Reflections from our students
Guided by one of Surrey Park Swimming’s adult learn to swim teachers, Sunita has been practicing jumping into the deep water of the diving pool and then swimming across to the other side. This is the first time she has tried this exercise. There are nerves but there is also laughter. A lot of laughter. Sunita says, “When you’re laughing, you’re happy and you kind of let go of the nervousness and you just focus on the happy part.”
A year ago, when Sunita started swimming lessons with Surrey Park Swimming, she could neither float nor swim. “What really motivated me was my daughter,” she says. “She wanted me to be in the pool with her but I couldn’t because I was so scared of the water. She’d be like, ‘Mum, come jump with me,’ and I would say, ‘Look, take your dad but don’t ask me, I can’t do it.’ Then I could see that face, you know, a disappointment in her face where she was like, ‘But I really want you to come, why can’t you come in the water?’ She was my biggest inspiration. And that is what made me start swimming.”
Joy, another adult learn to swim participant, has a story from the beach, such a huge part of Australian summers: “My big example was when I went to the beach and I was really scared in the water and my husband said, ‘Don’t worry, just go jump in.’ I could stand up with my head out of the water. But of course, I was really scared when a big wave was coming. Yes, so scared.”
Joy, like Sunita, is doing the diving pool, ‘deep water, jump and swim’ exercise. “Now, when I go into the deep water, I feel excited,” she says. But a year ago, both had started their swim lessons in the learner’s pool. “We started in the shallow pool,” says Sunita, “Where the kids learn how to swim, which was so safe. We started there and now we are here,” in the deeper water.
Different participants have different reasons for beginning adult classes. Trent, like Joy and Sunita, wants to be there for his kids, “I’m going to spend a lot of time in the water with them. So I had a bit of a nudge there.” But he goes on: “The other reason is for fitness purposes. It’s a great sort of aerobic exercise and low impact.” and Selena, another mum, says “It’s a life skill which everyone needs to learn. If you can’t really swim and if something happens, you can’t really save yourself. That’s why I feel that I have to learn, because I didn’t learn swimming when I was young in China.”
As Selena noted, if you can’t swim, you can’t save yourself in an emergency and nor are you likely to be able to save your children or others that find themselves in trouble. Lack of swimming skills are a major contributing factor to drowning fatalities in Australia and Royal Life Saving, Australia, research shows that twenty-three percent of Australian adults report weak or no swimming ability (1). Trent said “the thought of doing adult swimming lessons was a bit daunting, a bit off-putting. But I think there’s a lot of people that are actually in the same boat. There are so many adults out there that don’t know how to swim and when you realise this that uncomfortableness will disappear very, very quickly.”
Trent adds that one of the great benefits at Surrey Park Swimming has been the availability of classes to suit all levels of experience. “Obviously, you can start at beginner level if you’ve spent very little time in the pool. Intermediate level for someone like myself who sort of had the basic swim techniques, but really wanted to refine that. And then obviously moving into the advanced level where you can start to train for specific events, long distance or triathlon. So there’s a level to suit all abilities.”
It took Trent only a few months to notice significant improvement in his swimming ability and fitness. And after a year of lessons, Selena says, “It was really, really difficult at the beginning because I’m was just so scared of the water. Even the learner’s pool where it was not deep, I was still scared. Now I’m more confident and as you can see I can actually swim without any help.”
And what advice does Selena give other adults learning to swim? “Take your time. Don’t be rushed, learn everything properly, step-by-step. That is the way I want to teach my children: don’t be rushed. Foundations are the most important thing. The water is not that scary when you know how to swim, right?”
Sarah, from Korea, another classmate of Sunita and Joy has a daughter swimming with Surrey Park Swimming’s Club Squads. “She’s really good at swimming and she asks, when I have my lessons, ‘What did you learn?’ and I say, “I learnt how to do this!”. “I am really happy to share this story with my family. I’m still scared in the deep water (but) swimming is now one of the best, like happiest parts in my life.”
