The Snorkel Workout

As some of my friends and readers know, I’m on a mission to shed at least 30 pounds by October.

Most weight-loss plans suggest exercising in addition to cutting calories and changing eating habits. Unfortunately for me, one of the reasons I need to lose this weight is due to a knee injury that makes most exercise painful if not impossible.

“Go swimming,” the nurse practitioner told me.

“Oh, yeah. Why didn’t I think of that?”

The reason is that I’m a terrible swimmer. For someone who grew up at the beach (born and raised in Miami Beach, FL) you think I’d be a natural. But I’m not. I used to swim for exercise in grad school, but had to resort to the breast stroke since I am simply too uncoordinated to manage the crawl.

For me, it’s like juggling. There are three things to do and I can only do two of them at a time. I’m simply unable to move my arms, my legs and breathe simultaneously. The result is either that the lower half of my body sinks as I flail my arms and breathe, or I get dramatically out of breath while concentrating on moving the extremities.

Neither result is sustainable and one has a tendency to get a lifeguard blowing a whistle, with embarrassing effects.

Nonetheless, I attempted a water workout yesterday at a local private women’s college pool. I decided to try water walking to start. It went well. I got my heart rate up without subjecting my knee to the usual stress of supporting half my weight. Acknowledging that as a full-time writer, my main upper-body workout consists of typing and I eating, I realized water walking wasn’t enough of a workout. So I managed a couple of slow laps of breast stroke in the “recreational section” of the pool.  I wasn’t sure I was fast enough to get into one of the official lap lanes, so I watched the other swimmers for a while.

Which is when I spotted the solution to some (certainly not all) of my problems: some of the swimmers were using SNORKELS while doing laps. What genius! This eliminates the need to remember to rotate your face out of the water before inhaling! One can devote their full focus to arms and legs and not drown. There has to be a Nobel Prize for this. If not, someone should start one.

Thus, my next mission is to obtain a mask and snorkel and manage to get my hefty ass to the pool again to put the technique into action.

Considering it took me two months to get to the pool the first time, don’t hold your breath (ha-ha!) waiting for the follow-up to this. I hope to manage it sometime before the end of the summer.

All in all, I did complete 18 laps: half walking and half slo-mo breast stroke. My arms hurt so I know I got some therapeutic effect. I’m actually looking forward to my next water workout. It didn’t hurt that the pool has a great outdoor Jacuzzi for post-swim relaxing. This is California, after all.