Like most skills, if you don't use them they fade away. When I was a kid I was like a fish when it came to water. I was always excited to get in the pool and I would spend the entire day at the public pool to the point where all the lifeguards knew me and actually encouraged me to put more sunscreen on. I was anywhere from I think 8 - 15 years old when I spent a lot of time at the pool and I would swim and swim and swim and swim and swim and probably be ready to go to bed when I finally got home in the night.
I would imagine that my mother really enjoyed the fact that we liked the pool so much too because that meant that all summer we basically left her alone in the house.
I would later be on swim teams but not in a serious sense. I never ended up winning major tournaments but it was normal for me to finish in the top 5-10 at the meets. I think that if I had taken it more seriously that I could have been good at it but I grew up in a time of great technological change in the world so I was far more interested in that.
Anyway, recently my knees have been bothering me, most notably my right one to the point where running or jogging is sometimes painful. I think I need to just take a rest from running for now and decided to do some swimming instead.
There are certain days of the week that I have a variable schedule so I am able to go to the gym pool in the afternoon when nobody else is there. It is a madhouse after working hours and I would prefer to avoid it. While i was there I went through all the old strokes that I used to find were almost like second nature to me, only to realize that I can barely do any of them anymore.
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Freestyle I found rather easy but there was one thing that I hadn't counted on and that is that my ability to control my breathing isn't what it used to be. I suppose this is understandable because like most 40 year old people, I was in far better cardiovascular shape in my teens and 20's than I am now. I found that after just a couple of laps I was taking a breath on every single stroke and even then I was in danger of inhaling water. I slowed down a lot and it got a bit better. I think I only cranked out a couple hundred meters like this though as it was quite uncomfortable.
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backstroke was better because I could breathe all the time but i found it nearly impossible to control my trajectory and kept running into the ropes. I was also afraid of hitting my hand on the wall and would stand up or tread water after I saw the flags hung across the pool that indicate when you are getting near it. I think I only made it about 75 meters of this before I gave up on that.
After a break stand in the shallow end i had a go at the most difficult stroke, butterfly.
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I already had a massive appreciation for people that can do this stroke correctly, let alone excel in it, but after trying it for the first time in probably a decade and a half the other day, I can say wow, the people who do this are in extremely good shape. Even though I was probably using wildly improper form I only made it one length of the pool before I gave up on this entirely. That is some crazy amount of energy that has to be expelled just to do it at all. I think all the other strokes can be done in a lazy and laid back way but not butterfly.
The only stroke I could do for any sort of duration was breaststroke and this is because I was able to get all the air I wanted and I was able to control my direction and buoyancy without difficulty. I think I did 500 meters of this or so.
It was nice being in the pool but I realized how much work I have left to do on my cardio. I regularly run (well, kind of run) every week multiple times yet I didn't have the endurance to do most of the strokes I used to just do for hours on end without stopping.
This was kind of an eye opener about my age and it was a bit disappointing. But don't let this frustrate any of you 40 somethings out there that make an effort to exercise. Even though I probably looked quite silly to any expert that might have seen me, I am still a lot more active than most of the men my age... and that is what really counts I guess.