Breathe

Breathe. Photo: ©Matthew Smeal

I swam today. It was a usual day. I swim most days.

As I swim, I think of my breathing. I hear my breathing. I have mild asthma and I often hear the wheeze as I inhale. While mildly concerning—particularly in the winter months when the cold water triggers my asthma—I am used to it and soon find my rhythm.

On other days I don’t notice my breathing at all. I like those days. But something has been playing on my mind lately: the urge to not breathe. Or is it the urge to breathe differently?

Pre- and post-swim discussion with other ocean swimmers embraces many critical topics: wetsuit vs no wetsuit; clear lens googles vs tinted; buoyancy shorts vs budgie smugglers; latex cap vs silicone. And single-sided breathing vs alternate breathing.

If you need air, take it. Breathe.

I am an alternate breather: one breath every three strokes: right-side breath, two, three; left-side breath, two, three… Sometimes you can tell this from the whisker rash on both my shoulders from when I become lazy and drop my head too much or am simply looking down at fish, rays, turtles and other marine life.

Alternate breathing is a good skill to have when ocean swimming; the swell is always coming from one direction or the other and you may have to favour a side. Other times the chop can catch you square in the face as you breathe, leaving you to switch immediately to the other side, your chest aching as you hold your shoulders out of the water and spin your head in synch with your arms as that first breath attempt becomes null and void. Being comfortable breathing from either side is useful.

On choppy days, or days when I am going harder than usual, I breathe as needed. Right-side breath, right-side breath, right-side breath, two, three; left-side breath, two; left-side breath, two, three; right-side breath… 

If you need air, take it. Breathe.

These are the days to curse the pressures of time and responsibility, when surely the sea is all there should be.

But this new phenomenon—the urge to not breathe—has not come up in the usual banter. It has me intrigued. I will breathe, then stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke…hmmm. Despite swimming, and swimming hard, sometimes the need to breathe becomes less. It is, I suspect, a developing mammalian dive reflex. There is immense relaxation on those days, a rhythm with the ocean, a oneness.

These are the days I feel most ‘in’ the water. These are the days of presence: days when I feel every water molecule on every skin cell. These are the days when nothing else matters, when there is only the ocean. These are the days to ‘double’, to finish the swim and simply turn around and do it again. These are the days to curse the pressures of time and responsibility, when surely the sea is all there should be. These are the days when everything is reversed: when the sea is the normal, and the land a mere curiosity to dip your toe in.

The sense to breathe eventually comes, but more from habit than necessity. Then the thought emerges: to breathe in the water – to breathe in water. I feel it is natural; my brain is telling me it is right. Sometimes I do a little bit: I feel the water through my nose, the back of my throat, water entering my body. Or maybe I just think I do. It feels like I should – inhale the water, like a fish; my gills will separate the oxygen out. I will be fine. Breathe in the water… Wait. What gills? I raise my head and breathe.

I continue, upset as I realise that this may not take hold in my family.

I feel foolish from then on. I keep swimming and think only of The Mariner: Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld. A human mutating into a fish. He had gills.

As I swim, I wonder how many more kilometres I need to swim before I can, like The Mariner—actually—start to breathe water. But surely this would be generational: what I have started through daily time in the ocean will continue with my children, and then further develop with their children. Eventually—several generations from now—we may begin to see a race of humans who have taken on fish-like characteristics or more likely those of marine mammals: one breath that will sustain us for several minutes underwater. Homo Delphinus – the dolphin within man, wrote legendary free diver Jacques Mayol of The Big Blue fame.

But my children rarely swim. I continue, upset as I realise that this may not take hold in my family. Other families will have begun their journey into the sea; a forced evolution borne from daily ocean swimming; a coastal fringe mutant race, straight from the pages of a John Wyndham novel and banished to the ‘Badlands’. But my descendants will remain landlocked. Perhaps they will do the banishing, instigating the plight of these new fish-people…

Maybe it is time to see a doctor again about my asthma. The lack of oxygen is doing strange things to my brain. Maybe the mammalian dive reflex is further developed than I thought. Maybe I just think of silly things when I swim.