Learning to Swim with My Daughter

I’ve been surfing and paddling since the 80s, Yet only now in 2021 am I learning to swim.

I thought I knew how.  After months, years, and decades paddling through the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans on surfboards, I’m comfortable in water.  I can freedive, hold my breath, snorkel, bodysurf.

But head down, stroke by stroke, nonstop, swimming for distances, this is a new sport to me.  To succeed, you need measured breathing, patience, and clean technique.  I still want to thrash, power, and hustle my laps up and down the pool.  That can work for 100 meters, but not for 500, 1000, or 1500 meters.  What you need is a repeatable, efficient, full body stroke, sustained for 30, 45, 60 minutes.  

So humility was the first gift of my intial swim sessions at the Manoa public pool.  As children, retirees, and my peers stroked past me, I peered through my Michael Phelps sky blue goggles, observing the body torque, stroke speed, and flutter kicks of my fellow swimmers, leaving me behind.

The next gift was focused breath.  Unique to swimming, you must coordinate your breathing perfectly with every stroke.  It’s intense, enveloping, and invigorating.  Head-plunged underwater, forging ahead powerfully, in an unending full body water race.

Weightless, fast, and free.

I was hooked quickly.  It started as just a few sessions a week at the beginning or end of the work day. But when I grew used to the full body immersion and exertion, and the intensity of a swimming workout, my body started to crave it. On a bike I always needed to look for hills to turn up the intensity. I love to run, but it’s high impact on my body and I shouldn’t do it every day.  Surfing is glorious when it’s happening, yet waves come and go.

But swimming.  You will submerge, you will ignite every muscle in your body, you will fly almost weightless through water space, and you will emerge smiling, strong, breathing deeply. 

I started bringing my 6 year old daughter Nel to the pool with me.  She is a strong and sprightly little monkey, and each day Leigh and I search for ways to help her burn all her energy.  Her new program includes six laps (300 yards) of swimming at the pool.  She normally grimaces as I rally her, and she shivers when we take showers in the locker room ( and she laughs if she catches a glimpse of a stranger’s bum!).

But once we dive under the water, and together swim our laps, she is smiling, happy, fancy free.  She twirls, kicks, and dances between her strokes. She dives deep to the bottom, and finishes every lap laughing and hanging off my shoulders.  I feel like a daddy whale with a playful baby whale frolicking around me as we go.

The lifeguards and fellow swimmers cheer for her.  She grins and feels proud of herself.  We scurry to the showers together and warm up, and then jog to the car in our bathing suits, laughing the whole way, sometimes as the valley rain washes over us.

Moments like these are the happiest in my life.  Playing in water, spending time with my daughter, growing stronger, giggling.  And everything in water is heightened.  We laugh harder, breathe deeper, focus more.

At this point in my life I want to slow everything down.  I want to be here, right now.    I don’t want to the seconds and minutes to run away too quickly. In part because I love this life so much.  In part because I cherish these early moments with my daughter. This chapter is the  sweetest one yet.

And in my quest to slow down time, I’ve discovered swimming.  Because when you are measuring every breath, moving every muscle, and guiding your little girl across the abyss of an Olympic sized swimming pool in a lush valley blanketed in sunshine, you don’t want to be anywhere else. 

Stroke by stroke, breath by breath, taking it slow, laughing underwater in a valley in the sunshine with my daughter Nel.  That’s where you’ll find me.