swimming to manhattan.(weight loss)(Column)

Byline: Jennifer Senior

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to swim. I love the gear, love the tangy smell of chlorine, love that it's a way to travel-a literal change in milieu-without leaving the confines of a gym. As a kid, I was an avid swimmer. I participated in swim meets and even won a bunch of races. As an adult, though, I never thought of swimming to keep in shape. Instead, like most city-dwellers, I joined a gym, where I spent occasional 30-minute spurts pedaling nowhere on a stationary bike. I decided to change my regimen this fall, after eating my way through Venice. The sight of so much water must have unconsciously stimulated my childhood impulses. I put two and two together: I had weight to lose. I had just vacationed in a lagoon. I should swim.

Most swim coaches will tell you that swimming is more efficient at burning fat than any other activity besides sleeping. But there's swimming and there's pottering, and pottering was a much more apt description of my first week in the water, when I lazily logged laps in various gorgeous pools in Manhattan-Reebok Sports Club, the Jewish Community Center. I ended my workouts not because I was tired but because I was bored.

Swimming, I realized, was deceptive. I thought I had immersed myself in a physical activity when all I had done was immerse myself in water. Web sites devoted to comparison-calorie counting agree: "Leisurely swimming" (my style) burns only 370 calories per hour for a woman of my weight (133 pounds). Leisurely jogging, on the other hand, burns 600. I was swimming roughly 20 minutes a day, barely enough to burn off a dozen peanut M & Ms.

It was time to join the "swim team" at Equinox. (Hilary Swank, who swam in the Junior Olympics, apparently took this same class.) The experience was-and I am being neither modest nor hyperbolic when I say this-an utter fiasco. The session was true to its name, a swim team, if not in actual practice then in character. The participants all wore zippy racing gear. They swam rapid laps of freestyle-as a warmup. Most were former college swimmers, and the few who weren't swam with serious goals in mind-like triathlons. I stopped about fifteen minutes into class, a blur of frenetic activity involving kickboards and sprints and modified strokes. I was breathless, clumsy, carving the erratic path of a drunk.

The coach, an energetic former swim-teamer named Marcelo Ehrhardt, gave me a private workout about a week later, taking me slowly through each exercise, which included clutching a kickboard (to build leg strength), swimming with a pull-buoy between my legs (to build upper-arm strength), and swimming underwater, coming up only occasionally for breath (to build endurance). But it seemed unlikely I'd be able to regularly attend the class: I could barely do two 25-yard laps of freestyle without collapsing-and 35 of them made a mile. The swim team completed at least that during one of its workouts. So I ...