Flip Turns And Answered Prayers

There is nothing natural about it.

You come in to the wall, you turn yourself upside down, blindly reach for the wall with your feet, push off and hope you are headed in the right direction.

Flip Turns. I have dreaded flip turns for as long as I have been swimming, which is going on 9 years now.

This whole time, even though I swam 5 times a week at points, I never learned how to do flip turns. Oh sure, I tried a few times, but it was always so disorienting and uncomfortable, I quickly gave them up. In this way, flip turns are a lot like prayer. Some of us may like to pray more, but every time we do it we feel uncomfortable. It is disorienting and we don't immediately get anything out of it, so we give up. What's the point?

So like I said, I never learned how to do flip turns. When I started training again back in June, I tried a few flip turns and gave up for the same reasons I always have. Let me just focus on swimming, flip turns aren't really that much better anyhow.

But since I was just getting back into things and was not in any way competitive, I decided that now was the time. I checked on the google machine to find the best way to do it and person after person said this. "The only way to learn how to do flip turns is to do it a thousand times. Do it a thousand times, and you will have it."

So it was that I started doing flip turns a few months ago. And let me tell you this. It. Was. Awful. Water up my nose. Breathing all off. Missing the wall. Too close to the wall. Ending up in the wrong lane after push off (this happened 3x.) So embarrassing....

I was all over the place and my swimming suffered. Actually, I couldn't even think about swim mechanics as I swam because all my attention was focused on the next flip turn. And so it went for weeks. But over time, I missed less and less and I learned how to time my breathing and my approach stroke better. My push offs became straighter and straighter.

And lo and behold, by the time I reached my 1,000th flip turn, I had it down. I didn't even really need to think about it anymore. So I began to re-focus on my swim mechanics and then I noticed something.

There is a guy that often swims at the same time as I do. We often share a lane as we swim at the same speed and so we don't get in each others way. He doesn't do flip turns. Recently he was swimming in the lane next to me and our speed still matches up. But when we get to the wall, I am now a full body length ahead of him coming off the wall. No extra effort, but a full body length advantage on each lap. Wow, it turns out there is a benefit after all, you just have to suffer repetition and patiently learn and then suddenly its all clear.

Prayer can be the same way. It feels awkward and pointless when we first learn to pray. We repeat the prayers we know over and over again because that is all we know how to do. It seems pointless. Awkward and seemingly vain repetitions with little or no discernible benefit. But if we stick with it. If we do it a thousand times. Suddenly prayer becomes easy and realize what we have been missing all along. Virtues can be like that.

So now my prayers have been answered and I can finally flip turn. Now I should do a flip turn and finally learn to really pray.

Posted in: prayer,swimming