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I was born in Florida and everyone here learns to swim almost before we are capable of forming memories of our lessons. There's so much water around that parents want to make sure their kid won't drown if it falls into a pool or retention pond. So when I meet people who never learned how, it's really weird to consider. To me, swimming seems like it should be an instinctual action like how it is in animals. Water is much denser than air, thus swimming is just moving in a way that uses that resistance to propel the swimmer through the medium, which seems intuitive. I want to know about "swimming culture" in other states and countries. When did you learn to swim? If you never learned, why not? If you don't know how, what happens when you try to swim? Is swimming a rare activity in places like Northern Europe, and in such places, if you want to swim do you have to go to a public pool? This is one of those mundane things I've never thought about before and now I'm curious. note: if someone wants to talk about swimming as a sport, go for it, but I hate that poo poo. I was forced to be on a swim team when I was about ten and the only stroke I was ever good at was the breast stroke  That said, I'm a relatively strong swimmer, like most people in Florida.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:22
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My step dad didn't know how to swim until a year ago- he's 65. He's full blooded Japanese and I guess it just wasn't important in the culture or his family at least to learn. He tried going to learn at a city rec center where they taught adult swim lessons. I asked him about it after and it seemed like the inability to swim is more fear then anything and once you're in the water your brain just kinda goes full retard. Once he relaxed and had a coach walking him through it he picked it up pretty quickly which is why I think it's more fear. How someone could drown in a pool without being able to get themselves out though by at very least thrashing towards the edge though v  v
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Apr 14, 2015 14:31
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Swimming is really just about losing the fear, people just freak out and drown even in situations where it would be trivial to just lay and float. Leather Daddy posted:My step dad didn't know how to swim until a year ago- he's 65. Freaking out and thrashing is exactly how it happens, thrashing doesn't do poo poo for movement besides straight to the bottom. For certain special forces training they throw the people in the water with legs and arms bound exactly to remove the instinct to freak the gently caress out.
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Apr 14, 2015 15:13
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Hummingbirds posted:I want to know about "swimming culture" in other states and countries. When did you learn to swim? If you never learned, why not? If you don't know how, what happens when you try to swim? Is swimming a rare activity in places like Northern Europe, and in such places, if you want to swim do you have to go to a public pool? I only swim when I'm on holiday.
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Apr 14, 2015 15:25
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Here in the Netherlands there is water everywhere and the half of the country closest to the sea sits below sea level. So when I went to elementary school swimming was a (mandatory? Not sure) part of the curriculum. I think we learned swimming at the same time as reading. It's apparantly no longer ubiquitous with the influence of immigration, some of which have objections to kids (of mixed gender even!) in swimming clothing. I firmly believe it should be mandatory again like vaccinations. Precious sensibilities be damned, it's a basic survival skill here.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:00
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Hummingbirds posted:I want to know about "swimming culture" in other states and countries. When did you learn to swim? If you never learned, why not? If you don't know how, what happens when you try to swim? Is swimming a rare activity in places like Northern Europe, and in such places, if you want to swim do you have to go to a public pool? I grew up in MD, just outside of DC. My mom had me in a water babies swim instruction program at six months (June, weeks after outdoor pools open up, and stay open until Labor Day usually). Swim lessons are probably one of the earliest memories from my childhood, although most of what I remember is learning different swim strokes, and an instructor pushing me off the high dive when I tried getting out of my first jump off of one ("Hey, look it's your mom. Wave to her." /push). Pretty sure I took all of my classes at the same public pool, my maternal grandparents had an in-ground pool, and my paternal grandparents belonged to a private club in their neighborhood. At age 7 or 8 my family joined a private club in our neighborhood, I started swimming on their swim team, and I'm pretty sure until I was 15 or 16, I spent most of my summer days at the pool. Kids played a lot of games, diving for coins, diving through inner tubes, going off diving boards, and in the diving well we'd often play a tag-type game. If we played with rules where you could not try to pull a person to the top of the water, it was Sharks & Minnows. If we were playing rough, where you could try to pull a person to the surface to tag them, it was Beaver. A lot of parties at the pool too, probably one a month for four different age groups: kid's day (under-11), pre-teen day (12-13), teen night (14-18), and adult night. Usually themes, music, food, and games. The ones I remember were diving for coins (this time probably someone's entire coin jar dumped in the pool), and greased watermelons, where people shoved each other around a lot to try to get the watermelon to the edge of the pool and onto the pool deck. Not sure if there was a prize for that one. So there was a summer season culture at this pool in the 80's and early 90's. I think a lot of people moved away from the neighborhood and the membership dropped to the point that the pool shutdown, was sold (?) to the county, and then filled in. It's now a vacant lot, and a few other private clubs in the same county are shutdown and abandoned. Now at age 38, and occasionally I'll go swim laps, or if it's hot out (85+ F) and there is a pool I'll jump in and be lazy.
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Apr 16, 2015 17:23
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Norway here. I moved around a lot as a kid and grew up in relatively rural areas around smaller cities, both the coast and inland. I basically lived in the sea as a toddler in the summer. As I got older, I swam and dived for hours. My mother often "kept watch", but she can't swim (she knows how, but has a pretty bad phobia), if that gives you any idea of how normal it is to just play in the ocean. People swim all the time inland too, in lakes et cetera. Norway has a strong boating and fishing tradition (VIKINGS). My SO is from Northern Norway. It's pretty cold up there. He used to be on some some of swimming team. Most Northerners swim in the summer, and somehow don't die from the cold. I live in Oslo now, and lots of people here don't know how to swim. It's mainly a problem with immigrants from cultures that don't have a tradition for swimming. Every summer there are a couple of drowning accidents due to this, both in the sea and pools. edit: we have the same issues of "mixed genders" in school pools as mentioned above from the Netherlands. lizard_phunk fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 14:38
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Texas here - since I grew up in a part of Texas with lots of lakes and rivers, I learned to swim early on. It helped that my dad repaired boats, so we were always on the lake. But even among my friends who didn't have boat-repairing-dads, we just all naturally learned to swim. I don't think anyone I grew up with couldn't swim, lakes were just too ubiquitous and inner-tubing too drat fun.  I've also lived in West Texas, where the only nearby source of surface water was a pool at the YMCA, and loving nobody knew how to swim. I tried to get several people to come learn, and nobody would. Despite this, it seems like everyone in West Texas owns a freaking boat, which they drive around on vacation to go fishing with. People are weird!
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Apr 19, 2015 12:29
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I'm in the Navy, and during basic there's a swimming test portion, which should be obvious to most people. But the strange thing is like a hard 65% of people didn't know how to swim, and would freak the gently caress out during the swim portion, resulting in them having to stay in bootcamp for multiple extra weeks. always tripped me out that people would join the Navy of all branches without the foggiest idea of how to swim.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:14
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Nwabudike Morgan posted:I'm in the Navy, and during basic there's a swimming test portion, which should be obvious to most people. But the strange thing is like a hard 65% of people didn't know how to swim, and would freak the gently caress out during the swim portion, resulting in them having to stay in bootcamp for multiple extra weeks. always tripped me out that people would join the Navy of all branches without the foggiest idea of how to swim. Swimming was not a requirement of most navies until relatively recently (late 19th century). As long as you did your job right you would never be in the water, and if you were, something had gone catastrophically wrong and you were probably screwed anyway.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:18
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Hummingbirds posted:Is swimming a rare activity in places like Northern Europe, and in such places, if you want to swim do you have to go to a public pool? Finland: -About 2/3 of the adults can swim 200 meters, among the young adults number is nearly 90%. -More than half of the kids get swimming lessons in school. -200+ indoor pools, probably one in every 20k+ city. -There's lakes everywhere but the water temperature is usually enjoyable only for 2-6 weeks or so (personal preference). -However there's plenty of summer cottages near water so going to sauna and dipping in lake can be a nice experience even when the water is cold. -There's also those who swim in a hole in ice during winter but they are mostly a curiosity. I personally tend to swim maybe 1-3 times/year. Usually during the warm days in July while spending time with friends near water.
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Apr 27, 2015 20:08
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I live in Swansea, Wales, another coastal city (although my particular bit of Swansea is a way from the coast). I had swimming lessons as a child, but I'm just kinda bad at coarse motor coordination so I never learned to swim much more than 25m without completely exhausting myself. One time I tried 50m and just sort of collapsed halfway through the second length. As for individual strokes, with front crawl I could move around but typically swallowed half the pool while doing so. Breaststroke just never led to me moving at all, for me it was about as effective for locomotion as treading water. Backstroke was my favourite stroke, but when I wasn't cracking my head into the end of the pool I was losing my sense of direction and cracking my head into the side of the pool, or going round in circles, or colliding with other swimmers. And hahahahaha butterfly hahahahaha good joke. At one point I tried taking up swimming again, even if it was just a very casual thing, but I went with my mum and she tends to panic as soon as she swallows any water, so we stopped going. Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Apr 27, 2015 |
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Apr 27, 2015 21:03
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Greece here. Almost everyone here knows how to swim. Most of us have a summer home or our parents' old family house somewhere rural and close to the sea, and it's not uncommon for small children to spend all 3 months of our summer holidays there with our grandparents while our parents visit over the weekends. In my case we were pretty much thrown in the sea around late May/early June and were forcibly pulled out around mid-September. Our daily schedule during the summer was wake up, go to the beach, go home for lunch, go back to the beach, go home for a shower and dinner. Never really bothered with waiting 2 hours from when we ate to when we dove, we just didn't swim too far out and stayed around the depth we could easily stand in. It also helps that Athens has quite decent beaches so even before the school year finished we'd go to the beach and swim and play around after school. There are some public pools but they're not really THAT popular. Our schools don't have pools either. It's mostly something that we learned from our parents growing up, usually around the age of 2 or 3. Granted, since it wasn't proper swimming lessons, most of us don't have perfect form in butterfly stroke or whatever but generally we're very accustomed to being in and around water.
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Apr 28, 2015 12:57
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I can never shake the feeling that if I were thrown into a large body of water as an adult, having never swum before, I would probably work it out fairly fast. I always read those description of 19th Century sailors drowning instantly upon touching water really confusing. I guess I'm just wrong? Or are most people stupid? Both? I also think I would learn to swim pretty quick if I was a sailor, because, you know. It would be stupid not to learn that.
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Apr 28, 2015 15:27
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Jeza posted:I can never shake the feeling that if I were thrown into a large body of water as an adult, having never swum before, I would probably work it out fairly fast. I always read those description of 19th Century sailors drowning instantly upon touching water really confusing. The biggest issue is that people who don't know how to swim tend to panic and thrash in water, which tires them out and ends with them sinking. Even if you can't swim, just going motionless will usually end with you floating. But for someone who doesn't know how, panic takes over and this isn't what happens.
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Apr 28, 2015 15:49
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Thanks for the replies, everyone, it's cool to hear perspectives from so many countries. I asked one of my professors (who is from Northern Ireland) about this and he said he learned to swim in primary school. I also had a professor this semester who was from South Africa; I wish I had thought to ask him before the class ended.Jeza posted:I guess I'm just wrong? Or are most people stupid? Both? I also think I would learn to swim pretty quick if I was a sailor, because, you know. It would be stupid not to learn that. I've heard that sailors deliberately did not learn how to swim because if you fell off a boat you were hosed anyway, so at least it would be over more quickly than if you knew how.
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Apr 28, 2015 17:49
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I grew up in the Midwest and took swimming lessons as a kid, then when I was a teenager I got fat and stopped swimming for some years out of self-consciousness. In my early 20s I once fell into a lake by accident and spent several seconds panic-flailing underwater before I realized "you know how to swim, idiot" and effortlessly swam back to shore. I imagine if I hadn't known how to swim it probably would have been pretty easy to gently caress up and possibly drown, especially being encumbered by clothes.
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Apr 28, 2015 17:49
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Connecticut, swimming lessons as a child. I assume I can still swim but I haven't for probably 10+ years. As I recall I never did manage to get the hang of that flip turn.
Duck and Cover fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 18:45
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Being raised in Hawaii, I wouldn't be surprised if I was swimming with arm floaties before I was walking. Regardless, I don't recall ever not being able to swim. Although I now live in the middle of Europe and therefore swim only rarely, it still comes as second nature when I am able to get back into the water.
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Apr 29, 2015 19:33
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I'm in the UK, my parents forced me to go to swimming lessons every week, which I hated. I eventually got them to agree that the lessons could stop when I started secondary school at age 11. A couple of years later we stated doing swimming in PE and I was shocked at how many of my classmates could barely even swim a width of the tiny pool that our school had, and realised what a big favour my parents had done me.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:44
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Lemon posted:I'm in the UK, my parents forced me to go to swimming lessons every week, which I hated. I eventually got them to agree that the lessons could stop when I started secondary school at age 11. A couple of years later we stated doing swimming in PE and I was shocked at how many of my classmates could barely even swim a width of the tiny pool that our school had, and realised what a big favour my parents had done me. I started around 3, as far as I can recall even slightly, and I always like swimming so I can't relate to this completely, but it is shocking to me how many parents don't recognize that knowing how to swim is an important life skill that could literally save your life. An acquaintance of mine has 3 or 5 kids or something, and none of them know how to swim because he's simply left it up to them as to whether they want to learn or not (and they don't, apparently). gently caress that; frankly, it's like learning to read. You may not want to do it as a kid, but as a parent you should make it clear that it's not an option. I will agree that swimming lessons were fairly boring and often unpleasant, though, even though I've always loved swimming. I quit a lot earlier than most, but since my family had a pool when I was growing up, I have a lot of practice. As a result, my technique isn't perfect (my backstroke is awful, and I can just barely do a butterfly stroke), but I can swim a mile doing front crawl without even thinking about it. When I got my PADI certification when I was 11, I was the only student who could do the 200m ocean swim (they had to get someone to call me back, because I was intent on swimming all the way to the indicated buoy), despite the fact that I was always really lovely at pretty much every other form of sports or exercise (I have minor cerebral palsy, so anything that required balance, hand-eye coordination, or flexibility in my legs, was right out).
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Apr 29, 2015 21:02
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Oh yeah, I didn't make it clear, I love swimming but I just hated the lessons. More than anything I think it was simply the long periods of standing by the pool, wet and freezing due to lack of heating in the building, something that you don't have to deal with when at the pool with your friends on a weekend.
Lemon fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 21:18
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Hummingbirds posted:I was born in Florida and everyone here learns to swim almost before we are capable of forming memories of our lessons. There's so much water around that parents want to make sure their kid won't drown if it falls into a pool or retention pond. I'm in the same boat as you in regards to the part I bolded in your OP. A very large majority of my friends I know don't know how to swim, and to me that is bizarre. I grew up around pools (started "swimming" when I was 3 or something) and was a competitive swimmer from 5 to 22. I was fortunate enough that my parents were members at a local private country club and they got me lessons throughout my childhood. My summer days were basically spent as a pool rat and generally being in, or around, the pool from 10 to 5. I was never fond of competitive swimming, probably because my parents made me do it, but in college I was swimming because I wanted to, and I enjoyed it a lot more. Also, being a swimmer I am completely uncoordinated on land, but you put that sport or activity in the water and I'll kick everyone's rear end. Looking back, I wish I did a different sport (basketball, perhaps) but then I get thinking about the part I selected from the OP and realize that I'm fully capable on land or in water, which is a really invaluable skill while others literally can't float in water. Happy to talk more about swimming in general or competitive swimming, if you can handle my ramblings.
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Apr 30, 2015 21:34
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GramCracker posted:Happy to talk more about swimming in general or competitive swimming, if you can handle my ramblings. What's the point of the butterfly stroke? And when my parents made me join a swim team why did I always get yelled at for only wanting to breathe to one side while doing freestyle?
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Apr 30, 2015 23:53
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Hummingbirds posted:What's the point of the butterfly stroke? And when my parents made me join a swim team To make you incredibly tired extremely fast? gently caress butterfly, that's my thoughts on that stroke. I somehow went my entire swimming career only swimming the 100yd butterfly maybe 3 times total. Breathing to the side during freestyle is way more efficient than lifting your face straight up. Unless you meant you liked breathing to the right only vs alternating left/right, in which case I'm not sure why they would yell at you as I predominantly breathed to my right, waaay more than my left, whenever I swam freestyle.
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May 1, 2015 15:44
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lizard_phunk posted:Norway here. Norway here too, just confirming everything in the above post. The part about immigrants is just horrible - every summer the last few years there have been totally unavoidable deaths where kids and adults have drowned because they just never learned how to swim in their original country. A recent study found that 17 % of immigrant kids couldn't swim, compared to 5 % of Norwegian kids. The government is providing something like a million dollars per year now to programmes specifically for immigrant kids, to teach them to swim. (I'm from the north of Norway, and we tend to learn how to swim in indoor pools, because it's nice to be able to concentrate on the swimming part of the experience, instead of the "holy fuckballs, that's cold!"-bit.)
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May 1, 2015 16:18
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I'm in my mid 30s and grew up in Ottawa, Canada. My parents signed me up for swimming lessons when I was maybe 5 and eventually swam competitively from about 10 to 13. I wanted to give it up because spending a weekend driving to upstate New York or places near Toronto and spending a whole day waiting to swim 5 or 6 times was incredibly boring to me. Most of my friends and classmates had taken at least a few levels of swimming lessons but swimming was never offered as a part of PE in school. I gave up swimming for almost 15 years due to a bad shoulder but have recently gotten back in the habit of doing a few laps of breast stroke or freestyle every few weeks as cross training for distance running. My wife on the other hand never learned to swim. She's about the same age and grew up in Toronto but her Mom never had the time or money for lessons. She's currently looking in to adult swim classes as a form of low impact fitness and for the whole basic, potentially life-saving skill thing.
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May 1, 2015 17:57
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Learned to swim when I was a tyke in hawaii, spent most of my summer youth in VA/the Carolina's in a pool. The only time I hated to swim was when my parents tried to force me into competitive swimming.
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May 1, 2015 19:02
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I went to seven schools in four countries (if you count Scotland and England seperately) so heres my memory of each one: 1) SE England, aged 5-7: can't remember 2) Amsterdam (British International School), aged 7/8: Private lessons, only boys. 3) NE Scotland (two schools), aged 8-10:Pprivate lessons for both. Mixed from what I remember. 4) International Schools in the Middle East (one British, one American), aged 10.5-12: no swimming at the British one. The American one had extra-curricular lessons which were segregated by gender. It was quite strongly suggested that you attend these so-called "extra" activities though. 5) NE Scotland, aged 12.5-16: mixed compulsory swimming lessons at school, once per week for maybe three months of the year. Although mixed swimming lessons in secondary school are officially mixed, in practice they're more like 75% boys. The girls tend to "forget" their swimming kit or "be on their period". Obviously they didn't and they weren't (not every week at least), but teenage girls tend to be very body conscious and it's pretty easy to get out of swimming lessons. There are plenty of girls who don't want to go swimming at that age because they're embarassed about their bodies (plenty of boys too!). We have had womens-only swimming times at pools here in the UK since literally forever, and there's mens-only lessons at some places too (although you have to look a bit harder for those). They've got nothing to do with immigrants or muslims or whatever, although obviously nowadays they're the ones who get blamed for them. If and when I have kids I will encourage them to swim from an early age, and I'm in favour of gender segregation in this case if it increases participation, because my completely anecdotal experience shows that compulsory mixed gender classes decreases it.
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May 1, 2015 20:00
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GramCracker posted:To make you incredibly tired extremely fast? gently caress butterfly, that's my thoughts on that stroke. I somehow went my entire swimming career only swimming the 100yd butterfly maybe 3 times total. Breathing to the side during freestyle is way more efficient than lifting your face straight up. Unless you meant you liked breathing to the right only vs alternating left/right, in which case I'm not sure why they would yell at you as I predominantly breathed to my right, waaay more than my left, whenever I swam freestyle. Yeah, I wanna say I wanted to breathe to the left only but my high-school-aged instructors would get very annoyed that I wasn't doing it correctly. duckmaster posted:Although mixed swimming lessons in secondary school are officially mixed, in practice they're more like 75% boys. The girls tend to "forget" their swimming kit or "be on their period". Obviously they didn't and they weren't (not every week at least), but teenage girls tend to be very body conscious and it's pretty easy to get out of swimming lessons. There are plenty of girls who don't want to go swimming at that age because they're embarassed about their bodies (plenty of boys too!). In my middle school (ages 12-14) gym classes, we had to spend about three weeks each year swimming. The period was only 45 minutes long and it's not common in my area (maybe the whole US?) for children in gym classes to be completely naked in the locker room, so everyone would try to get stalls to change in. The classes were coed so we had to swim with the boys; most of us only owned bikinis so for self-conscious teenagers, it was horrible. Then we had to go back to the locker room to try to dry off and get a stall to change into clothes in the last five minutes before the bell rang. The rest of the day, we had wet hair, so anyone who styled their hair before school looked like poo poo. Everyone loving hated gym during those three weeks. Once I was doing a swimming exercise exactly as the teacher asked, but she threatened me with a zero for the day if I didn't put my head underwater (and therefore ruin my straightening job in the first period of the day). That pool got a leak a couple years ago and when I heard that it was subsequently bulldozed, I felt vicarious relief for the students.
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May 1, 2015 23:44
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I was on a competitive swim team all through high school. It was fun as hell and gave me a nice lean bod. Now that I'm older, they have Masters swim teams for 18 and over that I think I would like to get involved in. Plus, meet lots of girls and see them in a suit before you take her out, thats always nice.
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May 2, 2015 07:51
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Australia here, my parents conscripted me up to swimming lessons through my childhood. At the public pool, which was weird, as I have always lived a kilometer away from the beach. Anyway, swimming lessons were standard in primary school and occasionally came up every so often in high school. Living so close to the coast, I was informed multiple times about rip tides and such other swimming hazards. Recently, I went swimming for the first time in about 10 years, and found that my training held, although it had severely rusted due to inaction.
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May 2, 2015 13:12
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OK, I can actually speak as someone who learned relatively late in life (teenager). Part of it was the "can't breathe" fear aspects, majority of it was probably putting my head underwater made my eyes burn like lava from chlorine in the local pools (goggles leaked and my initial childhood teachers had some kind of hard-on for demanding I not use them anyway) so going even temporarily beneath the water just hurt too much. I was in Boy Scouts which had a swimming requirement to go up in rank, so I decided I'd bite the bullet and take private lessons. Getting better goggles without leaks that the teacher didn't ban for reasons helped a bunch, biggest thing was probably starting with back floating/back stroke, which got me used to floating and then paddling without any of the issues with eyes or breathing. When I finally started working on strokes with my face in the water, I knew what floating was supposed to feel like and lost any of that "I'm sinking!" concern. Actually went on from just passing the Boy Scout rank requirement to getting the Swimming and Lifesaving (i.e. life guard stuff) merit badges. Don't swim too much anymore though, and I do tend to keep my head out of the water though I think that's actually more a result of the life guard style training (i.e. keep your head up so you can see the person you're going for).
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May 3, 2015 19:31
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I grew up in VA and my parents put me in swim lessons when I was a kid, I think when I was in kindergarten or so. They forced me to be on the local pool's swim team for a few years when I was in grade school which I hated with a passion. I always just kind of assumed everyone had swim lessons of some variety as a kid, I still find meeting adults who don't know how to swim really strange. I've never been a particularly good swimmer, but I can swim.
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May 4, 2015 02:25
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I'm from New Jersey (near Philadelphia), and none of my schools had any sort of swim lessons. At least not free ones anyways which was the only thing we could afford. Of course, it didn't help that my eczema made my mom paranoid of me going into pools, and it also made going into saltwater painful. My pre-school in New York had swim lessons, but I apparently started freaking out the moment I touched the water and got sent to the kiddie pool for the rest of the time. Unfortunately, I still don't know how to swim, but I'm planning on learning.
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May 4, 2015 23:29
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My stepfarther is in his 50s and still does not know how to swim. Which is strange because he constantly goes fishing. I think for him it is more panicking if he falls in water so he tries to just flounder. Mom makes him wear a life-vest every time he goes near water. For him I think it is more a pride thing as to why he refuses to learn to swim.
ShadowMoo fucked around with this message at 23:39 on May 4, 2015 |
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May 4, 2015 23:35
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Newfoundland here, I dont know how to swim and neither do my relatives or most people I know. Despite being a fishing province, most people never learn to swim. There was a big pedophile scare 10 years ago in my town and the pool was shut down. Without a pool, there's basically nowhere for anyone to swim besides the ocean, with its obvious dangers.
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May 4, 2015 23:37
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Ohio here. I cannot remember ever NOT knowing how to swim. My reason for posting is to back up what others have said, a lot of drowning deaths could be rescues if not for panic. Several years ago some teenage hick drowned in a relatively small pond in my hometown. Supposedly, a couple of his friends even tried to save him, but he was flailing so crazy from panic that they could not get hear him to grab him.
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May 4, 2015 23:50
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What's a good routine I could do in a standard backyard pool if I'm already in shape from lots of cardio? It's really hot/humid where I live so I'd like to switch to swimming or at least alternate if possible. I'm just not sure on how to start and how quickly to progress. There's a lot of different recommendations out there so maybe someone who knows a bit about it could give me some advice.
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May 5, 2015 07:55
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 02:13 |
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Dr.Caligari posted:Ohio here. I cannot remember ever NOT knowing how to swim. Either last year or the year before, a 29-year-old immigrant drowned in a man-made lake that was so shallow you could stand on the bottom in most places. There were six people from the same family rafting, including an infant, and I believe either most or all of them had no idea how to swim.
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May 5, 2015 08:13
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