Go Soak Your Head

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui.  Algonquin Books.  288 pp.  $11.29 *****

Nearly forty years ago, after jogging[1] for exercise for twenty years, I reluctantly decided that I couldn’t continue.  I lived in Durham, NC, where the afternoon temperatures all through the summer could easily be in the high nineties, with high humidity as well.  I always wrote in the morning; that was the one part of my routine that was unassailable.  One of my primary reasons for exercising, in fact, was to rid myself of the tension that had accumulated in a morning of writing.  It wasn’t an option to run early.  I tried to wait until things cooled off, but the heat often persisted way into the evening.  My joints were also starting to give me trouble, in my late thirties.  I began to look around for some alternative, and thought about swimming.

If you just looked at me, that might have seemed a better alternative.  I’ve always had a stocky build, slightly pudgy; I never looked like a runner.[2]  I’d hated long runs throughout adolescence, when I played football and put the shot in track.  Swimming had been the first sport I’d ever trained in, when I was twelve years old and on a swimming team.  I’d been a natural swimmer from the time I was young.

A friend took me to the local Y (which had a four-lane, rather cloudy looking pool that wasn’t used much), and I was stunned at how out of shape I was.  I’d been running three miles a day and could only swim four lengths consecutively.  I was in better shape than that when I was twelve.  But I improved quickly; after a week I could do twenty lengths, and I worked up to a mile.  Swimming became my new obsessive habit.

I found the repetitive nature of running to be mesmerizing and meditative, but swimming seemed even more that way.  It involved the whole body, and coordinating the body, in a way that running didn’t.  It was simultaneously excellent exercise and extraordinarily relaxing, especially as I got older and learned to relax into it.  People who do other sports often finish in the sauna or steam room, but I’m utterly relaxed at the end of a swim.[3]

People often said to me, as I was heading to the pool, “Have a good swim,” but there’s no such thing as a bad swim.  If you get in touch with the energy you have that day, swimming is always perfect.  It reveals how you actually feel, in a way that nothing else does.  I alternate swimming days with walking days, because I think walking is extremely important (the legs go first, as athletes say).  But though I love walking, I always look forward to swimming.

Bonnie Tsui would agree.  She makes my love of swimming look moderate.  Not only was she a competitive swimmer when she was young, she came back to competition in middle age, and felt the same urge to win she always had.[4]  She’s also done any number of heroic swims, including the famous swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco (no inmate could do it, she assumes, because they weren’t able to work out and their nutrition was terrible).  And in Why We Swim she’s done a comprehensive study of swimming, everything from Stone Age Swimming to The Water Cure to various kinds of competition, including the fascinating brand of swimming invented by the Japanese titled Nihon eiho, which made them extremely successful in the early years of competition.  Despite being comprehensive, Tsui is a lively writer with a light touch, and the book never gets bogged down.  It is entertaining throughout.

One thing she mentions is water temperature, a loaded subject that swimmers often disagree on.  In recent years the Durham Y has had trouble with the pool heater, and the temperature of the water plummeted for periods of time.  It got to a point where most of us found another pool until the heater was fixed, but now that I’ve read Tsui’s book I’m not sure we should have.  San Francisco Bay, for instance, was 53 degrees the first time she swam in it, and swimmers in the Bay Area routinely swim at that temperature and colder.  There’s a school of thought that believes the cold temperatures are good for you, the colder the better.  (The Y pool is normally around 80.)

Tsui opens the book, in fact, with the story of a man she calls The Human Seal, a resident of Iceland who was in a boat that capsized and who swam three and a half miles in water that was 41 degrees.  Most human beings would have died of exposure, and a couple of his shipmates apparently did.  But his body had much more fat than most,[5] and he survived (and also walked a mile barefoot to the nearest house).  Reading his story, and the way he became a national hero and inspired his whole country to build pools and undertake swimming lessons, is worth the price of the whole book.

Tsui also takes up subjects like Who Gets to Swim (not everyone has access to bodies of water and swimming lessons), the nature of competition (swimming competition is a fairly recent thing, having arisen in the nineteenth century), the health benefits of swimming (espoused by such different people as Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau), and swimming as a “religious exercise,” as she puts it.  As an activity that enables mindfulness and a way to engage the whole body and mind, it is on a par with Tai Chi and yoga.  I remember the time I encountered a friend of mine at the Y, an avid swimmer who was apparently having a hard day; as I walked out and she was just arriving, she clutched her hands as if to grab something.  Water, she said.  I must have water.  I knew exactly what she was talking about.  It wasn’t thirst.

This is a great book about an activity almost anyone can do.  Even the worst swimmers exercise the whole body.  And there’s a camaraderie around the pool that few other sports inspire.  I’m so glad that, on that day when I could only swim four lengths and felt humiliated, that I nevertheless persisted.  Swimming has been my companion for almost forty years.

[1] I use that word because I was pretty slow, eight minute miles, but it wasn’t a real slow jog.  I also, like many people at that time, entered a race or two, including at least one 10 K.  But I just did that to see if I could finish.  I was never a good runner.

[2] Though a surprising number of people knew me as “that guy who always runs around East Campus.”  I wasn’t a good runner, but I was dedicated.  I rarely missed a day.

[3] Though my back is sometimes tight.  I always do back stretches when I finish.

[4] I have no urge to compete, especially not now, when swimming has become practically a spiritual practice for me.  I read in Wikipedia that Parry O’Brien, the great shot putter, inventor of the O’Brien form, took up Masters swimming as he aged, and eventually died of a heart attack as he was competing.  As a former shot putter myself, I thought, What was he thinking?

[5] Fourteen millimeters, two or three times the normal thickness.