For Swimmers

WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Swimming is the most isolating of sports. Even long-distance runners have scenery to look at. Swimmers can (sort of) see and hear, but they are mostly in tune with their own minds and bodies. What is there to say about such a solitary and inward experience?

Plenty, as it turns out. In "Swim: Why We Love the Water," Lynn Sherr, a former ABC News correspondent, provides almost too much information about swimming, but she pulls us into the subject because she wears her learning lightly and interweaves it within her version of a quest romance: Can this 60-something grandmother achieve her goal and swim the Hellespont—the legendary strait that runs between the Aegean Sea and Turkey's interior?

Among her eminent predecessors are Lord Byron, who wrote a poem about his 1810 swim, and Leander, the figure from Greek mythology who, according to legend, swam both ways across the strait nightly in order to visit his lover on the other side. Will Ms. Sherr emerge triumphant, without catching a cold like the English poet—who was paying tribute to Leander—or without drowning like the storm-tossed Greek? (No need to guess the answer.) Although she is not as elegant a stylist as Charles Sprawson, whose "Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero" (1992) remains the best meditation about swimming, Ms. Sherr writes personably and moves her reader through her narrative at a pleasing pace.

All swimmers understand a basic truth about which non-swimmers express skepticism: Swimming is totally fascinating. It is true that boredom can set in, especially in numbing cold-water outdoor events, but so can Zen calm, as torture gives way to pleasure, blood pressure goes down and water lifts the spirit as well as the body. There's a reason that "buoyant" has multiple meanings.

Swimming has a history. Like bathing costumes, strokes come and go. Ms. Sherr tells us that several different swimmers in the 1930s are credited with rearranging the breast stroke by "abandoning the underwater sweep of the arms to bring them up and out of the water." The swimmers combined that motion with "an undulating kick," thus creating "the butterfly." In recent years, technical advances and changes in training mean that speeds are getting faster, bodies more efficient. Doc Counsilman, Indiana University's great swimming coach from 1957 to 1990, based the S-stroke, his refinement of the crawl, on the Bernoulli Principle from the science of hydrodynamics. Mark Spitz, the Indiana swimmer who won seven medals in the 1972 Olympics, profited from the master's wisdom.

In the past 30 years the men's 50-meter freestyle record has dropped two seconds, and the women's record has been lowered even more. Meanwhile, races are won or lost, as Ms. Sherr notes, by ever tinier "slivers of time." Olympian Dara Torres once said that competitive swimmers "know full well that every second has a beginning, a middle, and an end."
Swim: Why We Love the Water

Famous swimmers, and the famous who liked to swim, make appearances in Ms. Sherr's chronicle, including Chairman Mao, Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Cole Porter, as well as stars like Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams, Matthew Webb (the first man to swim the English Channel, who lost his life trying to swim the Niagara River below the falls), Gertrude Ederle (the first woman to do the Channel, who beat Webb's time by swimming the crawl rather than the breast stroke). The author also tells about the Australian champion Annette Kellerman, a cultural hero as well as a nautical one for refusing to be bogged down in heavy clothing, saying in Boston in 1908: "I can't swim wearing more stuff than you have on a clothesline." Sigmund Freud, we are told, liked the breast stroke because it kept his beard dry.

What Ms. Sherr does best is describe the pleasures of the water, of finding yourself while losing yourself, giving yourself up to the supporting medium. She swam as a kid at her parents' camp in the Poconos; she has been swimming ever since. In an effort to challenge herself in her later years, she opts for the Hellespont swim—an annual open-water race a bit less daunting than the Channel—and every chapter of the book builds her personal narrative while placing it in the context of often fascinating mini-treatises on subjects that reach beyond the water.

Take, for instance, the pool itself. It too has a history. The Emperor Herod had a 250-meter one at Jericho. The first public pool in this country was built—or so it is often claimed—in Brookline, Mass., in 1877. The postwar period has seen a proliferation of backyard pools, some grotesque, others comic in their design. Both Liberace and Frank Sinatra had piano-shaped pools; Jayne Mansfield a heart-shaped one; a Florida dentist built his in the form of a molar. Tables, bar stools and outdoor televisions now make the pool into another room of the house. Like fancy kitchens with gleaming copper pots in which little cooking is performed, the gourmet pool of today often has no calories burned within it.

Ms. Sherr is alert to the sociological implications of her theme. She writes interestingly about women and bathing suits (Diana Vreeland pronounced the bikini "the most important thing since the atom bomb") and about the effects of water on women's hair, topics that become, with her attention, more than merely peripheral. I have a modest cavil. The book's design and typefaces do no great service to the author and her subject. Sidebars, secondary information and photos are contained in small, distracting blue or gray boxes that diminish the effect of the book's flow and threaten to drown the reader with too much detail. A buoyant subject deserves better.