Swimming Slowly is Harder than Swimming Quickly

Speaking of Covert Bailey, he had a phrase for beginning exercisers that I particularly liked: "Start so slowly that people make fun of you." I've had to relearn that after foot surgery, trying to run again but injuring and re-injuring myself until I got a little wisdom about being patient. Running, though, is fundamentally different than swimming in that you can revert to a walk. For me, there's no such thing as walking in swimming unless you are already fit and have good (enough) mechanics. In other words, you can't walk until you can run. So getting into swimming shape has a bit of a catch-22 to it. If your form is bad, it's difficult to get fit. If you're not fit, you can't put in enough yardage to get the form better.

I recently took up swimming again and had the issue of not being able to hold form very long. Do I thrash about and try to get the fitness or do I stop to not develop terrible form? I ended up taking short breaks at the limit of my form, which is an embarrassingly short interval. But I kept stacking them up and both the interval and the total yardage is creeping up. When I was swimming as a youngster, in high school especially, we'd start the season just by swimming endlessly, to get the "feel" for the water back. We never lost much base fitness in breaks between summer and winter season, so my 15-yr old self could easily drop into the pool for the first time in a couple months and swim, say, 5000 yds without stopping. It was the equivalent of walking -- steady pace that can be held virtually indefinitely. Now I fully appreciate how much actual fitness is required to be able to do what seemed like an easy cruise at the time.