‘It’s very rewarding’: Adults in Austin tackle swim lessons despite anxiety

On the first Monday in June, a group of adults – some in their 20s, some in their 50s – gathered around the kiddie pool at Austin’s TownLake YMCA for the first session of the adult basic swim class, designed to teach safe water habits.

Luis Gastelum was among the newcomers to the four-week class. He learned to swim as a kid growing up in Spain but said it’s been a while since he was in the water.

“I can survive perfectly,” he said. “But if I want to swim as a sport, there’s when I struggle combining the strokes and the proper breathing.”

Gastelum said his goal for the class was to get comfortable swimming laps for exercise. About half the class was in this position; the other half said they were not comfortable in the water at all.

Gustavo San Miguel holds a swimming board to warm up during swim class.
Patricia Lim / Texas Standard

Octavio Sanchez, the executive of aquatics at the Greater Austin YMCA, said those are the biggest two reasons adults seek out swim lessons.

“The biggest side is safety, right? Our world is filled with water, and a lot of people like to enjoy water, especially on a hot summer day. And it is very quickly an area where things can become dangerous,” Sanchez said. “But it’s also a healthy lifestyle. I like to think of swimming as the only thing you can really do from birth till the day you are bedridden.”

Both of those factors played into why Alex Esquilin signed up for the basic swim class at the Y.

“My entire life I’ve been told how important it is to swim. I have lived in Austin now for 10 years. I see my friends on the water every summer,” he said. “I’ve been on boats a handful of times. I always wondered what would happen if I were to fall off.”

We often talk about water risks when it comes to children: Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. for kids under 4, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the risk of drowning doesn’t end when you grow up if you never learn to swim.

A CDC study published in 2021 found that Black and Indigenous people are between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to drown than white people in the U.S.

Miriam Lynch, who leads an organization called Diversity in Aquatics, says swim skills are often passed down between generations.

“If a parent does not know how to swim, it’s most likely that their child will never learn how to swim,” Lynch said.

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Patricia Lim / Texas Standard

But the parents and grandparents of adults today did not always have access to swimming pools before the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.

“A gentleman I met last weekend said, ‘hey, there was a pool right across the street from me,’” she said. “He could not go into it because it was a segregated pool in his own neighborhood.”

Once pools were desegregated, Lynch says, a lot of communities stopped investing taxpayer dollars in their aquatics facilities. So even into the ’70s and ’80s, communities of color were left out of what she calls “the cycle of swimming.”

That cycle, Lynch said, goes something like this: “I swam at the neighborhood pool, I was an instructor at that pool, then I was a lifeguard, and that’s the summer norm.”

When this cycle isn’t established, Lynch says, sometimes a legacy of fear can take its place.

“Fear of water, I say, is not irrational. It’s inherited,” she said. “And a lot of fear is inherited through trauma where if you lacked a safe area to swim and you saw a drowning or you knew of somebody who experienced a drowning in that space, don’t go near the water because you might drown like so-and-so in our neighborhood.”

TownLake YMCA swim instructor Ariadne Pena-Laijas says adult students often have to overcome that fear in a way that younger swimmers do not.

“Adults know what to do; they’re just scared of it,” she said. “Kids don’t know what to do, but they’re not scared.”

The learning process can also be frustrating. Esquilin found that two weeks into his lessons, he was still struggling to keep his legs afloat.

“The past three classes have been focusing a lot on my kicking,” he said. “When you’re trying to learn so much at one time, you’re like, I want to go back to this one thing and perfect it, knowing that you’re going to be bad at everything else. So that’s when the frustration comes in.”

By week three, however, the frustration began giving way as swimmers started to meet their goals. Gastelum was able to swim a lap with close to what he deemed “proper” form.

“Obviously I need to polish how I am using my arms. I mean, it was a huge success for me because I got to breathe,” he said. “I arrived at the end and I was super tired because I didn’t breathe enough. So I just need to practice more so I can breathe more and better.”

By the next week, Gastelum was practicing lap after lap, working on his form in both the freestyle and the backstroke.

On the last day of class, Esquilin wasn’t quite ready for lap swimming yet. But he did make it all the way across the pool – including the deep end – with a pair of fins to aid his kicking. He was pretty excited about it.

“That felt really good. I mean, at the beginning of the process, every class, you’re just trying to get better. And sometimes maybe for me I could be overly critical,” he said. “But if I really were to take a step back, I told you before I would swim from one end [to the other]. And here I am now. So it’s very rewarding.”

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