How mastering flip turns in the swimming pool is like figuring out the Latin Mass: hard, but soooo worth it

Patrick Archbold, "Flip Turns and the Latin Mass" (The Remnant, January 15, 2016):

There is nothing natural about it.

You come into the wall, you turn yourself upside down, blindly reach for the wall with your feet, push off, and hope you are headed in the right direction.

Flip Turns. I have dreaded flip turns for as long as I have been swimming, which is going over a dozen years now.

For most of those years, even though I swam 5 times a week at points, I never learned how to do flip turns. You know those cool turns that Olympic swimmers do and we watch on underwater cameras? They look so easy. They’re not....

... And lo and behold, by the time I reached my 1,000th flip turn, I had it down. I didn't even really need to think about it anymore. So I began to re-focus on my swim mechanics and then I noticed something....

[Hat tip to JM]