Equipment

For my first training session I bought a pair of fins and a snorkel. Fins are alright. What can be wrong with fins? But snorkel is a bit of a joke. I bought a one with a silicon bottom part and a valve. Two problems with it:

• soft bottom part makes it wobbly and unstable after turns. I haven't tried, but I can imagine where the snorkel going to end up after jumping from a platform.
• the valve actually helps water to stay inside the snorkel. Unlike old fassion ones, where one powerfull exhail can remove water completely, in this one it was taking me three or four exhails to do the same.

So new technologies didn't quite work for me.

In the beginning...

I am standing on a starting platform trying to catch buzzer to start my swimming race. It's again lane of water in front of me... and others waiting for their start. I am a bit nervous playing the race in my head. In a second, after a signal, nervousness will be gone. Seconds or minutes of hard work will take its place. Hard work I was trained for during previous months... I am standing on a platform waiting for a buzzer... just like 20 years ago...

That was a night dream. The one after which you decide that you need to change something in your life.

I was obsessed with the idea to come back into finswimming already about a year. Once I have decided to find a swimming club for my son, normal swimming. I was browsing internet looking at sites of different clubs and accidentally came across wikipedia page with British records in finswimming. To my surprise the results there were weaker than ones I had 20 years back. This has fired a flame... I have contacted people from BFA, but they told me that there is no club in Bristol. Sadly the flame was extinguished... until I had my dream about a year later.

Now I decided to act. It is better to fail in doing something than miss an opportunity. I bought some equipment: fins and snorkel, booked a lane in Bradley Stoke leisure centre and went to my finswimming session. First in nearly 20 years :-)