Me vs A Swimming Update

I've posted a couple of times about swimming. This is mostly because it's the one actually active thing I'm currently doing, so it stands to reason that it makes for entertaining stories.

Besides my inability to kick, I've added to my resume a decided lack of coordination in relation to the butterfly stroke, and what I can only imagine are flip turns that present the audience with a good old fashion comedy routine (read: parents watching their kids are likely laughing at me).

The butterfly is a special kind of awful for me. Oddly, I love the kick (when I get to wear flippers). I get to live out every  little girl's fantasy of the late 1980's of being the Little Mermaid. I mermaid flipper kick my way down the pool in a wave of awesomness.

And then I add the arms.

When I try to coordinate the arm movements and lift myself out of the water (ostensibly to breath, but mostly to suck water into my face hole), I look more like a finless whale with a gross lack of motor control who's having seizures, than a graceful mermaid who wants to be part of your world.

To make matters worse, I'm picturing how ridiculous this must be to onlookers, so during the entire length, I laugh like an idiot. Even underwater. This does very little to help with my breathing. Mostly I just slowly drown the whole way down the pool.

Doing flip turns isn't much better. Again, while I look ridiculous doing them, I actually have a lot of fun trying.

Flip turns should, in theory, be pretty straight forward. Get to the end of the pool, do a somersault, swim in the other direction. The difficulty arrives when you can't use your arms to propel yourself around. Chin down, flip. That's it. Or, more accurately in my case, chin down, face plant into the water, get water up my nose.

After many attempts, I did eventually get something that could be passably recognized as a flip turn. Great. Now swim a length, flip at the end, swim back, but because I'd been practicing at the shallow end up until this point, I didn't really plan for what would happen when I couldn't touch the bottom.

I swam, I flipped, I pushed off the side of the pool, I jettisoned out to start my length back...I realized I was a lot deeper down than I'd intended. 

Like this, but less subtle

Rather than pushing off the side of the pool and straight going out, I had angled down and gone deeper than anticipated. This resulted in having to swim up a lot more than originally expected. I imagine that from the stands it resembled the surfacing of the Red October, though far less impressive, and with far more gasping for air than one usually sees with a submarine.

Well, today we move on to diving. I think I can dive....but then I also thought I could swim. Should be interesting. :-)