flow we can find happiness. 

Sports are a great source of flow. Mastering a skill or performing a feat of endurance that on its own is impressive but the dedication taken to arrive at the goal is the source of satisfaction. While I may try to make swimming lessons fun, the real source of happiness from swimming comes from learning something difficult. Swimming is not a natural skill. Compared to running, swimming takes hours of practice to become proficient enough to enjoy it. 

I often call the swimming pool the opposite world. Where up is down, left is right and dogs marry cats. By this I mean that all of our natural instincts in the water are wrong. This seems wrong when you see how “natural” Katy Ledecky looks as she breaks a new world record or wins another global medal. When I have a new adult in the pool, the first thing we do is blow bubbles. This is often the first time people have had to consciously time their breathing. Then I ask them to blow bubbles from their nose. Instinctively we breathe in through our noses so straight away, changing how you breathe, to consciously breathe the opposite of the way you have done automatically your whole life. We can see swimming is not natural.

In the same first lesson I asked people to sit on the floor in shallow water. This seems like the most simple thing in the world. Almost all of the time people can't sink and tend to hover in the water. Our bodies are naturally buoyant so we float inside the water. I feel that this point, that we float inside the water not on top is vital for learning to float. First we need to sink!

The instincts that we have when we panic in the water tend to work against us. I often describe a BBC documentary where a small chimpanzee falls into some water. Before the mother picks her up the way her arms grab at the air in panic is exactly the same as seeing a human panic in the water. So I'm sure the behaviour goes back to before we were humans.

Teaching people to be calm in deep water is the most satisfying part of teaching. Allowing ourselves to sink a little to be able to float and to calmly tread water is one of the ways I find flow for myself. The deep satisfaction of teaching a person to do a difficult thing and seeing their satisfaction at mastering a skill they felt was impossible just a few lessons before keeps me coming back to the pool after 25 years of teaching.

So swimming is fun but the process of learning and teaching is more than fun, it is satisfying.