- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 10/Aug 10:03

The trouble with breathing

For an hour, a mere hour, it is just you and the water. When you are in the water, sometimes all you can think of is the water. Not the bad day you had, not other people, not even four fearless felines. Water feels more gently accepting of my body than air. Swimming feels more natural than walking. Sometimes I think I never really evolved beyond the womb. Some swim for exercise, some for pleasure. I swim because everything to do with swimming feels like home. I have never seen an ocean colour I didn’t love. I love the shapes of rivers and the sound of small waves in lakes. Between all that beauty and my comfort in it, I used to think of water as the place I could really breathe. Well, boy, did I have news for me. I can love the water as much I want to, and it can love me back, but somewhere along the way I forgot there are some little forms of conversation between you and the water you can’t ignore. Or you’ll die. Or at least look like a flailing manatee. Conversation 1: Be able to swim. Conversation 2: Breathe. Swimming breath is different from non-swimming breath. I am not now, nor have ever been, nor do I intend to become a competitive swimmer. Still, I had a reliable – if not elegant – freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke. Oh, and I can float for as long as it takes to watch a Godfather marathon. I float for so long I fall asleep. I don’t know when it happened, but over my exceedingly long life I lost my strokes. They’re inside of me somewhere (along with my gills and fins) so, instead of throwing in the towel, the swimsuit and the rest of the beach bag, I took drastic action. I signed up for a class to get my strokes back. How did I get this bad? Anyone who has ever known me well knows that I identify as a sea creature. I have always been sure that my life would not end by drowning. I had no idea how drastic the situation with my strokes was until the first day in the pool. It was there I discovered that somewhere between 16 and three weeks ago I really was a tapir treading water. This is as humbling as I can fathom. I share a lane with a child so small I’m surprised he’s not in a stroller. One lane over is an old friend swimming six lengths for every one of mine. According to my coach, my arms don’t bend, my knees bend too much and my head can’t be trusted to turn as directed. And then there is my breathing. As someone not committed to winning medals, I think I can live with my tapir-ness. But not being able to breathe properly is killing me. I feel like my body has betrayed me. I’m familiar with the concept. When you’ve looked at enough aging people struggle to do the things that were normal to them, you get a sense of the frustration and a kind of deep sadness over the loss of who you thought you were. Let me see if I can do this any justice. To breathe properly for your basic freestyle stroke, you must fill your lungs with air and gradually release it into the water. That’s easy from your starting position. But as you continue, face in water, when you do need more air, you tilt your head to one side, scrunch up your face and suck air in through the side of your mouth. (The side facing up, not the bit still glancing over the surface of the water.) You must not inhale through the nose. You must not drink half the pool while pulling in air. You must not pop your head all the way out of the water like a meerkat. A swimming meerkat. All of this is no effort at all if you’ve been properly trained. The problem comes in the manner of the old saying: You can’t reteach an old dog something she once knew and proceeded to forget. A long time ago I asked someone how he was managing a difficult situation. He referred me to Anna Nalick’s Breathe from the early 2000s. “Cradle your head in your hands and breathe, just breathe,” says the chorus. I won’t be able to do the cradling bit, but I have to get back to breathing. Like I’m supposed to. The post The trouble with breathing appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.