Lessons From Bill, Part Two

By Diane Riggs

 

I first learned about Total Immersion Swimming from Bill Lang, my husband’s friend from college. When he asked me to be a student for his teacher qualification video I was delighted. I learned water survival skills when I was a child living on the Long Island Sound thanks to our town’s free swimming lessons.  When I was a teenager I did synchronized swimming for a short time.  I was never a fast swimmer, but I loved it and kept swimming into adulthood.  A partial rotator cuff tear from a fall when I was 31 meant that I sometimes had to take a break from swimming.  

One of these breaks occurred from 2005-2007 after I fell from my bicycle right onto the injured shoulder.   The pain was excruciating and I could not move my arm more than a foot from my side.  After physical therapy and a year of weight training I felt strong enough to try swimming again in December 2007.  I found that my shoulders, back and core muscles were stronger and my balance was improved; I was no longer sway-backed in the water.  I started experimenting and took out a few books from the library to see how to improve my form in order to increase speed and endurance and prevent further injury.

In May I did my first sprint triathlon, swimming the quarter mile in 13 minutes with a total time of one hour and 57 minutes.  In July I did a second sprint triathlon, swimming for the first time in Lake Erie.  On the day of the race I became disoriented in the water and in minutes I was gasping for breath, almost unable to move my arms.  I managed to get to a lifeguard on a kayak and rested for a while, then swam and rested again.  He said that I was hyperventilating and coached me to breathe more calmly.  By resting with the lifeguard and swimming short distances, I managed to finish the swim.  Still wheezing from water in my lungs, I got on my bike and cycled the fourteen miles, then finished the triathlon with a run/walk for a total time of 2 hours and 26 minutes. I was stunned that I could have trouble swimming; this had never happened to me before!  So when Bill offered to teach me Total Immersion I was grateful for the help.  I had already signed up for a third triathlon at the same Lake Erie venue.

The first things that Bill taught me – floating on your stomach with your hands in the “pocket” and feeling the balance of the patient hand – reminded me of the dead man’s float I was taught as a child on the Long Island Sound.  The easy, relaxed way that each new movement was added was reassuring. I found it a little more difficult to find the sweet spot for breathing because I didn’t have enough time to practice it. When we started doing the underwater switching it seemed quite natural, but it is so different from swimming the crawl that it doesn’t trigger old habits.  I enjoyed feeling the balance shift as you switch hands.  But when Bill taught me the zipper and the “french manicure” this was more familiar.  A few times I felt the propulsion that you get when you switch hands, but at this point I could not put it all together.  I have never been able to breath on the left side, but suddenly I began to naturally breathe on the left side as well.  This showed me that if I work on the small pieces of the technique my swimming will become more flexible and consistent.  I also found it very useful to watch the video without any sound because it allowed the imitative side of my brain to absorb the movements.  In the three or four days that we had together I could not completely acquire what Bill was teaching me, but what I did learn really stayed with me.

Three weeks later I went back to Lake Erie for my third triathlon.  I had been practicing what Bill taught me, swimming at the lake.  The single most useful thing was the image of a ray of light going straight out through the top of my head like a headlight.  I found this instantly raised my whole body so that I was floating on the water rather than my legs sinking, and my breathing became more relaxed.  It was also psychologically reassuring in the relatively murkier water of the lake. So on the day of the race I felt confident.  I finished the triathlon in 1 hour and 56 minutes.  I am pleased with how the Total Immersion technique helped me recover my balance in the water.  I believe that practicing this technique will transform my swimming.