Returned to the Pool after a 30 Year "break"

I have been swimming since December of 2017, after taking a swim for fitness class 30 years ago in college. I am up to a daily 3/4 mile -1 mile workouts abd have swam a mile and a mile 1/2 without stopping and one two miles session, with a break. I am completely loving swimming as my main form of working out! I started with 10 laps.... Hello Evhisbeast: Thanks for your story. I'm continually impressed with how many people get so much out of the water & for so many reasons. I don't think there is anything quite like swimming for working out & also being pretty kind to the body. I'm not sure I could swim a continuous mile without stopping but if I did I'd be going reeeeeeallllly slow the last half. :)

After 34 years away from the pool, I returned back to swimming on August 1, 2015 at a fitness center. The catalyst was a lap pool at a hotel that my wife picked out for our honeymoon in Las Vegas a few weeks earlier. It felt good...my eyes didn't. We could only go 500 yards at first but added 100 yards each time we worked out. The following year I joined a Masters team where a college teammate was also on the team. It has been sheer fun since I got back into the pool. I have the luxury of getting LCM and SCY training at the pool that the team uses and dryland training at my fitness center, which also serves as my backup pool for workouts on my own. I was never burned out. Life happened. The big thing that swimming does for me is that it helps to calm my PTSD. It is my aqua therapy. I have been re-addicted to swimming. Smiley92407, That is all wonderful! Again I'm amazed author many people measure their "taper" in decades. You have me beat by about 2-4 years. :) "It has been sheer fun since I got back into the pool." YES! I've been smiling my way through every workout. And it sounds like you have a really nice setup, pool-wise. There are nice SCY pools here and they're finally building the first LCM complex in the area. It's going to be wonderful when it opens, hopefully sometime next year. Aqua-therapy...I can relate to that, too. So glad to hear you're having a happy time of it all. Cheers!

Welcome back to the sport, Zwemmer! Like you, I swam through some undiagnosed respiratory issues as a youth. I was not a great HS swimmer, but I was pretty good. Not good enough to swim for any major conference college program, but I had some partial scholarship offers from smaller schools. For better or for worse, I chose to go into the Army after High School, instead. That was the start of a 27 year sabbatical from the sport for me. At 45, I had my mid-life "fitness crisis." After neglecting my body for 20+ years, I started eating healthier and working out. Not surprisingly, that eventually led me back to the pool, and, soon after, on to USMS. I've been back at it for 4+years, now. I kept a blog about my experience. If you want to follow along chronologically, you can follow from the beginning here. It's a few entries before swimming comes into the picture, but, once it does, it's the central theme. If you just want to browse around, you can start at the homepage here. I have to admit, I can get a little long-winded at times. But, if anyone would be at least somewhat interested, it would likely be someone like you who has recently come back to swimming after a long layoff.