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I started my journey in learning how to swim before I can even remember. I took the leveled swim classes as a child through the Red Cross. I remember it took me a long time to move up from level 4 to level 5.  I was not a very good swimmer. I was an uncoordinated child and so freestyle was a nightmare for me. I couldn't get my legs to scissor kick at the same time as my arms were moving. I would repeat the mantra over and over in my head,  "kick, pull, kick, pull," but that just lead to separating the movements.

Motor learning happens over three distinct stages. According to Fitts and Posner's three stage model, those stages are; cognitive, associative, and autonomous. The first stage is cognitive, when someone is first learning the new skill. It can be largely verbal and cognitive processes, meaning, lots of talking through the skill aloud and/or repeating it in your head as you do the task. In this stage the performance is inconsistent as you are still determining which strategies work for you. For this same reason, large gains are made in this stage. This was the stage I was in while first learning how to swim. I repeated the skill over and over in my head and had a hard time getting my body to move in coordination like what was being taught to me.

The second stage is associative. In this stage, you've gotten a handle of the basic idea of the skill. Now, performances are more consistent and improvements are more gradual. You no longer need any verbal aspects to the task and instead focus on detecting errors in your performance. You start noticing the most effective strategies and environmental cues associated with good performance.

The third stage is autonomous. In this stage, the skill is mostly automatic. You no longer really think about the skill in order to perform it. You still detect and correct errors, but largely you start processing information from other parts of the task and there is less interference from simultaneous activities.

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In middle school I joined swim team. In my hometown swimming was a very competitive sport from a young age. I knew kids my age who had practice for three hours a day. I had started getting into triathlons and my swimming skills were never very good, so when I heard a previous Olympic gold medalist had moved to town to coach the team, I thought I'd join and learn everything I could. Even though I was far behind the others my age, I went to try outs. They did not go well, I got stuck with kids two years younger than me. I worked at it as hard as I could, making great improvements at first. Slowly I moved my way up to where the kids my age were. Suddenly it felt harder, I was progressing at the pace of my peers but no longer as fast as I had before.

The law of practice is that performance negatively accelerates, or in plain terms, the more you practice, the smaller the increments of improvement will be. Of course, there is often performance plateaus within this curve. These plateaus can occur when strategy is changing, fatigue, motivation, or attention is affected, or by the ceiling or floor effects.

The law of practice was dominating my progress, making me improve quickly when I wasn't very good and then improve slower and slower as I got better.

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After a while on swim team I quit. I hadn't made friends with any of the kids on my team and the coaches weren't all that nice. I also hated competing in swim meets and that was required to be on the team. I can still remember my first meet. Showing up, not knowing where to go, being thrown into a relay event before I could even warm up because somebody else didn't show up. I absolutely hated the feeling of hundreds of people in the pool area all at once, all staring and screaming at me and 5 other girls to go faster, kick harder, beat the rest. I can do well when I try my best, but I have always put enough pressure on myself, I hated the pressure of so many other people all staring at me at once. I'll never forget it.

There are three stages of memory; sensory, short term, and long term. The first stage, sensory, is incredibly short. It involves taking in all information from your sensory receptors. It registers all it can and filters what is necessary. The duration and capacity can change based on what sense is involved but visually we an remember for up to a second and can keep about 4 things in our sensory memory. The second stage, short term memory, lasts 20-30 seconds and can keep 7 +/- 2 items at a time. These are the things we are actively thinking about. We solve problems, create and evaluate movements, and prepare information for storage here. Finally long term memory, which is relatively permanent, can hold an infinite amount of things. Although with this there can be a numerous amount of retrieval problems.

The feelings of all eyes on me and moving through the water in the moment were sensory memory. Once I got out of the pool they were transferred to short term memory as I kept thinking about it in the locker room. Finally, after thinking about the events for so long, it transferred into long term memory.

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Last summer, I went back to doing triathlons for the first time since the pandemic. I was worried about how I would do considering the time off. I was never the most competitive racer. But it all came back to me, the same feelings getting ready the night before, the same little pre race rituals. Even though my mind was pretty much turned off the whole time getting ready for the race, I didn't forget anything. It was like a melody, just going through the motions, having fun in the excitement of race day. I thought my swim times were pretty good considering the few years off from the pandemic and focusing on college. So, I decided to look up the winning times for women overall. I think if the race had a category just for swim times, I would've been at least in the top 5 out of more than 100 women that had raced that day.

There are two types of memory systems, procedural and declarative. In declarative memory systems you have semantic, which is facts, or episodic, which is memories of events that have occurred. In procedural memory systems, there are three different kinds; cognitive, perceptual, and motor. Procedural memory is often referred to as muscle memory, things you don't think about in order to do.

In this case, by now, my swimming has moved into Motor Procedural memory. I just swim and think about other things. I no longer think about any of my movements, just practice making them faster.