[dogruck]

Also, most people don’t know how to swim. When you ask a person if they know how to swim, when you’re headed to the beach, you’ll get:

1 Sometimes: no way, I stay out of the water

2 Usually: uh, sure, yup, I can swim

3 Rarely: Totally, I used to be on a team.

My favorite follow up to #2 is “could you swim 4 laps in a pool without ever touching the bottom or stopping to take a break? That usually prompts a “what are you crazy, no way that’s super hard” response. Then I inform the person that they do not know how to swim, and that they should be extra careful.

[meschi]

You are implying that only competitive sport swimmers can actually swim.

[JackCh]

Relatively few people who've not been on a competitive team have ever taken enough swimming lessons to be good for a few brisk laps of the pool. Where I come from every school child gets probably 20 hours or so of swim lessons in public school, spread out over several years. In my experience this sort of background is typically enough to be able to tread water and move around, but not with correct form. And without correct form they will quickly fatigue.

It's certainly possible for a autodidact swimmer with such a background to go to the Y pool and start doing laps until they figure out out on their own, but that's pretty uncommon. And it's also possible for somebody to pay for enough private lessons to become a competent swimmer, but that's also fairly uncommon. In my experience every licensed lifeguard I've ever met was currently or formerly a competitive swimmer; that's not a requirement but realistically only competitive swimmers could accomplish the 300 yard perquisite swim required to qualify you to receive training. (As for selection bias, in my training course there were several without competitive swimming backgrounds who tried, but failed.)

(In some outlying situations, perhaps such as a coastal community where surfing is common, the above might not necessarily be true. But for your typical community I'd say it's a good bet that anybody who hasn't swam competitively will, if they're able to swim at all, have poor form and fatigue quickly.)

[whatsstolat]

This sounds absymal. Is this the US? Definitely different in Australia and UK.

Maybe there are more pools here.

I used to swim 1k couple of times a week (no breaks) just to "keep fit" not even competitive. I considered that normal.

[JackCh]

Yes this is in the US. The school district owned one pool. A few years of your 12 years in the school district system, students would get a week or two of lessons during gym class (being bused to the pool from the other schools in the district, when necessary.) About an hour of lessons 2-3 times a week for one or two weeks, a handful of times in twelve years. On second thought 20 hours may have been an underestimate, but not by much.

That same pool is also where private swimming lessons for all ages were available for a modest fee (that program was subsidized by the pool's existence but otherwise self-funding. I worked as an instructor in that program for a few years and got a modest paycheck for it.) That pool was also use for practice and meets for the swim club (competitive swimming for young children) and the swim team (competitive swimming for teenagers.) Private lessons were mostly attended by young children, their parents stopped paying for it once they were reasonably confident their child wouldn't drown and it was very rare for anybody as old as a teenager to take those lessons. The pool was also open to the public once or twice a week for a dollar or two and there was a lane set aside for lap swimming, but it was rarely used.

I'm not sure what the bottleneck was that prevented more school-hour swimming lessons during their scheduled gym classes. It may have been the busing requirement, since there were a handful of elementary schools in the district that were not close to the school building that had the pool.

[adrianratnapala]

While I agree it is better in the Australia, it can't be that uncommon. I am Australian but would struggle to swim 100m.

I have always been a pretty poor swimmer by local standards. But that is not because others did any more lessons in school than I did (those lessons were quite limited).

Some might have had more private lessons than me; but I think the main difference is that they bedded down what they had learned in lessons doing recreational swimming. Which I is common in Australia, but rare where my family comes from.

[DoofusOfDeath]

Not really. It's more of a sign that the person knows how to swim efficiently, which I suspect is inversely related to risk of drowning.

Case in point: go to a public swimming pool (YMCA, etc.) when old people are swimming laps. You'll see people who are clearly not athletic swim for many tens of minutes without taking a break.

[andrewksl]

4 laps at what could be a leisurely pace hardly qualifies as competitive swimming.

[dfee]

I’d say that’s a segment of the population who can swim.

But outside those who swam on a team for more than a year (I was a competitive swimmers for more than a decade), and of course lifeguarded through my high school years, I’ve found it very rare for people who have less than a few hundred hours experience in a pool (in a non-play way) to understand their safety limits.

[mathinpens]

I'm willing to say that outright. In my experience as a very aquatic person ie water polo/swimming/surfing most civilians have nooooo clue how to swim. They know how to not immediately drown... But that's about it. Your typical surfer is also a good swimmer and comfortable in the water. So the people who can actually swim are 1. Competitive swimmers 2. Surfers

My adult swimming standards are going to be 1. Can you swim 1 mile open water 2. Do you know what to do in a rip tide

[whatsstolat]

That's surprising. It doesn't seem like a big distance. I guess that's more a sign of lack of fitness.

[dogruck]

Swimming 4 laps requires skill, not fitness.

[giancarlostoro]

#4 I grew up in ISLAND_NAME and went to the beach all the time.

At least that's my answer, but I do have to say if you're not physically fit you may not want to go too far out to sea. Swimming is fun but also a form of exercise too and will tire you out.

[nikbackm]

Are you referring to a 25m or 50m long pool here?

[avar]

It really doesn't matter, anyone who knows how to swim should be able to accomplish this with ease. Notice how he's not setting any sort of time limit.

[isostatic]

The question seems "can you swim 250m" or "500m"

Both of those are excessive "can you swim" questions. US scouts standard for "Swimmer" is

Jump feet first into water over the head, level off, and begin swimming.

Swim 75 yards in a strong manner using one or more of the following strokes: sidestroke, breaststroke, trudgen, or crawl; then swim 25 yards using an easy resting backstroke. The 100 yards must be completed without stops and must include at least one sharp turn.

Rest by floating…Long enough to demonstrate ability to rest when exhausted.

[avar]

Respectfully, those standards are crap. I'm from Iceland, and just looking up the swimming standards all 15 year olds have to pass and which I and everyone in the country had to pass as part of secondary school:

1) Swim 600 meters in under 20 minutes without stopping or touching the bottom.

2) Perform a rescue swim of 15 meters with a peer without stopping or touching the bottom.

3) Dive for 15 meters.

Those US scout standards are something Nordic countries might subject 6 or 7 year olds to.

The context of this thread is asking an able-bodied adult if they can swim before going to the beach. As in swimming in the ocean, an uncontrolled environment where there's waves and currents.

An able-bodied adult that actually knows how to swim should be able to swim for at least several kilometers in the open ocean without drowning or dying from exhaustion, assuming Mediterranean temperatures and waves that aren't higher than 1-2 meters.

[titanomachy]

By "dive for 15m" you mean "swim 15 horizontal metres while underwater", right? Diving 15m deep is a pretty elite skill.

[JackCh]

He almost certainly means 15 meters horizontally. Besides most hobby free divers not going to 15 meters very often, I'd wager 15+ meter deep pools are pretty uncommon even in Iceland.

[OscarCunningham]

Or perhaps "dive into the water from 15m above it"?

[titanomachy]

Also a relatively elite skill, though.

[DuskStar]

At least when I was a scout (~6 years ago now, Eagle) those were the standards you had to meet to swim in a pool/lake where you couldn't stand. But there was still significant monitoring of swimmers - lifeguards plus a buddy system where every 5-10 minutes you'd have a "buddy check" where you had to join hands with your buddy and hold them up out of the water while they counted the number of pairs.

The requirements for the Swimming Merit Badge aren't all that much better, though.

[JackCh]

>"The requirements for the Swimming Merit Badge aren't all that much better, though."

As I recall the "lifesaving" merit badge at least requires 400 yards without stopping, which is a lot more reasonable. If it were up to me that'd be the standard swimming test, but I suppose they want an accessible "skill ramp".