I can swim quite well and used to be a very strong swimmer. My neighborhood has a pool and my family are charter members (well, they’re all dead now but me, but I have maintained the membership started 50 years ago) and I grew up there. I took swimming lessons there beginning as a toddler and practically lived there many summers. I don’t think I remember the specific strokes very well, and I’m quite out of shape, but I’m sure I could swim several lengths without stopping. My problem is increasing sensitivity to chlorine; I can’t stay in as long as I used to. Still, we walk the block to the pool for a dip most summer nights when we come home from work.
Can swim a length (underwater or on the surface), but can’t do breaststroke. I can do crawl and butterfly or backstroke without difficulty. Can’t do the breaststroke.
I’ll respond before reading any other responses.
Yes. I was maybe 5 or 6 when I learned. My parents used to claim they saw me growing gills. At 13 I got my lifesaving card. I live for summer and spend half of it submerged. Pools, lakes, oceans, I love them all.
Breaststroke, crawl, backstroke (not the arms out of the water kind), sidestroke, doggy paddle. And I snorkle.
Mom was terrified of the water and thus went out of the way to ensure I wouldn’t be, and thus I took years of swimming classes. I can swim.
Nope. I’m 27 and spent many a summer day in or around water but have never learned to swim. I’m not scared of it, though, and will go completely under without any kind of protective equipment.
Like a fish.
learned at 11, pretty much all strokes.
Accross a pool? yeah, I like to go for sometimes 2 miles at a time in open ocean but used to race across lakes when I was younger.
In my experience as a former dive instructor, sea kayaker, and casual sailor, there is a substantial portion of the population that either does not know how to swim, or cannot swim well enough to be safe in any conditions more aggressive than a swimming pool. And this is out of a population that has self-selected to engage in open water-based activities; I imagine the lack of swimming ability is even much higher in the general population, especially among people who have grown up in urban areas where “swimming” consists at most of splashing in a wading pool.
I’ve been swimming since I was 2 years old, and think that swimming should be a part of any physical education criteria whenever feasible.
Stranger
Certified Lifeguard here.
Yes - can swim and do all strokes required to get certified.
Zero fear of water - though there was this time I swam about a 1/2 mile off the gulf coast, put my head underwater and opened my eyes. I could see infinitely in all directions and it freaked me the fuck out. But, I think that isn’t so much the fear of water as it is some type of agoraphobia.
Yes I’m a very proficient swimmer. My parents sent me for lessons from the age of 4, and I was also taught at school (including life saving).
In Britain it’s something the government is very hot on, as a health and safety issue. All schools are required to teach swimming at primary school (ages 5-10 or 11). Pupils are supposed to leave primary school being able to swim a number of strokes - the success rate is about 80-90% apparently.
Children under 16 are also allowed to swim for free at public/local government run pools.
There may also be a geographical disparity. The first time I ever met someone who couldn’t swim was in college … they were from the Midwest. In many parts of the US, if you’re not living near a city, there may just not be that many swimmable bodies of water around.
I could always swim, even though I never took formal lessons.
I’ve been taking lessons as part of triathlon training the past three months and now I can REALLY swim. Got the breathing and technique down, and now I’m working on speed.
I can swim very well. I took lessons as a kid from before I can remember until fifth or sixth grade. The head of the program was also the coach for the county swim team and told me I should join, but I never did.
The one stroke I can’t do is butterfly…I tried, but I just couldn’t do it…but the last time I tried was when i was ten or eleven, so maybe if I tried again I might be able to do it.
The most I’ve swam at one time is…half a mile? I don’t know, whatever I needed for my lifesaving merit badge in boy scouts. I’m good at holding my breath, though. I was able to go all the way down one length and back again in my high school’s pool…but it wasn’t an Olympic sized pool, it was only 25 meters long. So…50 meters underwater.
I’ve always lived near water. In addition to a nice pool at the high school, I grew up just a few miles from Lake Champlain, and ever summer my family took a trip to either the southern coast of Maine, or to a nice lake in New Hampshire.
Never liked deep water. Learned to swim as a kid, had to relearn when I joined the Navy. Don’t enjoy it at all, and would eventually drown if I had to swim to save my life. Hate the beach, refuse to go on boats. Had a couple of near-death experiences.
Yep. Four years (at least!) of YMCA swimming lessons. Mom insisted that all of us kids take swimming lessons up through the Dolphin level. (Let’s see… I think it went Tadpole, Guppy, Minnow, Fish, Flying Fish, Dolphin?) One of those last two I seem to remember taking more than once – I never could get the hang of the butterfly!
Jeez, I can’t remember the last time I went swimming. Probably on my honeymoon, almost 20 years ago!
My mother loves to swim, so we attended swimming lessons starting at age 5.
Another swimmer here. I can do the crawl, backstroke, breaststroke (although my kick is nonstandard; I used to do a decent frog kick but they tried to teach me the whip kick and I ended up doing some weird amalgam, I think), and sidestroke. I’ve tried butterfly but just can’t manage to put the kick and stroke together properly (I used to say that instead of the butterfly I could do a drowning moth). I can even do flip turns.
I took lessons as a kid, starting at age five or six, and was on swim team in high school one year. The two best things about that was keeping my weight down and not having to take gym class during the swim season. Then I discovered that I could take swimming in gym and actually get As! Even if it was a class below my level (and I’d done advanced swim class by then), the teacher would usually just let me swim laps in a lane on one side of the pool while the class used the rest of the pool.
When you attended RPI, did they still have the swim test as a graduation requirement? They did when I attended in the 1980s but I’ve been doing a web search and it appears that this this was formerly something commonly required by universities but many no longer do.
Yeah, I can swim. I grew up in Florida, and everyone there knows how. My university requires a swim test to graduate, so everyone here has some swimming skill.
With 77 responses, and 8 non-swimmers, we are up to just over 10%