It is not easy to find a gift for me. I am fortunate in that I really have everything. But people still want to give me a present. Then I often receive things that I don’t like, don’t use or don’t please me at all. But I appreciate it when someone makes the effort to give me a present. Then each time I am very happy and not until later do I begin to think what I can do with the present. Probably it will hang around somewhere for a long time unused.

Therefore, I have adopted another strategy. I wish for something. Something I want, and which probably I would have bought myself sometime. So I wished to improve my swimming style. My crawl still has a lot of potential upwards. In this way I came across vouchers for swimming training in the indoor pool in Oerlikon.

On my first meeting with my new swimming trainer I was rather sceptical. She is quite a bit older than I am, slender rather lean not really with shoulders like a swimmer, who spends 3 hours every day in the pool. I thought tp myself that it will be a bit “old school” and was already mentally prepared for a disappointment. But I was way off the mark. Carol is extremely nice and pedagogically and didactically skilled and experienced. She praised me a lot but basically corrected everything I did. The hour with her is always very demanding and then I am k.o. but super happy (although dissatisfied that my progress is so slow)

I have unbounded energy, but Carol has about twice what I have. I swim backwards and forwards and she walks backwards and forwards beside the pool,or on numerous occasions gets into the water and shows me how I have to do it properly. The list of my improvement potential is long. When one has got used to certain movement patterns, it is terribly exhausting to get rid of them again.

For example, instead of swimming with the arms like a Y, I overstretch in particular with the left hand rather like an X. Clearly I understand what I have to change, but at the latest after swimming 10 m, my left arm stretches into an X. I don’t stretch both arms forward enough and backwards not at all, I turn the left hand when I dip the left hand into the water like a water hammer, etc.

Then Carol decided that I should at last also learn the roll in order to be able to turn elegantly. I had always avoided this because I always got my nose full of water. But in fact the solution is banal – one must simply breath out the whole time one is rolling under water. That also sounds easy, but today during training it caught me out again because I was not consequent.

For Christmas I am wishing for more hourly or half-hourly lessons with Carol. I still have a lot to learn, It is fun without end and my gratefulness for this gift is truly double – once, because I am pleased that someone is thinking of me and once, because I look forward to my present.

Image source: Rainer Sturm / pixelio.de