When the Saturday coach for Swimming with Alaska Masters (SWAM) asked if I could stick around and help teach the Adult Learn to Swim class, I gaped at her from behind my goggles. “You remember I just learned to swim, like, a year ago, right?”

“You still know more than they do,” she said of the new crop of Learn-to-Swim students.
“Show them what you know.”

Having grown up in the landlocked Midwest, I never learned to swim as a kid. Although my family had an above-ground pool for most of my childhood, my pool time consisted of floating in a tube or playing pool volleyball. The fabric of life in the rural small town where I grew up was woven not from rivers, but from corn and wheat and endless flat and.

When I moved to Alaska, I casually took up kayaking. I loved paddling on Resurrection or Kachemak Bay, and I even got to spend two weeks kayaking in the Tongass National Forest with U.S. Forest Service specialists through a Voices of the Wilderness artist residency.

Every time I slid into my cockpit and adjusted my spray skirt, I was keenly aware that, despite the life jacket I wore, not knowing how to swim posed a real danger.

There was another, less urgent, reason I wanted to learn to swim, too. An avid runner and cyclist who’d gotten inspired by watching a friend finish the Gold Nugget Triathlon, I was just one sport away from signing up for the race, myself. While the Gold Nugget allows swimmers to use any combination of strokes to complete the first leg of the race, the operative word in the rulebook is swim—a thing I, notably, could not do.

It wasn’t until I started working at APU as the fiction mentor for the new MFA Creative Writing low-residency program that I found out about SWAM’s Adult Learn-to-Swim (ALTS) classes, held at the pool in the Moseley Sports Center. At just $10 per lesson, the sessions are affordable. Open to any adult, they cater to all knowledge levels, from hydrophobics to experienced athletes who want to improve their stroke. In my first class, a couple of women were attending with the hope of strengthening their freestyle for the Gold Nugget.

My first lesson, I bobbed and floated and practiced rotating my head to inhale. As the weeks passed, I discovered how impossible it seems to concentrate on every part of swimming at once. The coaches broke strokes down to their components—breath, kick, head position, catch and recovery. Taking the freestyle stroke apart and learning it bit by bit reminded me of workshopping stories during the summer MFA residency, the way workshop participants hyper-focus on a scene, or a character, or an exchange of dialogue, in order to better understand its function in a story and to consider how it might become stronger.

Sometimes I struggle to describe how fiction writing happens. For me, it’s an intuitive activity. I learned my craft by reading and observing what my favorite authors did on the page. My own MFA in creative writing was earned during the “cone of silence” era of writing workshops: The author of a piece being discussed by workshop peers was expected to listen to critiques, appreciations, and questions about their work without responding. So I never had to explain the mechanics of what was happening in my head and how I translated it onto the page.

Being forced to think about my own methods in order to help someone else learn challenges me to be clear and specific; it’s a process of constantly honing my own ideas, then articulating them. It’s something I’m aware of when I work with my graduate fiction students—but it’s become particularly present in my mind as I’ve been teaching other adults to swim.

One thing writing and swimming have in common is that as long as you do either, you never stop running out of opportunities to improve. Teaching feels the same: I leave every workshop and conversation with students already thinking about how I might do things differently next time, how I can be clearer, listen better, convey ideas more articulately.

Now, as I explain to the ALTS students how their arms will become the source of their propulsion when they swim freestyle, I find myself pausing to think through what that means: why we position our arms in the water a certain way, how rotation of the body translates into a streamlined entrance into the water and a more powerful catch. Often, I will pantomime the motion I want students to understand—or I’ll find myself telling them, “Hang on, let me do this so I can describe it to you.”

It’s easier to narrate physicality—rotate your shoulder inward as you imagine a giant is picking you up by your elbow, let your fingers skim the surface of the water—than it is to describe what’s happening in my mind when I am, for example, building tension in a scene. Instructing others in how to swim has helped me get better at teaching writing because it directs my attention to the particulars of what’s happening in my brain when I write, just as I now pay attention to what’s happening in my body when I swim.

I’m getting better at teaching both writing and swimming by doing those things. In both cases, I often walk away—after workshop, after an hour at the pool—feeling like I’ve failed. I wasn’t eloquent when explaining an idea; I couldn’t get streamlined in the water.

But that’s part of learning by doing. Failure, over and over, and what it teaches us for next time. Every Saturday, SWAM Coach Nell Loftin asks, “What did you learn today?” Because there’s always something. The newbie swimmers, the experienced athletes—we all answer, because we’re all still learning, every time we get in the water.

This year, I completed the Gold Nugget Triathlon for the first time, thanks to SWAM’s ALTS classes at the APU pool.

The moment I dropped into my lane at Bartlett High School’s pool, where the race’s swim segment happens, I felt a little nervous. This wasn’t my familiar APU pool, with its safe four-foot depth and its soothing, buoyant saltwater.

Everything I’d learned in APU’s pool still applied, though: freestyle was still freestyle, I still needed to fully exhale so I could take a breath, I still needed to calm my kick and keep my body streamlined just below the surface of the water. As I completed my first lap of the race, I heard the voices of the folks I swim with at each Saturday SWAM workout; the day before, they had wished me luck and encouraged me to relax, have fun, and rely on everything I’d learned.

Now, when I teach ALTS, I tell the new swimmers: A year ago, I was where you are. Learning to swim as an adult may seem daunting, but it’s possible, it’s fun—and it might even help you become a better version of whatever you already are.

Adult Learn to Swim with SWAM is happening now, every Saturday at 10:30 a.m. between August 30 and October 4—but you can drop into a class for just $10. The next ALTS session starts October 18. Learn more at swamalaska.org.