Phyllis Lear never learned to swim and nearly drowned when she was eight. The scare left her with a lifelong fear of water and a stubborn will to conquer the problem. She doggedly took beginner swim lessons. “I failed every single time,” she says from her home in California. “You’d think it’s not so hard, but for me it was hard. You’d go for an hour, get in the pool and it’s freezing, and nobody ever worked on my strokes.”

Then Lear spotted an ad for a swim clinic specifically for aquaphobic adults. It’s run by Paul Lennon, a former competitive swimmer who uses exposure therapy to treat aquaphobia. Lennon holds his Adult Aquaphobia Swim Centre workshops (beafish@mac.com) all over the world, renting swimming facilities such as the YMCA, and acclimatizes his clients in warm water for six hours straight on the first lesson. His clinics, for which he charges US$995, run for six hours a day, five days in a row. Lear, who was then 64 and “in pretty good shape,” had signed up. But when she learned about the exposure therapy, she thought, “Who in their right mind can go swimming for six hours? I’m cancelling.” She told her husband. “My husband said, ‘Go and when you get tired, come home.’ ” Continue…