In order to honor the blog's title, it's time for a swimming post. Late summer is the season for a lot of open water swim races around the world. And for just plain open water swims - where a swimmer with a support boat tackles a body of water by him or herself. No race. The English Channel (brrrr) is one such swim, as is the Catalina Channel (sharks!) in California. These days, the only seems to be a swimmers imagination and wallet.
The Daily News of Open Water Swimming posts daily news (yes, its title is quite appropriate) of the latest of these types of swims by some amazing people. I like visiting the site because of the inspiration it provides. And the videos. Any athletic or creative pursuit requires dogged determination and the ability to give the most when it hurts the most. For example, often when people who have completed the English Channel say some variant of: "Yeah, when I was about an hour from France, the captain of the support boat said I had to pick up the pace or the current would change and I'd never make land." So you've just been swimming for ten hours and someone tells you to swim faster? And you can? Wow. My hat is off to you.
Or maybe swimming freestyle is too boring and you want to do four laps of the San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, one each of butterfly, backstroke, breastroke and freestyle? The Daily News of Open Water Swimming: Butter, Back, Breast And Free In The Open Water:
These are regular people, albeit talented and hardworking regular people. Not freaks. They are doing the possible, not the impossible. I'll think about all that the next time I want to quit. The next time I think that writing three pages is enough for the day or swimming one more lap would just be too hard.
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