Chapter 3 Fish Out of Water - 2

Swimmers Really Do Report ‘Feeling Better,’ reads the headline over one study of mood changes, an indication of how swimming can also promote mental health, or at least a sense of well-being. Kellerman, who spent much of her life promoting her own healthful lifestyle, put it in terms that might get her elected today: “For the woman who swelters in her kitchen or lolls in a drawing room, for the man who sits half his life in an office chair, an occasional swim does as much good as six months’ vacation. That weary feeling goes away for once in the cool, quiet water. Tired men and tired women forget that stocks and cakes have fallen.”

Or as a swimming instructor from another era declared, “The experienced swimmer when in the water may be classed among the happiest of mortals in the happiest of moods, and in the most complete enjoyment of the most delightful of exercises.” I think that’s partly biological: our skin is our largest organ, so swimming is our most sensuous sport. And partly revolutionary. Swimming, says Kellerman, “is the one sport in which women are not at a disadvantage with the stronger sex. And I feel that I have a right to speak thus for I know that the sea has brought me from a little lame child to the woman I am to-day.”

Alas, this otherwise ideal sport may not do much for our waistlines. While swimming can smooth out the figure and certainly burn fat, it does not directly promote weight loss. According to Dr. Joel Stager, associate director of Indiana University’s Department of Kinesiology, that’s because “losing weight is about efficiency—the amount of work done divided by the metabolic cost of doing that work.” The problem, he tells me, “is that most people who need to lose weight are so out of shape, they can’t swim far enough to make a difference. And the better swimmer you are, the less metabolic work you’re doing. So as you become more efficient, if you’re swimming to lose weight, you are defeating your purpose by getting better.” Blame it, he says, on buoyancy, which “reduces the energy expenditure associated with swimming.” It’s a dilemma, but not one that troubles Dr. Stager. Weight, he points out, is not a good index, especially since muscle mass weighs more than fat.

Health

Of exercises, swimming’s best,

Strengthens the muscles and the chest,

And all their fleshy parts confirms.

Extends, and stretches legs and arms,

And, with a nimble retro-spring,

Contracts, and brings them back again.

As ’tis the best, so ’tis the sum

Of exercises all in one,

And of all motions most compleat,

Because ’tis vi’lent without heat.

–Dr. Edward Baynard, from his poem “Health,” 1764

We are talking at his office at IU’s main Bloomington campus, a lush, leafy enclave of gentle hills and imposing limestone buildings that could be the movie set for Collegetown, U.S.A. Dr. Stager, who is also director of the Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming, is a principal investigator of an ambitious study on the health effects of swimming on the human body, focusing on longtime members of US Masters Swimming, a national organization of more than 50,000 adults who want to stay fit in the water. USMS clubs are all over the country, offering everything from tune-ups to killer workouts to international competitions. I joined in January 2011 to get ready for my personal marathon, hoping the regular drills and connection with other swimmers might crank up my strokes and speed to Hellespont level. I have also agreed to take part in Dr. Stager’s study. The Counsilman Center, headquartered in the giant Health, Physical Education and Recreation building (or HPER, known appropriately on this go-go campus as Hyper), is named for James E. (Doc) Counsilman, the celebrated coach who led Indiana’s male swimmers and divers to dozens of titles. He also coached Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimming world’s first seven-medal man. A world record breaststroker, Counsilman became the oldest person to swim the English Channel in 1979, at the age of fifty-eight (a record since broken), which he did “to challenge himself,” says Stager. He died in 2004 from Parkinson’s disease.

Counsilman’s legendary innovations at the Bloomington pool that anchors this complex—like the wall-mounted pace clocks (one is still there), so that athletes could monitor their own time—made him the authority of his day, a giant in the field who was proudest, according to Joel Stager, “of bringing science and sport together.” His breakthrough book, The Science of Swimming, published in 1968, became the swim coaching bible. His forte was technique. Dr. Stager’s interest is exercise physiology—the heart-lung-muscle triad. “What floats my boat is, how does Michael Phelps accomplish it?” he explains. And the $64,000 corollary: Does swimming keep you young? At fifty-nine, Joel Stager is his own best advertisement, with the streamlined body and boyish good looks of the competitive swimmer that he was when he first came to work with Counsilman in the mid-1970s. He loves the sport and swims daily in the pool just below his office—3,000 yards every noon, five days a week—a rigorous workout in Doc’s old pool with like-minded fanatics who leave me panting in their wake. At IU, everyone I meet swims. Very, very well.

“You can come up with an excuse every day why not to get into the water,” says Dr. Stager, a sprinter. “I am proud that I set an example for my students. This is what we profess, but it’s also what we do.” Stager’s students are equally committed swim groupies, putting swimming through the microscope of a series of investigations. One is researching the thermoregulation of water versus air; another, the energy value of chocolate milk for racers. I hear about a “start study,” examining how swimmers go off the blocks; about research on swimmers’ hands: Is there an ideal size? In a world that rewards victory-by-a-fingernail, these are not frivolous topics. And the students—broad-shouldered and muscular, padding about in flip-flops—fully appreciate the opportunity to study the sport that sustains them.

“It’s about being in the water; it’s meditation,” says a well-built graduate student in a black tee revealing killer biceps. “I’ve come up with some research thoughts doing laps. You learn a lot about life by swimming.”

What Joel Stager is learning may change our understanding of the human body—in particular, the central nervous system. “Our hypothesis is that maintenance of physical activity—specifically swimming—preserves higher brain activity,” he says. “And then some.” His project, in conjunction with the IU Brain Science Lab, focuses on the hard-swimming members of US Masters: men and women who swim 3,500 to 5,000 yards (that’s two to three miles) three to five times a week. Some have been doing it for nearly twenty years. “There are,” Stager says, “few comparable populations who engage in routine intensive daily exercise for decades.”

That’s a bit above my fitness grade, but for the sake of the study, I’m one of them, with a good opportunity to see where I fit into the swimming world. After my vitals are recorded, my heart rate is monitored as I fast-walk around the indoor track. I am checked for motor control and balance on a treadmill, then hooked up to electrodes to test my nerve conduction velocity, as a weak electrical current tickles my funny bone. I opt out of the brain MRI because there’s a pin in my kneecap, a result of the break that got me swimming in the first place. But I get totally into the cognitive ability tests to check my memory, reasoning, logical thought, perceptual speed, and nonverbal learning. I am asked to count backwards by threes and recall sets of scrambled letters, I have to rearrange letters and numbers read to me out of order, I manipulate symbols and numbers and identify missing pieces for spatial recognition, and somewhere I seem to recall a light box where I had to put certain cards in place. After two days of tests, and another week at home recording my activities in a diary, my part in the study is over. How’d I do?

“All is well!” reports Colleen McCracken, the PhD candidate who is running the study. “Your cognitive results placed you in the top quartile,” she says, meaning that my brain is clicking along just fine. Phew. And “your arteries can relax and contract better than [those of] most people your age,” she says, meaning that my cardio system is pumping away happily. Double phew. I still need to improve my oxygen consumption—to get my endurance up—and while my body mass index is normal and healthy for the general population, other Masters Swimmers are leaner and meaner. Didn’t need a test for that one. But overall, it’s good news: swimming may be keeping me healthy. And I have contributed to something that may change the way we think about it.

“Yes, swimming is good for your heart,” Dr. Stager tells me. “We’ve found that the arteries of older USMS members tend to be more elastic than those of younger nonswimmers. And that the muscle mass of older Masters Swimmers is equivalent to [that in] persons fifteen years younger. Masters Swimmers have lower average heart rates than sedentary controls. That’s good. But it also appears to be good for your brain.” Among the findings so far: Active swimmers appear to have greater cell density and “connectedness” in the cerebellum, which could mean protection from age-related complications in gait and balance that lead to falls. And they show very little decline in nerve conduction velocity (NCV)—the speed with which your brain tells your muscles what to do: the NCV rate in eighty-year-old swimmers was similar to that of fifty-year-olds in the general population. Smaller age-related declines have also been found in Masters Swimmers’ working memory capacity, which is reflected in decision making and reaction time in making decisions.

I ask if he believes that the evidence so far is incontrovertible that swimming slows down the aging process.

“Yes,” Dr. Stager says, “but we have to be careful with the terminology. Maybe typical lifestyles—sedentary lifestyles—accelerate what we commonly think of as aging. What we’re really trying to do is separate sedentarism from aging. So what we’re saying is, the Masters Swimmers—and this is a flip—demonstrate what is necessarily aging. What the general population is demonstrating is sedentarism.”

In other words, maybe Masters Swimmers are the norm; they’re how we should all look. And they are aging less quickly than the rest of the population.

“Absolutely,” he says. “What we used to think was a necessary consequence of aging now appears to be more related to lifestyle choices. This is really important.”

It is a striking preliminary conclusion for a work still in progress, and Joel Stager says the message is simple: “One more incentive to get in the water.”