I’m not sure you can do this gradually. Instead, I think you have to keep turning up and waiting for a revelation. That’s what seems to happen in my class: one week, a swimmer will be as stuttering as I am, and the next, quite suddenly, they will produce an effortless stroke and cut through the water like clockwork. Every now and then, I glimpse this in myself. For a few luxurious seconds, my mind and body will cooperate, and I will feel the lightness of it, the sense that many rhythms are synchronising into something that feels like a flow. But it soon collapses.
