Back from a wonderful day at the Conrad Hotel (now the Wyndham) for a one-day course in breaststroke from the Art of Swimming People. All-round genius of the moving body, Dominic Hickie, recommended this to me when I was training for the Swimathon, but I didn’t get on a course until it was over. The first one I did was an hour a week over five weeks back in April, learning to do front crawl again, and it was as amazing as he said it would be. It’s the logic & wisdom of Alexander technique applied to swimming, and it works. I was nervous about doing the breaststroke day as it’s the stroke I swim most, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to unlearn my stroke in a day. But our instructor, Janet, was fantastic, and when we came to look the video clips of ourselves at the end of the day putting it all together in the pool, I was really pleased with the result.
Having got so much out of it (I can’t wait to get in the pool again to put it all into practice), I inevitably spent a lot of time pondering the way we learn things and why. The sessions on crawl were just a few hours, but those hours have an enormous impact on the way I swim, every time I’m in the pool. It’s like piano lessons – there are some things which you take with you for life from your teacher; a single sentence spoken at the right time, or something they tell you to think about which always works for you. You take it with you, and carry on learning ever after, at the piano and away from it. At other times, you can spend hours, days, weeks ‘learning’ stuff which either you never really get or benefit from, or forget & don’t use.
In the breaststroke day, we spent time doing things on dry land, slowly, gently & thoughtfully, with plenty of time allowed to let things settle in before going to the pool. A hundred hours isn’t necessarily ‘more’ learning than five, and ‘doing more’ in an hour doesn’t necessarily mean that you achieve more – it depends so much on the quality and nature of the learning experience.
