Quite appropriately I was born under the sign of Pisces.
Swimming relaxes me. It also inspires me.
“Hey Mombo, I”ll race you to the other side of the creek,” a 9-year-old Miranda said to me.
Her grin alerted me that she was under the assumption she would win.
Miranda is tremendously competitive.
She was wicked furious when I won. She challenged me to race after race after race.
Every couple of years she figures I”m too old to beat her and she tries again. She is a star soccer player and she runs every day.
Last year we were visiting my mother in Concord, Mass. We went swimming at the Thoreau Club. She tried one more time. “I bet I”ll beat you this year, old lady,” she said. A comment such as that is the reason I never let her win.
She did not win. “Do you want to race again?” I asked her. I told her she probably did not want to end the night being beat by an “old lady.” But she declined.
I wonder if she will give it another go this summer.
I love to swim. The ocean is my favorite place, but I”ll swim in almost any body of water or swimming pool.
I even braved the public pool during the summers in New York City, which wasn”t so much swimming, as it was standing with my arms to my sides in a huge concrete tub with hundreds of others who were attempting to beat the heat and humidity.
I joined the swim team in fifth grade.
I found out that butterfly was my favorite stroke, but also liked to compete in the individual medleys, too.
Last weekend my wonderful father (Happy Father”s Day, dad!) told me about a book written by Lynn Sherr titled “Swim: Why We Love the Water.”
It”s all about the wonders of swimming. I read the review in the Economist and now I”m convinced I have to read this book.
Here”s a snippet from the review: “Having neither flippers nor fins, nor any form of gills, humans are not natural swimmers. Yet over the centuries they have happily thrown themselves into the English Channel and the straits of Gibraltar and Messina; they have swum round Manhattan, across the Sea of Galilee, and through the dark southern Atlantic from Robben Island to Cape Town. Every year, in early autumn, more than 27,000 people embark on a mass swim across Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan, most of them using flotation devices. Nearly 52 million Americans swim at least six times a year, making it the third most popular sport after walking and working out.”
Sherr, 69, a correspondent with ABC News decided to swim the Hellespont in western Turkey because, “There was something about the famous channel that separates Europe from Asia that caught her imagination,” the review stated.
A journalist who is following her specific dream — very cool. And it has to do with swimming.
I imagine the book is amazing, because the review is written with such magic and eloquence.
“Ms. Sherr weaves notes from her year of magical training for the Hellespont swimathon into a highly readable celebration of man”s watery history and the lure of the blue …”
And finally, medical experts say that “swimming offers something that no other aerobic exercise does: the ability to work your body without harsh impact to your skeletal system,” according to Discovery Health.
Go ahead, take the plunge!
Mandy Feder is the Managing Editor at Lake County Publishing. She can be reached at mandyfeder@yahoo.com or 263-5636 ext. 32. Follow on Twitter @mandyfeder1.
