Turn the breaststroke on its side, keep the bottom arm stretched out, and you get the sidestroke, which was early promoted for its speed and economy: “one side may rest, while the other is employed.”
Also known as side swimming, or the underarm stroke, it had become the racing stroke of choice in London by the mid-nineteenth century. “It is,” pronounced journalist Robert Patrick Watson, “the most beautiful and the most graceful means of transit through the water.” And one of the easiest to learn. Mastering the stroke at the age of forty after splashing helplessly about was a revelation to one writer: “All at once I knew how a fish would feel if it could suddenly walk.” In time the kick shifted slightly from frog-like to scissors-like, and swifter swimmers figured out that raising the stroking arm out of the water rather than pushing through it during recovery was even more effective. Thus was born the overhand sidestroke, aka the English sidestroke, or just the overhand, the ultimate lung buster for several generations. It is, reported one contemporary, “most exhausting, and always involves a great expenditure of strength; it is only used where rapidity is needed for a short distance to speed.”
The backstroke wasn’t so much invented as described, recommended as the “most easy” to a world emerging from the Dark Ages. At first it was legs only—in an upside-down (here we go again) frog kick, arms resting on the belly. But humans have usable arms as well, so they were added in a sculling motion, then an inverted breast stroke sweep, and finally with the one-at-a-time reach and pull that is also called the back crawl. When the legs switched to what we now call the flutter kick, the stroke was complete—but not an instant success. The swim master at England’s Eton College called it a “waste of tim. . . . useless.” Another coach dismissed it as too slow for competition, which would surely be a surprise to world record holder Aaron Piersol, who whipped through four lengths of an Olympic pool in less time than it takes to boil water.
The major problem with being on your back is that you can’t see where you’re going, which may be why the belly-down breaststroke and the more breathable side stroke reigned so long. But they too yielded to progress, as the motion of both legs and arms switched from sweeps and thrusts to pulls and beats—and the brief appearance of the dog in swimming history. Watch Lassie when she gets in the water, and you immediately recognize the doggy paddle, or dog stroke. “Think not this way hard,” advised Renaissance chroniclers, “for many ignorantly fall upon this kind of Swimmin. . . . and are able to bear themselves up so in high water, before ever they learn’t to swim.” That apparent contradiction is easily understood by anyone watching a beginner or small children in the water; often the first primitive movements pre–swim school are these, which Australian swimming champion Charles Steedman called “the crawl,” no doubt because the paddler seemed to be creeping across the water. The term was not then well known; in fact, his 1867 book may be the first time the word “crawl” was used in swimming literature. It would soon have a far different meaning.
The novelty of the “hand-over-hand” stroke (also called “the thrust”) was notably observed by artist George Catlin on his travels through the unexplored American West. He was so taken by the way the Mandan Indians swam—“quite different fro. . . . the usual mode of swimming, in the polished world”—he faithfully described their stroke in the journals he published in London in 1844:
The Indian, instead of parting his hands simultaneously under the chin, and making the stroke outward, in a horizontal direction, causing thereby a serious strain upon the chest, throws his body alternately upon the left and the right side, raising one arm entirely above the water and reaching as far forward as he can, to dip it, whilst his whole weight and force are spent upon the one that is passing under him, and like a paddle propelling him along; whilst this arm is making a half circle, and is being raised out of the water behind him, the opposite arm is describing a similar arch in the air over his head, to be dipped in the water as far as he can reach before him, with the hand turned under, forming a sort of bucket, to act most effectively as it passes in its turn underneath him.
That enticing description likely sparked the British Swimming Society’s invitation to a group of Ojibwa Indians later that year. The Native Americans had been ferried across the Atlantic by Canadian entrepreneur Arthur Rankin as a touring exhibit for a British public spellbound by the “noble savages.” Coincidentally, Catlin then enlisted them to promote his own exhibition of portraits and Indian artifacts at Piccadilly’s famed Egyptian Hall—part of a living display (with salary). They even performed a war dance for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. The Swimming Society cooked up a race, promising a medal (first-class, silver) for the fastest Indian. So at high noon one April day in 1844, a party of Ojibwa, in full regalia and on horseback, arrived by what must have been an unusually large omnibus to an eager crowd at the High Holborn baths. With the water temperature cranked up to 85 degrees (at the request of the Indians’ medical advisor), the competitors—Wenishkaweabee, or Flying Gull, and Sahma, or Tobacco—removed their costumes, lined up, and dived in.
The only surviving report of the performance does not specify how far they stripped down, but since the Indian women who had accompanied them were immediately relegated to another room, it’s likely that the visitors swam unclothed. At a signal they were off, completing 130 feet, almost an Olympic length, in less than thirty seconds. Flying Gull won by more than a body length. They repeated the race back to the start, and Flying Gull again edged out Tobacco. Today, that pace wouldn’t even qualify for bronze; it’s about ten seconds slower than the world record. And later the Indians were handily defeated by English breaststroking champion Harold Kenworthy. But what wowed the witnesses and the unnamed sports reporter for the London Times was not so much their speed as their technique: “Their style of swimming is totally un-European,” he wrote. “They lash the water violently with their arms, like the sails of a windmill, and beat downwards with their feet, blowing with force, and forming grotesque antics.” It was nothing like the breaststroke.
Curiously, the unusual new practice died in the waters of High Holborn, at least temporarily. After a celebratory toast with wine and biscuits, the Ojibwas returned to their jobs at Catlin’s gallery. Flying Gull’s silver medal was promised within the week. But the image of his flying arms was indelible. Almost thirty years later, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named John Trudgen (occasionally spelled Trudgeon) won a race that dazzled eyewitnesses and revived old memories. He “swam with both arms entirely out of the water, an action peculiar to Indians,” announced the editor of the Swimming Record in 1873. “Both arms are thrown partly sideways, but very slovenly, and the head kept completely above water.” Trudgen said he’d learned the stroke from native tribes in Argentina. But unlike his Ojibwa predecessors, “his time was very fast”—so fast that he “degenerated Londoners to the level of mediocrity.” So fast that John Trudgen’s name was attached to the hot new stroke.
While speedy, the stroke looked stilted. With the head always up and the legs imitating the frog, not the flutter, the swimmer surged ahead with a herky-jerky motion. “The body is lifted at each stroke,” noted one observer, “and at each swing of the arms seems to be hurled forward, a considerable swirl of the water occurring as each movement is finished.” Like Tiktaalik the Trudgen was a stroke in transition, evolving from the sea of the breaststroke to a new world of accomplishment. Gradually it morphed into a narrower, more streamlined version, with the head almost fully immersed and the legs more scissors than frog as the body rolled side to side. It was, to some, “the king of all stroke. . . . the fastest of all those which there is any fun in swimming. It is the one stroke which gives the highest speed with the least exertion: it is the one stroke which is suited equally for speed and distance, for racing and pleasure, for the swimming-tank and the open sea.”
But it wasn’t soup yet. There are conflicting accounts about the next enhancement. Either:
In 1902, fifteen-year-old Dick Cavill, an Australian member of a prominent swimming family, sped to victory in a hundred-yard race combining the top half of the Trudgen, that is, the alternating overarm movements, with a new leg motion. One look at the elaborate description confirms how new: the legs were “kicked down from the knee to the toe on to the surface by the feet being alternately raised out of the water, and without the body being turned from side to side.” We call it the flutter kick. Cavill claimed that he’d seen it on a racer who’d learned it from natives in the Solomon Islands. As for the stroke itself, “the swimmer appears to be crawling over the water instead of being in it.”
Or:
When Alick Wickham, the racer who’d learned it in the Solomons, used it in a race, a Sydney coach said, “Look at that kid crawling.”
Or:
When Cavill did it, opponents said he “was crawling all over me.”
Whichever, it was called the Trudgen crawl or, after its first performer, Australian crawl. By the time American racers adopted it, the so-called two-beat kick (one per arm stroke) changed to six (three per arm). Another Australian figured out that breathing in sync with the strokes made it even more efficient. The crawl as we know it was set, “the newest and the fastest,” a physics teacher wrote in 1910, “of all swimming-strokes.”
It would continue to be streamlined. And confusing. I was taught the Trudgen crawl with both a flutter kick and a scissors kick, alternating with each arm. This is not an exact science.
Even the reliable breaststroke was rearranged yet again when someone wanted to get to the wall more quickly. Several different swimmers in the 1930s are credited with abandoning the underwater sweep of the arms to bring them up and out of the water, then combining that motion with an undulating kick: the butterfly. Such a delicate-sounding name for such a pain-producing stroke, though one of the most splendid to watch when it’s done well. It took another few decades for the swimming world to accept the new leg stroke, the maddeningly difficult movement that is named for the affable dolphin. The fly, as it’s known, is the ultimate test of flexibility and core strength, the toughest stroke to execute well. While your core is undulating and your feet are flexing, your arms are circling almost 360 degrees, in the middle of which you have to breathe. It is beyond irony that nature’s butterfly cannot swim.
Breaststroke
“Swimming-strokes are like clothes,” observed one instructor. “One does not get on comfortably with only one suit.” Comedian and writer Laurie Kilmartin, a former competitive breaststroker, describes the styles in her own swimming wardrobe:
Freestyle: Truly a dull and unimaginative stroke. Left arm, right arm, left kick, right kick. What kind of person finds intellectual stimulation in this sort of repetition? Clomp, clomp, clomp. Freestyle is an elephant’s stroke, all apologies to elephants. It is a stroke for people who stop at yellow lights and excel at algebra. Freestylers prefer Windows to Macintosh, Kenny G to Miles Davis and day to night.
Backstroke: Do you not realize that you are upside down?
Butterfly: Good Lord. When will this most violent of strokes be committed to an insane asylum? The loud uncle of swimming, butterfly boorishly hogs the remote control, making all the other strokes watch football on Thanksgiving Day. Grow up. You are making a scene.
Breaststroke: Breaststroke is all that is noble and good in this cruel world. Many deitie. . . . enjoy the solitude of this most subtle of strokes. Breaststroke has refined tastes. It reads the New Yorker and paints abstracts with oil. Breaststroke, we suspect, enjoys a martini now and again. (Contrast this with the alcoholic butterfly, which pounds Budweisers from cans, shoplifted from a 7–11). It soothes the inner beast and acts as a gentle tonic on a troubled heart. Breaststroke, you see, is in harmony with the universe; its pull and kick chase one another in playful symmetry. And if that weren’t enough, breaststroke also boasts the crown jewel of competitive swimming, the pulldow. . . . a holy moment of shrouded watery silence. Breaststrokers go to chapel during the pulldown (often giving thanks that they are not backstrokers), and break to the surface only when their brave lungs are nearly burst. . . . Breaststroke is Yin and Yang, Rum and Cok. . . .
Join us.
Today there are four official competitive swim strokes: fly, back, breast, and freestyle. I’m working hardest on the last, because you can never get good enough at the crawl. But my heart still belongs to the breaststroke. Sigmund Freud reportedly liked it because it kept his beard dry. Works for the hair on the top of your head as well. Laura Hamel, editor of Swimmer magazine and a breaststroker, calls it “the thinking person’s stroke. Look at the rule book,” she tells me, pointing out that defining the breaststroke takes up more space than any other. “It’s so difficult to judge.” A more romantic breaststroker compares its up-and-down rhythm to the sun and moon “rising and falling around the horizon each day.” A poet sees the coming together of the hands as prayer. You can see when you breaststroke. You can breathe. You can think when you glide.
I’m just saying.
“Lynn, get your legs up!”
“Lynn, use your core!”
“Lynn, use your triceps, not your forearm!”
That’s just some of what I’ve been told since I decided to ratchet up my freestyle to a new level—a proficiency that could, among other things, get me across the Hellespont. Truth is, I’d always thought of myself as a perfectly elegant mermaid, slipping through the ripples, or waves, of any blue box or ocean I happened to inhabit. Not until I got into the pool at my twice-weekly Masters drills did I realize I might be behind the curve. It has been humbling.
I had to learn lap etiquette (swim counterclockwise, leaving space behind the leader; tap gently on someone’s foot if you want to pass) and new lingo (“Okay, we’re going to do five by two hundred free pull at 3:15, breathing five, seven, seven, five for each two hundred”—huh?). I reacquainted myself with a kickboard, welcomed the ease of swimming with the little Styrofoam wedge called the “pull buoy” that fits between your thighs and floats your legs so you can work on your arms, and agonized over the sequence of sprints that squeezed every bit of air out of my lungs. I also had to retrain my limbs, trying to erase the muscle memory of many decades, to come up to speed.
The experts call it “a feel for the water”—the heightened focus that makes gifted swimmers aware of every ripple across each of those “itty bitty muscles that you don’t use for anything else in your life,” explains champion Olympic backstroker Natalie Coughlin. “You have to know what your belly is doing while also knowing what your shins and your feet and your arms are doing.” It’s a mental exercise, she tells me, “knowing the sensation of the water. And if you don’t do it all the time, you start to lose it.”
Especially when the rules have changed. For example: When I was taught the crawl as a toddler, you swam flat, flat as a flounder. And if you asked the instructor to demonstrate on dry land, he or she would stand still and move only the arms. Right, left, right left. Ditto about breathing: we were taught to fill our lungs by turning the head—not the whole body. Today it’s about the roll: keeping the head and spine in a line and making the body more knife than pancake when you reach forward. And when you ask someone to show you how, they stand on deck and do this kind of jitterbuggy dance thing that moves the hips and the opposite arm, back and forth. “You have to learn to line everything up, sort of like Pilates in the water,” advises George Block, a celebrated former club coach from San Antonio, Texas, who has been recommended to me as a really good explainer. “Use your core to streamline and then the arms and legs to apply propulsion.”
I am talking to him by telephone, but he is so graphic, you can probably learn from your living room. “Our bodies are a balloon—your lungs a giant airbag—tied to an anchor, your legs,” he says. “Your legs are your biggest muscles, and they’re farthest from the heart. So they’re just air suckers. They cost a lot of oxygen and a lot of heartbeats to propel you. You need muscle strength, but it’s more neurological than physiological, because you have to learn to recruit the right muscles. And the right muscles in swimming are all small. It’s a real pulsating sport. Everything is slow-fast, slow-fast, whatever movement you’re making. In freestyle: first you have to flex your wrist, your fingers go down, your palms start to face back, and then your elbow rotates. You get your whole forearm facing back, trying to create this big paddle up front. And you want that to be relatively slow. Can you feel the water? Can you get hold of it, as it wraps around your forearm? And then you want to kick in your big muscles of your lats and your triceps. And phoom! Shoot it back as fast and as far as you can. So the whole stroke accelerates from slow at the beginning to fast at the end.”
And the legs? “The legs are pretty constant, almost like a metronome going against an upper body movement that’s going from slow to fast. So it’s almost like having a percussion section or a string section doing one thing where your wind instruments are playing something different.”
I am reminded of what another coach told me as I practiced in the pool: “You have to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time.” George Block agrees. “Yes. And it’s really confusing to tell kids to do it and then to relax while doing it! And to keep their elbows up underwater.”
It’s about weight shifts, subtle movement, making the water work for you. And it’s a lot to take in, but it makes sense when you get it right, as I find myself doing roughly once an hour. I worried that swimming would become work, not fun—that the pleasure of being in the water would turn into drudgery. Not a chance. Too much to learn.
Dr. Jane Katz, the New York expert, gives me more specific tips when she kindly agrees to swim with me one morning: Extend my arm further forward on each stroke, she says; roll slightly to the nonbreathing side (head down in the water) to keep from being flat, to slice through the water better; kick my legs only twice on each stroke to keep from getting breathless.
Rely on my arms. “Yes, it will tire you out as you learn,” she acknowledges, nimbly hoisting herself out of the pool after my lesson. “But do it gradually—half a lap, then a whole lap, then as you just swim along. It will come.” She’s right—I feel more agile and am swimming better.
This is how many swimmers learn and improve—focusing on different limbs and muscles, then knitting them together over time. Terry Laughlin uses a different system, one that’s helped a lot of adults get into the water for the first time. It’s called Total Immersion, and it emphasizes balance, not body parts. “It’s not about an ‘arms department’ and a ‘legs department,’” he tells me. “It’s about whole-body streamlining. Learn how your body naturally behaves in the water.” Laughlin, whose everyman shape at sixty belies a sleek crawl, demonstrates his technique when I drive up to visit him in New Paltz, New York, a quiet community in the Hudson River valley nearly two hours north of Manhattan. The warmth of his basement pool is a welcome respite from the snow on the wintry ground—it’s an Endless Pool, one of those bigger-than-a-bathtub tanks with a controllable current that streams by at a soothing 89 degrees. “Pay attention to the water flowing cleanly around you,” Laughlin says, sliding in for the lessons.
With the help of a video camera, he analyzes my problem immediately: I’m not efficient in the water. “You see what your arms and legs are doing,” he explains, after showing me myself on the tape. “What you think is propelling is mostly stabilizing. Correcting your body position. You’re moving water around rather than moving through it.” The main message: use your gut for balance; streamline your body; soften your limbs. “Stop thinking about using your arm muscles to push on the water molecules behind you,” he says, showing me the unnecessary force that I’m employing. “Use them to separate the water molecules in front of you. You still use it to push back, but that’s secondary to what I call a human-sized sleeve through which you slip the rest of your body. Try to be gentle and light and gather moonbeams.” It is indeed a different approach: less power, more balance. I understand why Terry Laughlin is the talk of the internet, with followers from around the globe. The day I’m there, a middle-aged Canadian, who looks more like a wrestler than a swimmer, has flown from his home just below the Arctic Circle to Montreal, and then driven four hours for his lesson, to keep up with his young son. “Terry helped me to feel the water,” he tells me, “the way I felt the air as a kid when I put my hand out the window of a moving car. I practice each move fifty times when I’m done.”
Many months later, when the snow has melted and the summer sun allows long plunges into the water, I emerge from a mile workout through the bay off New York’s Long Island to find myself chatting with a fellow from Ohio who has admired my stroke. “I’m a relatively new swimmer,” he says, “trying to do the same. I’ve read this book called Total Immersion, and I’ve been getting the lessons online.” When I tell him I know Terry Laughlin, his eyes widen as if I’ve mentioned a rock star.
Not everyone is a TI fan. Some racing coaches question his downgrading of power, his dismissal of proven techniques—he calls pull buoys and kickboards and flippers “contaminants” because they teach separation rather than integration of body parts. Laughlin himself regrets some of what he published in his first book and has prepared a revised edition. But his principles seem practical, similar to everything else I’ve learned, just packaged slightly differently. I find myself incorporating much of it into my Masters drills. In fact, all the advice I’ve gotten is helpful—now I just need to apply it, to sort through all the things I’ve learned and figure out which ones work for me.
“There’s no one way to swim,” says Russell Mark, a scientist and performance expert with USA Swimming. “A lot of it depends on body type, range of motion, flexibility, strength, the length of your arms and legs. A lot of our best swimmers are just so natural in the water, they make it look so easy. And a lot of recreational swimmers have to work to stay on top of the water. With beginners I want to say, ‘Hey, just relax. You don’t have to fight the water.’”
It’s partly the art of surrender, following your senses rather than your brain. Some also call it being the stroke, being the pool or the ocean. It is, they say, the Zen of swimming. And it’s where the very best swimmers live—both physically and emotionally. When I ask Michael Phelps if being in the water is a good feeling, he answers without hesitation: “It’s my home. Been that way for twenty years.” Michael is twenty-six.
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