my blog Oscar Peralta

I was always very proud to say I learned to swim before the age of two (thanks mom!).

I remember, kicking on that board as hard as I could and all those drills that everyone who has been to the standard swimming lessons is familiar with. For many years I swam using those skills that they taught me and what I considered to be the 'universal truth' about swimming.

When we moved to Singapore we landed at a very nice condo that had an awesome pool. We started swimming some laps with my good friend Rob. It was already too long since I have swam on a regular basis so 4 or 5 laps was good enough to get my heartbeat going like on a rave party. I was able to get a little better and do 10 or 15 laps. This was a 25 meter pool so it wasn't bad but it wasn't great either.

One day Rob, who found himself getting pretty exhausted after every workout, found this post from Tim Ferris about how he defeated his fear for swimming and how he learned a method developed by Terry Laughlin called Total Immersion. I didn't pay too much attention at the time since, I already knew how to swim!

Months later somehow I bumped again into the Total Immersion deal. This time I dug into it and it really caught my attention. There are a few videos out there on youtube that I found pretty illustrative. I decided to give it a go and it was the best thing I've done since I discovered cheesecake! Well, not really, I've luckily done quite exciting things since but anyway it was a pretty cool discovery!

I went through the process of relearning what many years of swimming classes have built into my muscle memory. It was not that hard for the most part and even though I am not quite there yet I saw huge improvement within a few times at the pool.

In a couple of days I will be taking part of my third triathlon this year, second Olympic distance, and even if I haven't trained as hard as I could I feel pretty confident that I will enjoy the 1.5km swim.

(Note to myself: I am taking the risk of posting this before the race starts, so don't you dare to drown!).