I swam more today. Well, I swim today, it felt more like the first time I swam. It felt less like I was struggling, and more like I was swimming.  My fellow non-American, Alistair had given me some tips earlier in the week, and challenged me to swim better.  I like challenges.  I also realised that perhaps trying to work with front crawl might not be the best starting approach.  I'm paddling around right now doing exclusively breast-stroke and back-stroke, so I finally decided I'd just work with those, instead of tethering my learning exclusively to the one stroke I can't even begin to swim at the moment.

I started looking on Youtube for some breast-stroke tutorials, and found this guy who ended up in the Marines.  He's totally nuts, but is demonstrating breast-stroke out of the water, and with great commentary to boot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMoJVla31tc&feature=relmfu

His talk through is pretty exuberant, and either you hate it, or love it.  Either way, it certainly grabs attention.

I swam today for possibly the longest I have yet, and I swam well.  Well, much better than before.  I managed several full lengths swimming full breast-stroke, ducking my head on each stroke, with something other than abysmal timing, or perhaps more precisely, no timing whatsoever.

Before I started swimming again, I had a pathological fear of having my head under water, pretty much whatsoever.  Even a shower could be traumatic if I got it at the wrong angle.  There was no way in hell I was just going to get in a swimming pool and start ducking my head in and out of the water and swimming perfectly.  After about what I'd guess is three weeks, I'm finally comfortable enough that I got my head under and back up repeatedly without panicking.  Even if I swam like crap, that is a huge victory for me.  Add to that the fact that I seemed to be moving almost twice as fast as three days ago, and it was a good day.  The tripple bonus was that after watching the videos, my backstroke was massively improved also.  I saw the flags above moving by much faster that I had previously other than perhaps when I had the pull buoy (is that what they are called?).

Of course, I'm a crazy loon, can't have enough of a good thing, so when I finally got out of the pool, and landed my butt in my car, I was triumphant, but utterly exhausted.

We're ordering delivery tonight.  I deserve it (plus I didn't have energy left to got to the store and buy food, and it was way later than it should have been because I was splashing around in the pool like a happy fool a little longer than I probably should have).