Keep breathing, it's good for you

The village of Meriden is about as far as you can get from the sea in England. I lived about three miles from it (Meriden, not the sea) during most of my teenage years. Add to that that neither my mother nor my father ever learned the trick of how to swim, and that’s my excuse for not learning till past thirty.
Even then it was only enough to be able to say to my kids “look, Daddy’s doing it, so you can too!” Once they got better at it than I, like when they were about five, I felt my duty done and stopped. Other disincentives include inhaling enough water to drown a small army of rats, and watching Spielberg’s Jaws; all three of them; I even read the book.
Fast forward to nearly now and for reasons explained in an earlier blog, I’ve started to swim a couple of times a week. OK, so it’s good exercise and if you don’t count the pool, requires little in the way of equipment, at least compared to golf and motor racing. But it still feels like an experiment in controlled drowning and invokes sheer panic when the bottom gets too far away for my feet to reach.
Under such conditions there are only two alternatives, stop doing it or get help, so yesterday I had a swimming lesson from coach Ramzi.
It was a revelation. Apparently I’ve been breathing all wrong. Yes, I know not to do it underwater, but the all the childhood admonitions of “breathe through your nose, not through your mouth” had to be forgotten. Breathing is such a regular, not to mention important, habit that controlling it voluntarily requires a considerable effort of will.
And do you know what? As I concentrated on breathing air through the right orifices at the right moments and learning how to keep the water out, the panic started to evaporate too.
My reward was to be able to play with flippers, goggles and polystyrene floats, oh, and I’m going back for another one next week.
Google Meriden, and you’ll get the namesake in the USA, and hey, guess what, that one is a centre for swimming pool manufacture. No excuse for non-swimmers there then.