Breaststroke is Fun

Way back in the Stone Age when I was in high school, my sport of choice was swimming. It was a non-contact sport where I didn’t have to worry about someone else swimming into my lane and tackling me. Just for the record, tackling in the water is called drowning. It was great exercise and more fun than any other sport. I was in great shape since I swam several miles a day. The fact that I got to spend every day with fit women in skin-tight lycra swim suits had nothing to do with my decision to join the swim team. It did, however, have something to do with getting me to sign up each year after that and may have had something to do with me begging my parents for prescription goggles. I loved the swim team.

My specialty was distance freestyle. Simply put, I was insane. My job was to swim the longest races in the shortest time possible. A 500-yard race on land is just the length of five football fields. A 500-yard race in the water is roughly the distance from Boston to Chicago. It seemed like it would never end. As soon as I saw that little red sign in the water telling me I was coming up on my last lap, I would kick in the afterburners and do the swimmer equivalent of a sprint to the finish. Then, someone would have reach down into the water with a suction hose and use it to get me out of the water since all that was left was a puddle of skin and bones. The muscles abandon the body about halfway through the sprint.

Other people were almost as insane as I was. I had a couple of friends who specialized in the butterfly stroke. If I could find a way of describing it as beautiful as a butterfly, I would. But, speaking as someone who knows how to swim that stroke, there is nothing beautiful about it. Michael Pfelps makes it look deceivingly easy. It’s not. It requires you to move both of your hands forward while dolphin kicking with you whole body and then pulling with both arms which breaks the laws of physics. Then, there is the minor detail of breathing. It can’t be done. You basically have to throw your body out of the water like a breeching whale, grab a breath in the 1/138 of a second you have, and then go back into the water. I nearly drowned trying to do that but I did manage to get mouth to mouth from the cute girl in the next lane. Now that I think about there is something beautiful about butterfly.

Then there is the breaststroke. I so wanted to be good at this. It looks so smooth and effortless when you see someone breaststroking. In my not so humble opinion, it is one of the most beautiful things in the world. When you see someone who really knows what they are doing with the breaststroke, you have to just sit back in awe at the skill involved. In high school, I had no clue what I was doing when I would try to breaststroke. I just couldn’t seem to get my hands in the right spot to make it work right. Every time I tried it, I looked like I was just struggling to figure out what I was doing. I did master breaststroking later but, for now, let’s just talk about swimming.

Just remember, that swimming is a great source of exercise, cardio fitness and really good excuse to check out the babes underwater.