Afterword: Can Mindful Swimming Enrich Your Life?

My undertaking here is nearly complete. I’ve written what I hope you’ll find to be a practical and encouraging guide to better, smarter swimming, most especially so you might enjoy every lap you ever swim, just as I do. But before I point you to the pool, I’ll offer a few final thoughts—not on how to craft a smoother stroke, but to share lessons I’ve learned from using swimming as an exercise in Mastery and Flow.

In June 2002, I completed the 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon Swim (MIMS). I had two inspirations for this swim. One was turning fifty in 2001 and wanting to undertake a challenge I would never have dreamed of in my twenties. My second inspiration was TI Master Coach Don Walsh, who swam around Manhattan at age fifty and again at fifty-two. When Don set his sights on MIMS the first time, he was advised to prepare by training up to twenty hours—or 60,000 yards—per week for several months. With a job and family, that was out of the question, so he decided to become a more economical swimmer instead and prove he could successfully swim a marathon on a moderate amount of training.

Don took a TI workshop one year before his first Manhattan swim, then tirelessly improved his efficiency through practice, peaking at about 25,000 yards per week. On race day, Don enjoyed his entire nine-hour trip. As he described it, “When the race was over, everyone else was in severe pain. But I felt great! If a race official had said, ‘Don, you missed a turn and you have to go around again,’ I could have done it easily.”

Don’s secret was matchless efficiency, rather than superhuman fitness. Swimming TI-style, he maintained a leisurely rate of 50 strokes per minute yet kept pace with rivals who were stroking much faster. If you multiply 50 strokes per minute by nine hours, you’ll find it took Don 27,000 strokes to swim around Manhattan.

If that seems a huge number, consider that everyone else was stroking between 72 and 80 times per minute, taking as many as 41,000 strokes. With the 14,000 strokes Don saved, he could have swum halfway around Manhattan again!

I wanted to train just as Don had—and complete the circuit in fewer strokes! On June 23, 2002, I swam 28.5 miles in a time of 8 hours and 53 minutes, averaging 49 strokes per minute, for a total of just over 26,000 strokes, at least 11,000 fewer strokes than any of my competitors. And like Don, I enjoyed the experience so thoroughly that, within an hour, I had decided to do it again. But the lessons I learned while training for MIMS were just as valuable as the experience of doing it.

In tackling MIMS, I also wanted to demonstrate that one could train for a marathon swim with not a moment of boredom or tedium. For four months, I swam twice as much as I usually do and enjoyed every moment. When other MIMS swimmers learned that I was training solo (I did one session with a friend and three sessions with Masters teams, but more than one hundred hours of training by myself) they commented that I must be going out of my mind having to swim that much by myself. But I enjoyed and was engaged by literally every stroke.

Which is important not just for sanity, but because boredom leads to lack of attention and loss of efficiency. I needed to give full attention to each of the approximately 150,000 strokes I took in training, to ensure that each one helped imprint flow and economy as a habit strong enough to survive nine hours of nonstop swimming. My training for MIMS, ultimately, became far less a quest to swim 28-plus miles. It had far more long-term value as an exercise in achieving Mastery and Flow. Let’s look at Mastery first.