Chapter 1 Diving In-2

Swimming forces you to focus and sets the mood to meditate; it allows you to dream big dreams. Silent film star and swimming champion Annette Kellerman, whose invention of the one-piece bathing suit in the early 1900s made women as agile as their male mates in the sea, wrote, “Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push.” Or as Henry David Thoreau put it, we should each explore our “private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”

Even the suggestion of swimming can be stirring. Watch a swimmer pass a building with a pool: the whiff of chlorine produces a wistful smile. Sit with swimmers when a TV commercial shows someone in the water: they actually stop and watch. “It’s something where you can exert yourself and feel incredible afterwards,” explains a former coach. “If you go out for a really hard run and give yourself the same exertion, you can’t eat; you feel so miserable, all you want to do is cool off and drink. If you have a great swim workout, you want to go have a feast. Look at people’s faces when they leave the athletic club: the ones who walk out looking like they feel great are the ones who just swam.”

Swimmers are special, a swim mom tells me—so focused on their sport, so disciplined about their workouts, they have to do well in school. A former competitor says he used to resent it when he was introduced as “the swimmer” because it made him feel like an outsider. Now he’s proud of it “because it takes a lot of commitment. And because I know that I can survive.”

Swimming is brimming with idioms about our struggle for survival, about striving and thriving in an occasionally hostile world. Striking out as an iconoclast? You’re swimming against the tide. Getting nowhere? You’re treading water. Wrong about something? You’re all wet. (That one’s insidious; for many of us, wet can be wonderful.) How many times have you talked about “sticking a toe in” or “diving off the deep end” or finding yourself “in over your head”? And it’s not just subprime mortgages that are “under water.” We blithely refer to a change in circumstance as the “tide turning.”

The real thing can stop you in your tracks, as one English Channel contender recently learned. Three hundred yards from the shore, after stroking his way through eighteen hours of turbulent waters, he was caught in a turning tide, a surge so powerful he couldn’t chop through to the finish line. “It’s mental torture,” his coach, Fiona Southwell, tells me. “You have to dig deep.” Southwell, a cheery blonde Brit who completed her own Channel crossing at age fifty-one to compensate for empty-nest syndrome when her children went off to college, gives me the secret to her nineteen-hour, twenty-two-minute achievement: “I tied an imaginary rope to the shore in Dover, where I began. The other end was tied to the beach in France, where my eighty-three-year-old parents would be waiting to meet me. Every stroke I took, I imagined pulling myself closer to them, and when I hit a wall my son reminded me not to let go until I stood on French soil. It worked! They were just pulling me in.”

Life lessons from swimming permeate the foundations of our society, with references in everything from the Bible to rock music. In a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript accompanying Psalm 69, King David—naked, a crown atop his curls—swims through an ocean of blue waves (“the deep waters” of despair), praying for salvation. The Talmud says that a Jewish father must do several things for his son: circumcise him, teach him Torah, find him a wife, teach him a trade. And teach him how to swim. According to Rabbi Anne Ebersman, director of Jewish programming at New York’s Abraham Joshua Heschel School, that can be interpreted two ways: First, to prevent drowning in a world where trade depended on sea travel. “Ships were dangerous,” she explains to me. “And probably there were stories about drowning. But swimming can also be seen more metaphorically,” she goes on, “how to take care of yourself, knowing that you can master something by yourself. So it’s a basic skill to get through life and also a metaphor to get through life.” The same point is made by an advisor to Mohammed and one of the major voices of Islam, Umar Ibn al-Khattab. “Teach your children swimming, archery and horse-riding,” he says, a directive often interpreted as serving the soul as well as the body.

More contemporary moral guidance comes from the bighearted blue fish named Dory in the movie Finding Nemo. When Marlin, the clownfish, gets the grumps, Dory grabs his fin, wriggles onward, and sings, “When life gets you down, do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”

Andrew Grove, the genius behind Intel, called his memoir about escaping from war-ravaged Hungary Swimming Across. In it, he talks about his childhood—when he was known as Grof—and he relates the story of his favorite high school teacher, Mr. Volenski, addressing assorted parents at a school meeting. “Life is like a big lake,” he tells them. “All the boys get in the water at one end and start swimming. Not all of them will swim across. But one of them, I’m sure, will. That one is Grof.” Grove recalls that his parents “told so many people about [the story] that over time, my swimming across the lake of life became a family cliché. [But] I continued to get some encouragement from each telling. I hoped Mr. Volenski was right.” He was. Grove got out. And up. He ends his memoir this way: “I am still swimming.”

Me too. Which is what this book is about.

It’s a celebration of swimming and the effect it has on our lives. It’s an inquiry into why we swim—the lure, the hold, the timeless enchantment of being in the water. It’s a look at how swimming has changed over the years and how this ancient activity is becoming more social than solitary today. It’s about our relationship with the water, with our fishy forebears, and with (suck in your stomachs, class) the costumes that we wear. You’ll even find a few songs to make the laps go by more quickly.

It’s also about my progress in the Hellespont. Byron was twenty-two when he crossed it—in an hour and ten minutes. I assume that Leander’s nocturnal outings took half as long, perhaps before he was sixteen. I vaguely remember both those birthdays and am hoping to finish before my next one removes me from my sixties. I’ve chosen this body of water carefully: wide enough to challenge me, reasonable enough to think I might make it. Might. I’ve airily assured friends that if I stop partway, it won’t matter—just trying is enough. It’s a bluff. I’m not used to failing. Never mind that I’ve swum no further than half a mile or so at a time for decades and that some of my strokes are unreconstructed leftovers from summer camp. I’ve trained hard for eight months, in pools and bays and oceans, plumbing my own untapped limits while chasing this more tangible goal.

Breaking the surface of anything is both thrilling and frightening—a body of water all the more so, as the ripples set off by our fingertips merely hint at the mystery of what lies below. And then it’s as if you were never there. Water mends itself, sealing over the slightest intrusion so someone else—or you—can try again. There’s an image that intrigues me: A young man painted on a tomb in ancient Paestum, in Italy, soaring headfirst into the water. Or wherever his final destination might be. You can’t see his target, but his ease and elation are enviable. He trusts what he’ll find, even though he can’t be sure what it is. That’s where I’m headed, too. If you’re a swimmer, you know the feeling. If you’re not, I hope you’ll take a look, take some lessons, and dive in yourself. Swimming is magical. It can also save your life.

The Skinny on Dipping

•An estimated 51.9 million Americans swim at least six times each year—one in six of us—making it the third most popular sports activity after walking and working out. A much smaller but far more dedicated group, 6.3 million, swim at least once a week for fitness or competition. That’s a lot fewer than regular runners and bikers, perhaps because swimming requires five to ten times as much energy as crossing the same distance on land. Or maybe it’s about getting your hair wet.

•We splash about in nearly 10.4 million residential pools and another 309,000 public pools across the country.

•Of the four strokes most commonly used today—butterfly, back, breast, free—the fastest is free. It used to be called “crawl,” a term an upcoming generation will likely stop using altogether, but not me. The two words are used interchangeably here. 

•Except for the breaststroke, arms are more important than legs in swimming, providing up to 80 percent of power.

•The swimming pool at your local rec center is likely twenty-five yards long, which is called the standard Olympic short course. Internationally, yards become meters, which are slightly longer. The pool you see at the Olympics is fifty meters, which is called the long course. Most pools in American backyards are forty feet.

How to measure your own laps? In a twenty-five-yard pool, 71 lengths equal one mile. In a forty-foot pool, 132 lengths equal one mile.

The racing community measures it differently. To them, 66 lengths of a twenty-five-yard pool make a mile. Don’t ask; it’s a gift.

•Pools used to be called tanks, whether they were actual tanks full of water or just holes in the ground. What you wore in a tank was a tank suit. Brenda Patimkin wore a black one in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. Decades later, changing its name to “maillot” has not lessened the angst over fitting into one.

•Saltwater is more buoyant than fresh, cold water more than warm. Both will keep you afloat.

•The first person to swim the English Channel was Matthew Webb in 1875. First woman: America’s Gertrude Ederle in 1926. Number of people who have swum the Channel to date: around nine hundred. Most jaw-dropping Channel feat (so far): a triple crossing (that’s across, back, across again). I don’t know why either.

•Weirdest swimming spin-off: underwater hockey.

•Best swim gear ever invented: goggles. Most annoying thing about swim gear: caps don’t keep your hair dry.

Myths about swimming infuse many cultures. The one about Hero and Leander is about as fact-based as the ones about mermaids and mermen. Here are some more:

•A drowning person does not go down three times before succumbing. It could be only once. Or thirty-three.

•Witches do not float better than regular people, despite the devilish punishment devised by ignorant authorities in times past. They called it “swimming the witch”—dunking the accused, who was trussed like a chicken and often weighted down, in a body of water. If she stayed aloft, she was guilty and died; if she sank, she might die anyway.

•Eating before swimming is not recommended, but it will not cause you to drown. You do not have to wait one hour before plunging in. But don’t tell your kids. Better they should digest. 

•Contrary to urban legend (and an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete on Nickelodeon that revolved around “a chemical agent that reacts with human tinkle” and turns into a green slick), there is no known chemical that turns green, or any other color, when it comes in contact with bodily fluids in the pool. Unfortunately.