Stephen Clendenin
English 202, Writing About Sports
Blog Post 3
02/21/11
Composure
Composure
Imagine the water lapping at your chin and threatening to enter your mouth and nostrils. You fight to exhale, blowing a spray of salt water the mists over the slapping waves around you. Your legs feel like a pair of legs carved from ice. They are heavy and lead-like, dragging you deeper, and deeper into dark green waters. There is no land in sight. No gull crying overhead. There is only the wind blowing more and more waves, and the constant rush and splash echoing in your ears. But most of all, your shoulders hurt. A deep hurt like someone has taken the tiny nerve endings within the joints of your shoulders, and twisted them tighter, and tighter, making the inner layer of your skin burn. The icy cold of the water keeps that heat contained, but your skin is alive with goose-bumps that crackle down your back like Rice-crispies in a bowl of cold milk. Your heart is huffing like a steam engine, and you know you’re still alive because somehow, someway, you are still moving. Slowly, painfully, moving. So you keep your composure. You tell yourself “I’m still moving, I’m still alive, I can still breathe.” Then, the moment of panic comes. You can’t get a breath. You turn your head to breath, but water rushes into your gaping mouth like krill to a whale’s gullet. You choke, gag, sputter, cough, and your abs tighten more and more with each attempt to rid your mouth of the salt that is drying out your mouth and making your gums feel like hard wax. That’s when impulse takes over. You begin to struggle hard against the waves. Your rhythm is gone. That once burning heat inside your shoulders has been doused by the ice-cold water. In that moment of desperation, when all you wanted was air, your arms were forgotten. And now you have slowed. You don’t have the energy to go on. A scream pushes through the last of the water in your lungs, and you fling your arm towards the heavens. You hold your arm there, waving, like the wing of a fallen albatross, envisioning the furious paddling lifeguard hurrying to your rescue. He will be there soon.
In open water swimming, one of the most important rules, for yourself and other swimmers around you, is to always keep your composure in the water. In other words, don’t panic. In competitive open water swimming, during a race, there are always lifeguards surrounding the area where the swimmers are swimming. The worst thing a swimmer can do is panic. They loose focus of what’s in front of them, where they are, and that there are other swimmers possibly nearby. The possibility of injury and drowning doubles when composure is lost, and panic sets in. The panicked swimmer doesn’t think clearly, and only thinks of what is bothering them right then and there. The most common cause of such panic is swallowing water, and loosing the ability to control breathing. As long as a swimmer can breath, they can keep going. To learn some proper techniques on breathing while open water swimming, and not panicking when water is swallowed instead of air, check out this link.
