novels. Of course there are teachers who can teach a set subject, in a set order, using predetermined
phrases, but there aren’t many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils
and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all.
I wasted the first two years trying to find a good coach. Each new coach tinkered with my form just
enough to mess up my swimming, sometimes to the point where I could hardly swim at all. Naturally,
my confidence went down the drain. At this rate there was no way I could enter a triathlon.
Things started to improve around the time I realized that revolutionizing my form was probably
impossible. My wife was the one who found me a good coach. She’d never been able to swim her
whole life, but she happened to meet a young woman coach at the gym she’s a member of, and you
wouldn’t believe how well she swims now. She recommended that I try this young woman as my
coach too.
The first thing this coach did was check my overall swimming and ask what my goals were. “I want
to participate in a triathlon,” I told her. “So you want to be able to do the crawl in the ocean and swim
long distances?” she asked. “That’s right,” I replied. “I don’t need to sprint over short distances.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you have clear-cut goals. That makes it easier for me.”
So we began one-on-one lessons to reshape my form. Her approach wasn’t a slash-and-burn policy,
totally dismissing the way I’ve been swimming up till now and rebuilding from the ground up. I
imagine that for an instructor it’s much more difficult to reshape someone’s form who’s already able,
after a fashion, to swim, than to start with a nonswimmer, a blank sheet. It isn’t easy to get rid of bad
swimming habits, so my new coach didn’t try to forcefully do a total makeover. Instead, she revised
very small movements I made, one by one, over an extended period of time.
What’s special about this woman’s teaching style is that she doesn’t teach you the textbook form at
the beginning. Take body rotation, for instance. To get her pupil to learn the correct way, she starts out
by teaching how to swim without any rotation. In other words, people who are self-taught in the crawl
have a tendency to be overconscious of rotation. Because of this there’s too much resistance in the
water and their speed goes down—plus, they waste energy. So in the beginning, she teaches you to
swim like a flat board without any body rotation—in other words, completely the opposite of what the
textbook says. Needless to say, when I swam that way I felt like an awful, awkward swimmer. As I
practiced persistently, I could swim the way she told me to, in this awkward way, but I wasn’t
convinced it was doing any good.
And then, ever so slowly, my coach started to add some rotation. Not emphasizing that we were
practicing rotation, but just teaching a separate way of moving. The pupil has no idea what the real
point of this sort of practice is. He merely does as he’s told, and keeps on moving that one part of his body.
For example, if it’s how to turn your shoulders, you just repeat that endlessly. Sometimes you spend an
entire session just turning your shoulders. You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you
realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally
understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and
shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.