Chapter 4 Different Strokes - 1

IAM SWIMMING upstream without a paddle. Yes, other humans are in the Hellespont with me, but they’re nowhere near, and yes, there are safety boats just in case, but that would be cheating. Stroke after stroke it’s just me in the sea, using arms and legs and abs (oh, that critical core) to cut through the current toward the other shore. Swimming is the ultimate on-your-own activity. Everyone else gets stuff to make it easier: skis, skates, bats, wheels, sticks, gloves, racquets, slick shoes. Even teammates to help reach the goal. Not us. An equipment malfunction in swimming means some part of your body has broken down. My favorite passage from an early Greek poem about this crossing describes Leander this way: “Himself the crew, the cargo and the ship.” Translation: no flippers, no noodles, no rope lines to hang on to. You do it yourself, as I am right now, and the way you do it in swimming is called strokes.

“Lynn, relax your shoulders! Lynn, stretch even further with those lovely long arms!” “Lynn, get your head deeper into the water, like this!” Fiona Southwell, the eternally upbeat, utterly tireless British Channel swimmer, gave me some pointers the day before this event, at a beachside clinic designed to make the waters of the Hellespont less terrifying. For half an hour I was directed to swim all the way out to one buoy and then circle back, letting my body get used to the currents and the surprisingly salty taste. The orientation worked: I am comfortable now in this foreign sea, reaching for the other side with previously untapped energy. But the other side is so far away! To get there, I’m swimming freestyle, the better to pierce the oncoming tide. Every now and then I slide into a breaststroke, my rest stroke, to catch my breath and sight the route. Am I going in the right direction? Has the course zigged while I zagged? How did Byron find the Asian shore two hundred years ago without the radio tower that I’m locked onto? Once in a while I flip over onto my back for a complete change of pace—to inhale at will, to stretch my shoulders, to gaze at the perfect blue sky and the European hills I’ve left behind. It’s also a chance to dream. How cool is it to swim from Europe to Asia? How cool am I? Could I do this twice a day and make passionate love in between?

“The definition of swimming,” according to one nineteenth-century instructor, is “to keep yourself afloat and make progress. It matters little how this is done—in what mode or form—as long as it is done.” Simple enough. Sir Isaac Newton made it simpler: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” That’s his Third Law of Motion, which is really the first law of swimming: to get anywhere in the water you must either pull it toward you or push it away. It will reciprocate by sending you in the opposite direction. In the language of swimming, pulling or pushing is the “catch”; returning your arm or leg to the starting point is “recovery.” The alternative to both is floating motionless (see the previous chapter on buoyancy), a perfectly pleasant sensation that, depending on the current, either reroutes your journey or contributes little to it, whether your goal is the other side of an ancient channel, the end of the pool, or the wooden raft in the lake. In other words, you need to move, a detail that seems to have eluded the otherwise exacting Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. One day in Italy he is said to have lamented, “Why can’t I swim, it seems so very easy?” When his friend the biographer Edward John Trelawny said, “Because you think you can’t,” Shelley plunged into the Arno River and dropped like a rock until Trelawny retrieved him.

It takes more than just physics and will power to move through a medium some eight hundred times denser than air—where you are horizontal, where you need to move all four limbs at once in an environment without gravity (which means nothing to stand on or push off against), and where you can’t always breathe when you want to. It is “the most difficult art there is,” pronounced Ralph Thomas, an accomplished swimmer so convinced of its value to humankind, he catalogued every known book in print about it at the end of the nineteenth century. “To swim badly, as to do anything badly, is perfectly easy,” he went on. “But to move about, on or under the water with ease and without apparent effort, quietly and without splashing, requires much diligent practice.” And while the goal may be to slip through liquid as fluently as a fish, the modern development of human swimming strokes actually owes more to the frog, the dog, the dolphin, and the butterfly.

We begin with the frog, the accomplished little amphibian whose name was appropriated for the leg action of the breaststroke, “the first degree of Swimming,” in Reverend Digby’s pioneering manual. It was also known as the “human” stroke or the “chest stroke,” because you swim on your belly with your head facing comfortably forward. For more than three hundred years, the breaststroke was effectively the only way Europeans and Americans swam across any body of water. It’s how Ben Franklin stroked down the Thames, how Byron crossed the Hellespont, how Webb made it across the English Channel (although the then-prevalent technique of keeping his head out of the water for twenty-one hours left him with painful blisters on the back of his neck; he also moved his arms and legs simultaneously). The fundamentals were recognizable: sweep out and back with the arms, then snap them forward; draw the legs up and out, then back. Whoosh! You bolt ahead in the water. For several centuries, pupils were advised to learn it by consulting the acknowledged expert. “For the leg stroke there is no better model than a frog, whose action in swimming should be copied exactly,” advised one author. The frog was “the only correct master,” according to another. The authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica of 1797 quoted “very expert swimmers” as recommending “that some frogs be kept in a tub of water as examples” to would-be swimmers.

I made the discovery on my own—spending hours as a toddler by a lake in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains watching long, rubbery frog limbs flex up and out and back again. Hanging out with the little green guys gave me a leg up on learning, and I developed my own forceful frog kick that serves me well today. I could breaststroke forever. But the image of a small amphibian imprisoned in a basin to educate a grown human was irresistible to Restoration playwright Thomas Shadwell. In The Virtuoso (widely seen as a satire on the science of the day) he ridiculed what must have been a very common dryland occurrence. The scene is described by Lady Gimcrack as her husband learns to swim: “He has a frog in a bowl of water, tied with a packthread by the loins; which packthread Sir Nicholas holds in his teeth, lying upon his belly on a table; and as the frog strikes, he strikes; and his swimming-master stands by, to tell him when he does well or ill.” Later we come upon Sir Nicholas himself, lying on the table mid–frog-kick. He is asked if he has ever tried out the stroke in the water. “No, sir,” he replies, “but I swim most exquisitely on land. . . . I hate the water. . . . I content myself with the speculative part of swimming.”

For the latter part of his argument, I defer to my hero, suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, who as far as I know never swam a day in her life but still understood the urgency of confronting it, like everything else, on its home territory: “Women can’t swim as a rule,” she said in 1883, referring less to the breaststroke or any other stroke than to women’s second-class status in society, “and never will be able to do so—unless thrown into the water to learn the art.”

Which didn’t stop a host of enterprising inventors from dreaming up some eccentric, if not tortuous, contraptions to save would-be swimmers from the inconvenience of getting wet. They ranged from simple chest slings to hoist the pupil into midair (the better to move his arms and legs around), to complicated platforms with jointed limb rests at the corners, and a rubber air bag supported by a metal framework devised by a Scotsman named John S. Levett. His invention, wrote a (legitimate) swim instructor, “had its recommendations, but as poor Levett was himself drowned a year later on, when exhibiting the apparatus in the sea at Blackpool, no one took any further interest.” Understandably so.

Other inventors ginned up gadgets to aid the already waterborne: corks strung together in belts; gloves and boots with duck-like webbing that spread out like an umbrella; flexible tails to support the tailless.

Fortunately, swim instruction soon focused on the stroke, not the stroke aid. And the breaststroke itself changed: instead of executing arms and legs together, it turned out that you got further ahead by staggering the motions. And putting your face in the water allowed for a nice, long, energy-saving glide. In that way, the breaststroke remained “the ordinary and most straightforward style of swimming,” someone proclaimed. It is “and will always be, the most popular.”