Musing About Swimming❓

(and the Comrades Marathon)

Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.—Diana Nyad

Swimming is the ultimate in a hormetic exercise.

Evidence of recreational swimming in prehistoric times has been found, with the earliest evidence dating to Stone Age paintings from around 10,000 years ago. Written references date from 2000 BC, with some of the earliest references to swimming including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, Beowulf, the Quran and others. In 1538, Nikolaus Wynmann, a Swiss–German professor of languages, wrote the earliest known complete book about swimming, _Colymbetes, sive de arte natandi dialogus et festivus et iucundus lectu_ (The Swimmer, or A Dialogue on the Art of Swimming and Joyful and Pleasant to Read).

I aspire to run the Comrade’s Marathon. Currently, the bulk of my training is running in a diving well and riding my bicycle. It’s hard to hurt one’s self in a swimming pool.

The mammalian body is remarkable. Hormesis Rules❗️

While I anticipate getting back to my first love (running), I’m going to get back there by capitalizing on a cocktail of resistance-training, aerobic-training, and weightlessness that are inherent in pool running and bicycling.