If you’re struggling in the slow lane, can you help make it a better place?

“Feeling not fighting the water, being aware of your neck and your breathing, containing the impulses that spoil your integrity….all this takes time!”

Fast, Medium or Slow? Most pools have 3 lanes with the appropriate sign at the end. And we have a choice to make before each swim.

There’s a lot to be said for swimming slowly, with good coordination and a healthy relationship with water. The slow lane could be a much better place to be than it is.

The trouble is that the ‘good’ swimmers are usually in the fast lane. And because the slow lane’s full of ‘bad’ swimmers, nobody really wants to be there.

People who swim breaststroke with their head out of the water, straining their necks and kicking asymmetrically from twisted pelvises, give the slow lane a particularly bad name.

But slow swimming doesn’t have to be synonymous with poor swimming. Feeling not fighting the water, being aware of your neck and your breathing, containing the impulses that spoil your integrity….all this takes time!

If you’d like your swimming to be like Zen or yoga, deciding to swim slowly might be your best bet.

If more poor swimmers made the choice to learn to swim well, not to be able to do a triathlon or push themselves into the fast lane, but to change the quality of their own experience, then the slow lane could be the place to be.