Ten years ago, Lise Thorne turned up to her first swimming lesson able to do exactly one stroke, and desperate to avoid the other. Since then she's built Walking This Way into a community of 100,000 followers by talking honestly about midlife, reinvention and everything the brochures leave out, but front crawl was the one thing she'd quietly dodged for her entire adult life.
In this episode of In At The Deep End, host and swim coach Salim Ahmed sits down with Lise to work out what changed: how she went from panicking halfway round a 750m lake loop to swimming Coniston's five and a half miles, and why she's now training for a 70km relay across Lake Geneva.
Together, Salim and Lise explore:
The first lesson that nearly ended in a panicked swim back to shore
Why breaststroke feels safe but front crawl is actually the more efficient, lower-impact stroke
How learning to breathe properly unlocked a stroke she'd avoided her whole adult life
The mental leap from one triathlon in a borrowed wetsuit to a 5.5-mile lake swim
Why speed and sprint training matter more, not less, as we get older
How swimming became a physical route through issues that had nothing to do with the water
Letting go of the fear of "holding the group back", in the pool and in life
This is a conversation about learning to swim as an adult, yes, but it's really about what happens when you finally stop avoiding the thing that scares you.
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