IF EVERY TIME you take a short flight of stairs you find yourself huffing and puffing, think of Paul Bragg. When you next bend down to tie your shoelaces but discover you can’t see them because there’s a spare tire where empty space used to be, consider Paul Bragg. If a steady diet of cigarettes has left you hacking and coughing and gasping for air, reflect on the experience of Paul Bragg.
If the headache you get from doing the least bit of housework is so intense that you wish it on Saddam Hussein, think of Nellie Brown. If each Memorial Day you discover that last year’s bathing suit seems to have shrunk over the winter, stop a moment and consider Nellie Brown. If you know you should be exercising but don’t have the energy or commitment to begin any of the programs you’ve been considering, reflect on the experience of Nellie Brown before putting it off for another day, week, month, year.
Paul Bragg and Nellie Brown are just two of the many fascinating people you will meet in this book. Some of these people have overcome serious illness or debility. Others are ordinary folks in ordinary health burdened by all those ordinary problems that wear most of us down—career, family, school, parenting, taxes. What they have in common, whatever their backgrounds, are swimming and remarkable good health. Their experiences will help you realize that, yes, the seemingly inevitable progression toward deteriorating health can be slowed and even reversed, even after those first wrinkles and wisps of gray hair have started to appear. It doesn’t matter whether you are seventeen or seventy, whether you were a professional athlete in your youth or have never exercised a day in your life, whether those extra fifteen or twenty pounds have been around so long you can’t even remember not having them or seem to have jumped onto your figure over the past two weeks. You can swim your way to the same vibrant good health so many regular swimmers enjoy. In the process, you will be adding years to your life—vigorous, healthy, productive years. Best of all, you will enjoy doing it!
When I met Paul Bragg, in 1978, he had already become a living legend on Honolulu’s Waikiki Beach. As a child, he had been frail and sickly, and when he contracted polio at the age of fourteen, it appeared he might have to resign himself to a lifetime as an invalid. But young Paul was made of sterner stuff and found a miraculous path that he followed to great health: “constant activity and exercise—swimming, tennis, running, and lots of sunshine.” Paul went on to become a wrestler on two U.S. Olympic teams, a practicing osteopath, an expert on nutrition, and the author of over a hundred books on health. At the age of ninety-eight he became the oldest person ever to swim competitively—though there are three centenarians competing today. To stay in shape, he ate a good diet, churned through the warm waters off Waikiki every day, and jogged up to five miles a few times a week. His motto: “Rest is rust.”
At first glance, the “unsinkable Nellie Brown,” as she was affectionately known to just about everyone in her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, seemed an unlikely celebrity. But at age eighty-seven, this retired first-grade teacher (“I never made it into second grade”) looked to be at least twenty years younger and was in constant demand, besieged by requests for appearances on Good Morning America, interviews with local newspapers, an award as Alexandria’s Woman of the Year, and speeches at YMCAs and community centers. It was a remarkable schedule, and you may wonder where she found the time to get in her daily one-mile swim. But Nellie was a remarkable woman.
Nellie did not always swim a mile a day. In fact, she didn’t even learn to swim until she was sixty-eight. A childhood bout with polio had left her with one leg two inches shorter than the other. By 1961 ravages wrought by childhood sickness, later injuries, and advancing age had produced devastating results. “I could barely walk anymore,” she recalled. “I was afraid I’d have to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. For the first time in my life, I really felt old. I felt foolish and … just plain useless. It was frustrating and depressing.” Then her doctor recommended swimming as therapy for her legs, “and that made all the difference in the world,” she said with a twinkle. “People told me I’d never learn, that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But I wanted to learn. I had no intention of being an invalid. I’ve got too much living to do!”
When I interviewed her, Nellie Brown was not only swimming but teaching swimming classes for Alexandria’s mentally retarded and handicapped children. She was in the best health of her life, and she attributed it all to swimming. “I feel great,” she explained. “Swimming gives me the exercise I need to keep going.” She reported that it was easy to learn to swim, even at an advanced age, and that she intended to keep at it for a long, long time to come.
Admittedly, Paul Bragg and Nellie Brown are extraordinary people who have overcome extraordinary adversity. But they are only two of literally thousands of men and women with equally compelling stories whom I have met over the past twenty-odd years. You will meet many of these people through the pages of this book.
But, more to the point, there are tens and even hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans—from teenagers and young adults to senior citizens—who have made themselves healthier and enriched their lives through swimming. These are people who only a few years ago were sedentary, overweight, overwrought, or simply overburdened by the stresses of job, family, and taxes. Some were seriously ill. Yet today many of these people have had their lives transformed: they have fewer anxieties, enjoy markedly better health, take pride in their strong and healthy bodies, and find they have more satisfying sex lives and better relationships generally with their spouses and children. Many now delight in a youthful, zestful outlook on life that they once thought they could never recover.
Their elixir is swimming. Over the past few decades, medical experts have come to agree, almost unanimously, that regular exercise is a prime contributor to good health and long life. And of all the forms of exercise Americans have taken up with such gusto since the 1970s—tennis, bicycling, jogging, racquetball, jumping rope, aerobics, whatever—swimming has attracted the most participants. Not only has this thoroughly enjoyable activity become America’s most popular participant sport but it is fast gaining recognition as the best form of exercise for most adult Americans, all things considered, especially for those of us who have passed the big 3-0!
Judy Collins surely needs no introduction. For years, her soulful melodies and enchantingly beautiful voice have delighted millions. Seeing her, it is hard to believe that Judy is over fifty. Her skin radiates health and well-being, her body is strong and supple, and she seems relaxed and at peace with herself. Judy continues to give concerts throughout Europe and the United States, but only in recent years has she started to become the kind of singer she wants to be. “I’m beginning to learn what I want to sound like,” she explains. “My singing is stronger. I’m adding more humor and making more daring choices in the kind of material I sing.” In the last few years she has also begun to spend more time writing—new songs, a book, and an autobiography, Trust Your Heart, published in 1987. It is women like Judy Collins who give the over-fifty stage in life such a great image.
But things were different for Judy not long ago. “When I was younger, I drove myself mercilessly, made a lot of demands on my body, and didn’t treat myself very well,” she confides. What turned things around for her? Swimming. “I’ve been a workaholic for so long that it’s hard for me to take a vacation, and I rarely do. But if I swim, I get a vacation every day.” When Judy took up swimming about ten years ago, she found almost immediately that she was feeling better about herself physically. She stopped smoking and drinking (though she still has a cup of coffee every day), changed her diet, and lost twenty pounds. She tries to swim every day and finds that when she does she’s less tense about everything. “Swimming,” she says, “has taught me to be good to myself.”
“The first thing that my swim coach let me know,” reports Dwight Stones, the flamboyant former world high-jump champion, “was that if I planned to swim competitively, I would have to get into condition.” He couldn’t believe his ears. Here he was—a former world-record holder, two-time Olympic bronze medalist, winner of numerous national championships in the high jump—and he was being told he wasn’t in good enough shape to compete in a sport that did not seem to require much training. Today Stones accepts that even an athlete can be brought to a new level of fitness through regular swimming. Along with his running and weight training, he swims an impressive 4,000 yards three times a week at the Belmont Plaza pool in Long Beach, California.
Stones started swimming merely to prepare himself for TV’s “Superstars” competition. The venture nearly cost him his amateur status when he decided to ignore an AAU edict and keep the money he had won. But during his subsequent enforced layoff from high-jump competition, Stones kept up his swimming. To his surprise, he found that injuries that had plagued him for years, including a chronic hip problem, began to disappear.
Stones believes that swimming can be beneficial to athletes in all sports. “It’s the best form of exercise for me,” he notes, “because it’s a natural body balancer. In high jumping you use one side of your body more than the other, but swimming counteracts the muscle imbalance this creates.” The same is true, he might have added, of other sports that stress the use of only one set of muscles—tennis, racquetball, basketball, even aerobics and jogging. Further, Stones points out, swimming is an excellent recuperative aid and when used as a limbering exercise can actually prevent injury.
Roberta Kresch, a forty-eight-year-old biology teacher in Westfield, New Jersey, feels that swimming has given her a new lease on life. An avid, accomplished skier for twelve years, Roberta was skiing in the Canadian Rockies in February 1976 when she had a bad fall. She was hospitalized for five weeks and confined to bed for an additional two months. “I was in constant, agonizing pain in my back and legs,” she recalls. “I was able to walk only with the aid of crutches or a cane much of the time.”
Not satisfied with her recovery, Roberta sought out some of the top physicians in New York City to find out if anything could be done. “Eventually,” she says, “I met with a doctor in Millburn, New Jersey, who agreed to operate if I were willing to take the chance.” The risky eight-hour operation took place in August 1977. Three of Roberta’s disks were removed, and her vertebral column was opened up and widened in the entire lumbar region.
After seven weeks in the hospital and four months of recuperation at home, Roberta was ready to resume teaching at Westfield Senior High. Even before her operation, several physicians had recommended swimming, and now, before she returned to her classroom, she returned to the pool. “There’s no doubt,” she says today, “that my rapid recovery is attributable to my swimming.”
Roberta kept right on plowing through the water, improving her stroke and increasing her strength. In 1979 she felt she was ready to enter her first Masters competition. “It was only a small, local meet,” she reminisces, “but I almost cried when I won my first ribbon.” Two years later, she had won thirteen, along with a silver medal for the 200-yard backstroke at the eastern championships. Today she has won too many ribbons to count.
Roberta works out five or six times a week now. “I never miss,” she says. “Six o’clock every morning finds me in the pool. My back will never be 100 percent, but I’m almost never in pain anymore, and I threw my crutches and cane away many years ago.”
In addition, the workouts and swim meets opened up a whole new social world to replace the one Roberta lost when she had to give up skiing. “Everyone is so friendly,” she offers. “Some of the younger guys help me with my technique. And when I see swimmers thirty and forty years older than I am looking so incredibly good and able to continue their swimming with so little effort, I know I’m going to keep on swimming for the rest of my life.”
Herb Kern and Tom Whiteleather are teammates in Fort Lauderdale’s crackerjack Gold Coast Masters swim club. Both in their early sixties, each could easily be mistaken for someone a decade younger. Several years back they combined with Dan Malone and Bill Moffit to set a national record in their age-group for the 200-yard freestyle relay. But before they got into the swim, they were, as Whiteleather puts it, “your typical middle-aged slobs, well on the way to self-destruction.”
Kern hadn’t exercised in years and was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day when he resolved to break his habit and get into shape. It was not the first time he had tried to stop smoking. “Oh, I had quit a thousand times before,” he recalls with a smile. “But every time, sooner or later, I found myself going back to that infernal weed.” This time, however, he vowed it would be different.
Kern started jogging, working his way from one to three miles a day. But like so many people over thirty, he found jogging was too hard on his legs and joints. “Besides,” he explains, “it was just plain boring.” So he decided to try swimming. “I used to swim for the University of Miami,” he recalls, “but I must admit I was a little rusty after a twenty-five-year layoff.” He persisted, gradually increasing his distance, and soon found his old skills coming back. He also found he was sticking to his vow. “It’s amazing,” he says, “but I no longer had any urge to light up. Swimming leaves me feeling so relaxed, so good, that smoking just doesn’t interest me anymore.”
When Tom Whiteleather was a student at Ohio State University, he was national collegiate champion in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle events. But after he graduated he gave up the sport. Twenty years later he found himself much heavier than he wanted to be. He tried a “starvation” diet first, and it worked, at least temporarily. His weight dropped from 223 to 170 pounds in a little over two months. But as so many dieters have found to their chagrin, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. “It was insane,” he says now. “I wound up sick much of the time. That’s when I decided I needed exercise more than dieting. I had always talked about getting back into swimming. Now I knew I had to.”
Tom read about Masters swimming in a local newspaper and decided to attend one of the meets. “I went there and saw some guys I had competed against in college. They looked absolutely fantastic! I knew if they could do it, I could do it too.”
And he did! Today Tom is an avid Masters swimmer. Although he has not won any individual national championships, he is back down to his collegiate weight and claims to feel better than he has in years.
Mary Beth Hurt has never had any serious health problems and was never a top competitive swimmer. But like Roberta Kresch and Herb Kern, she finds swimming a delightfully invigorating way to stay in shape. Several times a week the slender actress interrupts her hectic schedule and heads for the Paris Health Club on New York’s West Ninety-seventh Street, where she swims a mile or more.
In the past few years, Mary Beth has found her career blossoming. Known for her work on the Broadway stage, she has been acclaimed as well for performances on television and in films, for example, in the PBS presentation of John Cheever’s The Five Forty-eight and in Woody Allen’s Interiors. With all that emoting, Mary Beth finds swimming “incredibly relaxing. Nothing feels better after a hard day’s work,” she says, “than to jump in the pool and swim.”
At age seventy-seven, Mardie Brown is one of the youngest people I know. Active, thoughtful, funny, and attractive, Mardie has a zest for life equaled by few people her age—or any age. She attributes her youthful enthusiasm and energy to her swimming, an activity she has engaged in since the age of four, and pursued faithfully since 1973. A mother, grandmother, and until recently member of a motorcycle club, the former probation and parole officer lives on a farm in Palermo, Maine, with Donald, eighty-four, her husband of more than fifty years.
Although I’ve known Mardie for almost twenty years, it was only in 1988, at the World Masters Swimming Championships held in Brisbane, Australia, that we became close friends. One of my favorite recreational activities is scuba diving. Mardie took up the sport in 1981, and I was duly impressed when she told me that she and Don had stopped for several days before the swim meet to dive off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But the couple also stopped in Hawaii, and I was even more impressed when I saw the photos of her surfing off Waikiki Beach. “The waves were small,” she says modestly. “It’s not as if I were surfing the Pipeline [on Oahu’s North Shore].”
In 1973, at the urging of her doctor, Mardie gave up smoking. But, to her dismay, after breaking her lifelong habit she found her weight and her blood pressure rising. An article she happened across explained how swimming could bring both under control, so, as she recounts, she “marched across the street to the YMCA” and began swimming. Within months, her weight and blood pressure were back to normal.
Two years later, she says, “I began my competitive career.” And she’s been at it ever since, winning several national and two world titles for women in her age-group. “I don’t ever intend to quit,” she told me. “I have more energy than I did at forty, I’ve met some wonderful people, and I’m having too much fun.”
In the past two decades, America has undergone a fitness revolution. In 1961, Herb Elliott, the great Australian middle-distance runner, remarked that our soft, sedentary life-style had turned America into a nation of “mollycoddled milksops.” Statistics bore him out. That year a survey found that only 24 percent of American adults exercised regularly. The stereotypical male, notes my good friend T. George Harris, founding editor of American Health magazine, was “twenty pounds overweight, used a car to commute any distance over two blocks, and got his exercise by trimming the lawn on a sit-down power mower. His wife was a perfect match: overweight, underexercised, with a vague notion of ‘sports’ as something her husband watched on television.”
By the 1980s the picture had changed dramatically. America had gotten off its collective rear and begun swimming, running, dancing, and bicycling its way to physical fitness. According to a recent study commissioned by Perrier, Fitness in America, 59 percent of all Americans eighteen years and over—more than 90 million adults—were participating in some sort of physical activity on a regular basis. We were mollycoddled milksops no longer.
One result of the physical fitness boom has been a remarkable improvement in the nation’s health. Americans have never been healthier. According to the U.S. surgeon general, our average life expectancy is now seventy-five years. That’s an increase of over five years in just the last two decades. Deaths from heart disease, the country’s leading killer, have dropped dramatically—about 40 percent over the past twenty years. And deaths from stroke are down 30 percent.
Of course, factors other than exercise have contributed to this remarkable turn about. A decrease in the amount of salt, sugar, and fats many Americans consume, closer monitoring of blood pressure, and a steady decline in smoking have been significant. But many physicians and exercise physiologists agree that the quest for physical fitness has been an important factor in the decline of heart disease and several other major illnesses.
Because the Perrier study, conducted by the Louis Harris Polling Company, provides the most comprehensive in-depth reading of the behavior, knowledge, and attitudes of the American public regarding physical fitness and exercise, we will be looking at some of its major findings throughout this book.
Among the questions the study asked a cross-section of adults was the following: “Please tell me which of these activities you personally participated in on a regular basis at any time during the past year.” The pollsters found ample evidence for the fitness revolution: the total of adult Americans regularly participating in the listed activities came to over 290 million. (Since there were only about 150 million adult Americans when the survey was conducted, it’s clear that a lot of people participate in more than one.) Nineteen and a half million people reported that they use their bicycles to pedal their way to fitness. Over 16 million have taken to the roads, dodging irate drivers and territorial dogs, and braving noxious fumes to jog. Another 13.5 million have crowded the nation’s tennis courts.
This explosive growth in sports for adults has proven equally healthy for the media: running, tennis, and aerobics “gurus” appear almost daily on TV and radio talk shows to extol the virtues of their sports. Sports medicine experts appear on the same shows to tell us what shoes to wear and how to deal with our shinsplints, stretched Achilles tendons, painful tennis elbow, and pulled hamstrings. Hollywood and made-for-television movies celebrate the mystique of long-distance running. How-to books are churned out at an astonishing rate. Countless newspaper and magazine columns offer advice on getting and staying in shape.
But while sports like jogging, aerobics, and tennis have garnered the lion’s share of media attention, the Perrier study confirmed what has been shown in every study of America’s fitness habits since 1967: America’s most popular sport is swimming. Twenty-seven million American adults swim on a regular basis, about as many as the number of joggers and tennis players combined. Away from the glare of the media and the blare of traffic, in more than 220,000 public and private club pools and some 1.2 million residential pools across the nation, in lakes and rivers and reservoirs, in the ocean surf off the east, west, and southern coasts, 27 million Americans are celebrating the fitness revolution by crawl stroking, backstroking, breaststroking, and butterflying their way to better shape.
More recently the media have started to pay a little more attention to this old favorite. Citing its immense popular appeal as well as its myriad health benefits, both the Los Angeles Timesand The New York Times have anointed swimming “the sport of the ’90s.”
In the next few chapters you will learn why swimming has attracted so many adherents, why medical experts regard it as the ideal form of exercise, and why it is, indeed, the sport of the nineties.
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