Mr. Morley goes off the deep end

Alright world, come at me and watch the smack down get slapped on you!"\nThat's the feeling I leave the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation with three mornings a week after I swim for an hour. I like splashing around in the Royer Pool with its 250,000 gallons of chlorine-tinted blue water because its an energizing workout that doesn't make me sweat like I just ran a marathon -- and I don't throw up like I just did, either. Swimming works every muscle in your body without the trauma on the joints and muscles like weightlifting or running.\nMy friend Jesse thought it would be good quality time if we went swimming Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when RecSports opens up Royer Pool for open swimming. I thought it was a pretty good idea.\nSo that was my plan. Go swimming with Jesse three days a week. But as with all of my plans, there was one slight flaw. \nI can't swim. I'm also scared to death of it. Sure, water is fine. I don't mind it. It's good for stuff like bathing and cutting gin. But I'd just never spent a lot of time around it as a kid.\nThe first Monday the two of us went, I was ready for it, though. I had my little goggles, my deck shoes and my Ralph Lauren neon orange bathing suit. Jesse wanted me to just jump in. \nYeah, right. I had so many floaties on, passengers on the Titanic would have been envious.\nBut after a little coaxing I was in the water. Two weeks later, I'm going off the springboards in the diving well happy as a little two-year old with a wading pool the size of Nebraska.\nBut not everybody is lucky enough to have someone like Jesse to be there with me as both a talented instructor, but also someone capable of dealing with the fact that height and water are my main phobias -- or were. I wouldn't let just anybody tell me to "man up" because I was hesitant about falling head first into 15-feet of water.\nFor people who don't have friends like Jesse, there's RecSports.\nDuring both the fall and spring, RecSports -- the fun side of HPER -- offers swimming lessons designed to teach adults who can't swim and who aren't comfortable in the water to make like Michael Phelps and glide.\nThe swimming lessons come in two levels. The first is designed to simply get you comfortable in the water and to teach you how to swim. The second level takes your technique and improves upon it.\nNicole Riley is majoring in recreation and works for RecSports teaching these classes.\nShe spent much of my pool playtime with me last Friday going over the kind of stuff she teaches in the first level. The first thing done is to just get people used to the water by floating on their stomachs. Then with the use of a kickboard, you kick up and down the 25-yard length of the pool a couple of times so you can get the maximum amount of flutter out of the kick. \nI'm still working on the whole concept of breathing under water. You can exhale underwater, by the way. You don't start running into problems until you try to breathe in.\nTo avoid complications, put your face in the water and blow all the air you can as hard as you can out of your schnozz. Pretend you're talking to the fish. Then you put your face to the side so your ear is in the water and breath in while you listen to what the fish say back.\nAll in all, RecSports comes across as a really good way to get over the fear of water and simply say to it: "Alright world, watch the smack down get slapped on you"