Swimming in my life has changed over time. I mean, it has played different roles, but especially over the last year, I think, about getting in water as such relief like flotation, weightlessness, an unburdening, I think is really what happens physically and mentally, emotionally. I think, you know, you can't help but respond to the medium in that way, like so profound from this fire hose barrage of badness in the world. You know, I think just to have a momentary pause from that, a relief from that is just, you know, it's such a gift because it's so easy to do and yet not everyone does it.

I'm Bonnie Toye and this is the Rich Roll podcast. The Rich Roll podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast, real quick.

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That's twenty dollars off an annual membership. When you go to meals rich roll dotcom and use promo code power 20 at checkout. Did I mention that Bonnie Choi is here? Not only is she wonderful, she's here to discuss my very favorite subject swimming and more broadly, the allure of water. Why, despite its dangers, it seduces us and the evolutionary psychology behind how it went from being this thing that we related to only in terms of survival. This thing we just tried to survive into one of the world's most popular activities, a thing that we seek out.

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When you use the code rich role at checkout, go to woop dotcom. That's OPIS dotcom and use the code rich roll a check out to see fifteen percent off your order. Unlock your best self today. OK, Bonnie. Lifelong swimmer, magna cum laude. A graduate of Harvard, Bonnie is also a contributor to publications like The New York Times. She's the author of a book called American Chinatown A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, which won a whole slew of very fancy awards.

And her new book, Why We Swim, has also been widely lauded, including being named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most read books of Twenty Twenty. It's definitely one of my favorite reads of the year, and this is a conversation about that book. It's a love letter to swimming and a deconstruction of our historic relationship with water through the lens of survival, well-being, competition, community and flow. But underneath it all, this is a conversation about.

Why, to be a swimmer is to be a seeker. So check it out. This is me and Bonnie Choi.

All right, well, we're rolling. So nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this at such a pleasure. I'm so glad to meet you. I appreciate you coming down from Northern California. And I'm so glad that you jumped in the ocean today.

Like I said before we started, I would have been for you just a minute before our conversation about swimming.

It was it was one of those, you know, really beautiful sunrises. I mean, you kind of get jaded living down here.

I think in California specifically stated and I paddled out this morning and took a photo and I sent it to a friend who lives here and he said, I think we talked about it sort of like maybe puncturing his, like, jaded heart.

You know, even his after being out here, you could well, there's a lot of reasons to complain about Los Angeles, but the beach is in. The weather is not one of them. When I see you know what I hear you talking about surfing, it should be like I used to live in San Francisco.

I'm like, oh, my God, it's so cold and unforgiving and uninviting on some level compared to it is a battle here.

It's a battle that's part of the thing. Right.

And it's like I think about it. I like to think about it as.

Making a date to, like, go wrestling with the ocean in the morning, and I expect it right at Obbie, you always expect that it's going to be somewhat hellacious, even on an easy, low, you know, baby day. But but I kind of like that. I kind of like being challenged. And I partly am OK with it because my my surf buddy, Caroline Paul, she's she is one of the first.

She was one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco. So she's just like this. You know, she's a pilot. She's just tough.

And she has basically had like nine, 10, 11, 12 lives of adventure. She will go out and look san on the beach looking out.

And every time she goes, it doesn't look that bad every time, no matter what it could be, you know, overhead, double overhead.

And she'll just say it doesn't look that bad.

And then so we'll go we'll try it, you know, we'll be repelled back will be, you know, booted out of the white water. But I think just like having that mindset is a good way to be, you know, and I like that about kind of gets easier the more you do it.

But it never quite gets easy enough.

Like the number of times, you know, I couldn't count the number of times I've stood on an outdoor pool deck in ridiculously cold weather, staring at the pool, knowing that the water in the pool is warmer than the water in the air and being unable to jump in like that, like moment where you're just staring at it, going, how am I going to get into this water?

It's breaking the seal, right? Know it's still the membrane. It's like an invisible membrane between you. Right.

And it. And yet it's I think that it takes something it takes some activation energy to break that seal every time, no matter what. Right. But it's always worth it, right.

Yeah, always. You never like. I wish I hadn't done that. Yeah. Are the pools still all closed up north? They are.

They've started to reopen. So my local pool, the Albany Aquatic Center, it's just north of me in Berkeley. That's sort of my home pool.

And I it didn't reopen until very recently, right.

A month, two months. And so I just ended up swimming in the bay for the last eight months or surfing.

Did they didn't they close Aquatic Park also?

They did, yeah. Yeah, they did. Because I think too many people were going there in the beginning and then they closed the Dolphin Club and the and Rowing Club, the facilities.

So even now, you know, I have friends here that seems like pretty low risk. But I think in the beginning it seemed right. Just the.

And we didn't know enough. Right. Right, right. So this the flocking together. But now we know, of course, being outside. Great. You know, in the water, ocean breeze. Great. Like, keep doing it, survive, get through this.

You know, there's a couple pools that are open down here, but they've all migrated to these online platforms where you have to reserve a lake. Yeah.

You know, you got you doing that right? I have. But every time I look at I log in and all the everything's booked.

Yeah, it's going to be there. And I never know, like I just like to go.

I'm like, oh, I got a I got an open hour. I'm going to go do it. Like it's difficult for me to know day to day. Right. So the other week I like booked a lane every single day at different times throughout the day.

And I didn't make it once because there was no just throwing a bunch of things on the wall because it's a long drive actually from my house too.

And it's just, you know, I'm I'm struggling with I did the exact same thing that you just did this morning.

You did. They opened up and I said, I'm just going to this one's open. This one's open. I'll just, you know, snatch and grab them.

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I show up without a reservation just to see if somebody doesn't show up because I've missed so many. I assume people are having the same issue. Any luck?

I'm hit or miss with that right now. Anyway, I'm so glad to talk to you about my very favorite subject, swimming and the human relationship with water.

And this book that you created is just a beautiful work of art. It must be incredibly gratifying to have it be so well received. I mean, making the time. One hundred must read books of twenty twenty. I mean, that's incredible, right?

As a writer, somebody has been writing for a very long time. That's, that's quite the accolade.

Yeah. You know I of course. I've been thinking about this book for many years before I decided to write it and and figure out how to frame such a big topic. Swimming is is a topic. It's not a it's not a book. It's not a story. It's not a narrative. And I had to provide that and I had to figure out how to do that in a way that felt right to me and to see it finally out in the world.

And of course, I could never have imagined that it would come out into the world during a time when most people actually couldn't go swimming. It was just very strange. And and then, of course, that, you know, over the months, I mean, it came out in April, the hardcover, and then it will and it sort of rolled out around the world in the summer. And then the paperback will come out this coming April.

But to have then the gift of those months where people were thinking about their relationship to swimming in a way that they always had, they'd always taken it for granted. They'd never interrogated.

Why it made them feel good.

They would just show up at the pool, you know, do their work out to their friends and go basically did not enter their minds because we didn't have to do things like make lane reservations, you know, two weeks out to get some time with the water and to get these.

I've gotten the most incredible letters from people just I mean, I, I would never have thought that the book would get people to swim in open water.

You know, that was it was I didn't have any specific intentions.

There's no agenda. There's no agenda. Exactly.

It was meant to be this you know, this cultural and scientific exploration of our human relationship with water and with swimming and how it's so curious that we we as a species are not born knowing how to swim. We have to be taught. That's a very interesting thing about us humans and about, you know, higher order primates. Right.

You make the point that we're the only land mammal that doesn't instinctively know how to swim. Yeah, and I'd never really thought about that.

Think about I mean, I once I started to look into this and I you know, in the book, I list examples of, you know, dogs, cats, cats hate water, but they like they can swim. Right. Bats can swim. Bats can do a crazy like butterfly. It's really. Yeah. I look. What after we finish talking, please, you tell me. Yeah.

OK, it's just so we have this, you know, we, we came from the water but we're not suited to it anymore. So we have to sort we've been kind of clawing our way back to as land animals and, and, and part of it is of course survival. But also it is so much more than that. Once you learn how to survive the water, it's can be so many things. And that's sort of how I laid out the book.

You know, the question is presented in the title why we swim and then it's structured in these five thematic ways. We can answer that question. And I wanted to get out all of that because I wanted it to be this expansive and really inviting an invitation to to come in the water. Right.

And look at it. I took it to be very like sort of a swimming version of Chris McDougall's Born to Run That Way.

I've joked with him about it.

Oh, yeah, there's a little bit of Murakami. You know what I think about when I think about running, it's like a swimming version of that. Wow. The born to run thing. But with the born to run thing, though, it would have been great if you found some undiscovered indigenous tribe somewhere of super swimmers to me, too.

You know, too much on the head. Right? Right. But but it has that vibe. It has that that feel to it.

And, you know, I'm somebody who's who's passionate about the water and somebody who's had a, you know, on a personal level, had a relationship to something from as long back as I can remember. And I've thought deeply about it and I've written snippets about it over time.

I wrote my college essay about it feels like to be like underwater, you know, like this is something I've been thinking about for a long time, but never thought about what that might look like in an expanded, you know, comprehensive version of.

And you captured it perfectly like it's the perfect book that fires on all cylinders. And it is this weird.

You like when you telescope up and look at humanity's relationship to water over time, like there's an anthropological kind of aspect to your book.

There's this push pull like we're drawn to the water. You know, coastal real estate is expensive for a reason or something about being by the water that that appeals to us on a very profound level. And we're also terrified of it and repelled by it. So it's that tension.

Yeah. Makes it interesting. I really wanted to get at that. I mean, I wanted it to be a book that was not just for swimmers, but for people who didn't don't call themselves that. Don't think of themselves that way. And why is that there? It's because of this. Tension that you speak of between life and death, you know, emersion, submersion, floatation like this, this kind of I talk about in the book, this porousness between states that I think is like it's the it's what's so enigmatic about the water and so alluring and that we want you know, we see of this gorgeous, sparkling body of water.

We want to get in it. I mean, kids look at babies like they just are just in the bathtub right now. They're just enamored with it because it's it is not. Of us, it's not for us necessarily, you know, we need water to survive, we need it, obviously, but when we see it around us in our environment, there's just something that is talking to us on a very essential level. And I wanted to explore that a bit.

So what do you make of that? Like, what is that?

Well, I was really interested to, you know, in the course of my research, discover that our brain activity changes with the sound of water, seeing water.

You know, we know about how we respond to green spaces, right? We as humans just there are set points in the environment that we respond to.

I think there's a great book by Florence Williams called The Nature Fix, and she talks about how we are evolutionarily suited to respond to certain set points in the environment. And that makes sense. Right? So we, you know, being in the forest, being by the water and so. We have always known this on some level, right, so the. Books and, you know, philosophers and writers and poets since time immemorial have all spoken about, right.

You talk about the Greeks. Yeah. You know you know the one Samira's we're going to get into. Right.

And so once you start looking, you realize it's everywhere. It's everywhere, across time. And so I was very interested to know and wanted to to learn a little bit more about the science that's starting to catch up to explain why that is how our bodies respond, not just, you know, physiological with a physiologically with immersion and with the mammalian dive reflex and all that.

But that just being near water, not even getting in it, looking at it, walking by it, smelling it, listening to it, that, you know, our our our brain activity are alpha waves like, you know, increased.

And that's that's calm, relaxation, creativity.

I mean, that's good stuff. And we know that to be true. Yeah.

It's it's no mistake that images of sunsets at beach. Right.

Are absent.

And, you know, there's something about the the gestalt of the waves crashing and the light bouncing off, you know, the surface and the smell to that that produces this calming effect that can't be replicated in other environments.

And I just know personally, when you swim as somebody who runs and rides bikes and does all different kinds of things, there's something unique about swimming, the experience of that and how you feel in the aftermath of it that is very different and unique and special.

What do you think it is when you think about it?

I think there's something about the submersion and the muting of the sound or the sound of what the waves, you know, what that does in your ear canal and the sort of suspension of gravity and the loss of feet, like you lose your sensation of your limbs in the same way that you have on land, like all of those things combined to create this, you know, very different experience that I think is, you know, healing to the human body.

Yeah, I mean, just mind floatation weightlessness, an unburdening, I think is really what happens physically and mentally.

Emotionally, I think, you know, you can't help but respond to the medium and that way, I think.

And there have been times I mean, there there you know, the swimming in my life has changed over time.

I mean, it has played different roles, but especially over the last year, I think, about getting in water as such relief, like so profound from this fire hose barrage of badness in the world.

You know, I think just to have a momentary pause from that, a relief from that is just, you know, it is so it's such a gift because it's so easy to do.

And yet not everyone does it right things to do it.

And it's kind of the last frontier if you want to get away from the phone and all the noise and the and it changes your perception and your relationship with time.

Mm hmm. Yeah. It's uncomfortable if you haven't done it before because you're like, wait, you know, I need to listen to music or I need to, you know, like, I'm not comfortable with not being overstimulated. You kind of have to, like, let that go.

You are left alone with your own thoughts in a way. Oh, definitely the worst. Right. Why would I do that?

Why would I do that when I now there's like these devices where you can get underwater audio and they're figuring that out and I'm like, I don't want it. Yeah. I don't want any part of that.

I need to protect. This place is the one place where I get away from all of that.

I think about, you know, they've had sort of somewhat crappy technology to do that for time.

It doesn't work so well. Exactly.

And there's a reason why you don't see people using them very often. I mean, by and large, I mean, I would say like in a pool in any given day.

Ninety eight percent of the people are not writing anything like that. Right. I hope it stays that way. I know too.

Well, let's take it back to the beginning. I mean, you know, the obvious question is like, you know, why write this book? Like what? From whence comes your deep appreciation and love of the water?

I mean, I got to go back to my parents right by now. I've talked about the story so many times that maybe you haven't heard it.

I mean, maybe people listening may not have heard it. So maybe this is the book tour. You answer these questions.

This is the book tour that go in different directions. But you got to go. I like this story.

So it's go ahead. It's a really good story. My parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong, and that's our family origin story. And it has you know, we when we were kids growing up and heading to the pool for swimming lessons and my parents would be there and and then over the years, we joined the swim team and we became lifeguards.

And it always people who came to know us laughed when we told them that our parents had met in swimming pool because it was just it was too perfect, you know?

Right. Yeah. There's that black and white photo of your parents. There are quite young. When they met. They were. I think they were.

I asked my mom recently and I think they were 18, 19, something like that. I mean, they're just gorgeous. I mean, they just had the hots for each other.

You know, I just want to read all the names I know because I see them, you know, and I hate to say this, but that I have never seen them so happy.

This beautiful, you know, unfiltered. I mean, the both of their smiles are so big, you know, and and and it is a memory that I never had myself.

But I look at it and I like to think of that as a time when they were really happy, you know. So my dad was a lifeguard and my mom was at the pool. But when we grew up, they were always at the pool with us or at Jones Beach.

And we would go in the summers and spending time together. It's just very much baked into my brother and my experience of our nuclear family because. Until I was, I guess, in junior high or high school, my our parents were together ostensibly, and then they my father started kind of they separated, but we didn't really know it as such.

So he started traveling back to Hong Kong and then to China. He's an artist. He's a right.

You know, he's I actually first won an Emmy. He won an Emmy. Yeah, he won an Emmy.

And, you know, he and I were so close when I was when I was a kid and I was the one who accompanied him on trips.

You know, I grew up in New York, on Long Island mostly.

And I would go with him to client trips into Manhattan and we'd go to the Met and we would just I would spend hours with him in a studio.

He we were very close. And so I associate you were telling me about you wrote your college essay about swimming. I wrote my college essay about swimming and art and writing. And those things were. Now they think about it, they still army, you know, they they I knew from a young age that those three things were so essential to who I was.

Certainly it actually I was visiting my mom this summer back in New York, and she made me clean out the garage. And I found my college essay. And I thought it's very strange to be looking back at this person and understanding what what stayed the same.

Many things stayed the same.

You know, essentially this this relationship I have with the water and also with writing and creativity, that's something that I traced back to my dad.

Yeah.

Barry, he was the permissive free spirit. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, he was fun and he was a kid.

And he's today at 73 years old. He's still a kid. He is he he actually hasn't changed that much.

But I have, you know. Was your mom more of the taskmaster then? Oh, totally. Yeah. She was the strict one. I don't actually remember her smiling.

It's terrible. It's so terrible.

But, you know, after they divorced, which was really, really painful, they didn't they didn't finalize their divorce until I was in college.

And but then I got to know my mom as this as who she was. She was a person who was not in relationship to my dad. She was fun. She had her own ideas. She was she had stories to tell.

And I that's when I got to know her. You know, as a real person, you need both of those. Yeah.

You know, I think you need you need the artistic sensibility, but you need the the regimented person as well.

Oh, yeah. I you know, she was the one who said, you know, my desire for order, my desire to prepare like all of those things come from her, like my sort of.

Risk averse older person self is because of her, and I say those things lovingly and because I understand that those are things that you need to operate and be a responsible human in this world. And I take the fun and the creativity and the light from my dad. But I also know that in the context of our family, that that really ruined our family, know this sort of shirking of responsibility and not owning up to that so profoundly. Both. Parents have shaped me to be who I am, and I hope you came out pretty good.

Oh, thanks. So it worked out, you know, it could have gone to Harvard, right.

Like, so, but and yet you're an artist, so you have you know you know how to focus and, you know, organize your life. But you can also be a free spirit and creative and, you know, follow these whimsical, you know, passions that you have to track down these stories.

Yeah, that's my mom.

I remember my mom said to a good friend of mine, and it was not in this was when I was 22 and I took off for a few months to go on a fellowship to New Zealand.

And I was came back and I had student loans to pay off.

And I said, I really want to work at this Adventure magazine.

You know, they're not paying me right now, but I just I'll just take a waitressing job or something in New York while I'm doing it.

And she said she turned to my friend and she said, Bonnie is such a free spirit and she was not a compliment.

Right. So I was. I was. But I said, but you know what, though?

To her credit, like a couple of weeks later, she said, you know, if you really want to do this. I will support you in this, and I did I did it for six months and then I got a job that paid money, actual money, and and there we go.

That was probably a big step for her. It was actually now that I think about it really was.

I have to ask her about that. Yeah. Yeah.

But you grew up in and around pools all the time, swam competitively, you and your brother. But you didn't end up swimming in college, right. You know, in college.

Yeah. I by the time I got to college and I wasn't good enough to swim in college like not no I but I was done with competitive swimming because college to me represented like something new, like super fun and exciting. And I always knew that I was going to. College was going to be the place where I got to meet new people and new things, and I very much felt that I wanted to do that because I wasn't, you know, I I think I was a very old person when I was like a kid.

You know, I was like, I want to be twenty and eight, something like that.

I just it just wanted to have autonomy, I think. And I rode Krewe. And I you know, it's so quintessential it's almost a cliche to be like rowing, right, sculling in the shadow at an Ivy League college.

Yeah, it's like the Ivy is like, you know, within sight as you're on the wall. Still a water sport, though. It is.

I want and I was talking to a friend about this recently, you know, I love I just thought it was so cool to have a different perspective of water. And when, you know, when you're swimming, it's so slow.

Right. It's a you're on a team, but you're the experience of swimming is very much you in the water.

And when you're in a boat with, you know, seven other people and you have to become one, you have to move in unison.

Almost all of that time.

I would say like 98 percent of the time, you you can feel like the slight tug of someone else who's not quite in your sink. And then the two percent of the time when you are flying together is just so magical. It's like it's as if you are taking flight and you didn't even you're not trying.

And I was thinking about this the other day because I wanted I really loved experiencing water from a different perspective.

And then I only quit because, you know, you're looking at me and I'm not a giant person, you know, and probably between, like a coxon size and a lightweight harness that you're not small enough to be a cop.

I was I was not. I'm only five four. I was like. The the coach said to me, your technique is great, I put you in stroke in this boat, you know, but you have to put on like 20 pads. And I had already packed on like I was eating like a crazy person, you know, and that the freshman dining hall I was working out in the weight room, I was working like a maniac.

And I just was like, I think I have maxed out. I don't know that I can gain any more weight to do it. It was weird. It was said you were like, I'm done. Well.

And then I joined Water Oh Guy again, another water spot. Yeah, but it was fun. I mean, it was it was hard.

I just realized that after a while that I was playing a sport in college and you know this more than anyone. Is it. That's all you're doing. Yeah, it's pretty all encompassing. And I didn't want that.

You wanted to broaden your. Yeah. Aperture your horizons.

Yeah, I get it. What's what's interesting about your relationship to swimming in high school is that it the pool represented like this refuge for you.

Right. Like you had, you know, a complicated relationship with your peers in school. But at the pool, which was a much more diverse you know, it was literally a pool of all different kinds of people.

Right.

It was kind of like a refuge, like a place where you felt at home. And I think that's worth exploring a little bit. And I really liked how you you did this kind of archaeological dig into the history of, you know, the United States and its relationship with swimming and in particular, you know, pool building and access to pools and how that changed over time. So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think it's it's pretty interesting.

I know, like, I grew up in the Northeast and. You know, most high schools don't have. Polls, whereas in other parts of the country they do, and that tracks back to our, you know, sort of checkered relationship with with race and segregation.

Yeah, I, I really did not appreciate meaning. I didn't understand the extent to which. The current, you know, gap, the racial gap in swimming ability between especially blacks and whites in this country, is so traced back to this era of segregation in our country and that it the fact that it persists to the degree that it does.

I mean, I think the rate is that the latest statistics show that black kids are five times they drown at a rate five times that of white children. Right. I mean, that is just.

It's horrible and I you know, and then it's not just swimming, access and education, but it's also then when you break through to join a team, you find a team or swimming, you love it, and then you feel like you're the only one or you're the you're you know, swimming remains a very white sport.

And you don't feel welcome or you don't feel that you belong or that you have positive images and and and stories, I think that that that has a really profound effect on whether you want to keep doing something, you know.

So like I was I recently got to talk to the founders of an organization called Blacket Swim. And Ebony Rosemann was is the founder. And she was talking about how when her daughter started swimming. And then I think the reason that they started the the organization is because when they Googled, like black kids swim, they would they would come up with the top Google hits were like black people can't swim or black kids don't know how to swim.

When I was growing up as a kid, there was this trope like, well, you know, black kids can't swim or they have a higher chance at body density or something like that, like some crazy reason why black people weren't good at swimming race. Ridiculous.

And then that is pervasive and it persists. And that's you know, those are the like, ridiculous things that I heard growing up to. At the same time, I think of my experience, you know, as you pointed to, was really special for me because I grew up. I swam on a team that was in the next town over, and it was a very diverse community. Freeport, New York, is, you know, has a large African-American and Latino demographic.

And it also the team also attracted kids from all across Long Island.

And, you know, even though I was at one of the, you know, the quote unquote, the only is in my high school, a town away, two towns away, that pool was super diverse.

You know, the head guard, you know, the at that pool where I lifeguard at the Freeport Rack was was black, you know, and she I don't know.

I think to see my point is to be able to see representation around you is no small thing.

I really credit that experience with I mean, making me who I am today that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be right back. But first, we're brought to you today by seed, the next evolution of probiotics.

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All right, back to the show. This section in the book where you talk about this era in the 1910s and early 1920s when America was building these massive public pools.

Right.

We've all seen pictures of that extraordinary pool in San Francisco that just looks like a sizable mall.

Yes, I think there was one in Chicago, too. There were a couple of these gigantic, you know, glass ceiling.

You know, like they look like arboretum zombies that were gigantic, that went the way of the dodo.

Right. Like they just disappeared.

Yeah, they were. So this was a shift in public pools from being, you know, during the progressive era.

There were there were pools for like before that was public hygiene, you know, like they were actually bathing facilities.

So like working class and immigrants would go and men would go on alternating days with women.

And so so it was much more a gender split with these pools.

And then once they became what you describe these like pool palaces, basically like pools than public pools were then for recreation. And so then were for families and were then, you know, public authorities. You know, the sentiment was that people of color could not swim in these pools with white people. And so they were they were turned away from a lot of pools.

There were, you know, and then during the civil rights era, the the public, the pool spaces, the watery spaces, the even public beaches that they were sites of protest. And in the book, I talk a.

How there was this incident calls a bloody Sunday, it was like in a public beach in Mississippi and it's where blacks went to be, you know, to use this public beach.

And and there, you know, there were riots and many of these pools that happened, there was violence.

And and if you think about it, we're talking about how water is freedom.

Water is relief. Water is so universal to all of us as humans. And yet this essential. This essential thing was not available to everyone, and I think the right of leisure, the right of recreation was something that was was seen as symbolic of this fight for equal rights and equity.

Yeah.

And so ultimately, these wall palaces closed down. They just shut her right.

And then hence begins this movement towards the backyard pool.

So the public pool kind of, you know, isn't a primary focus anymore because it's complicated for those reasons.

Yeah. After desegregation, you know, you'd think that the fight, as you know, is over, you know, equality one. But actually a lot of whites than, you know of means like fled the public community rules and, you know, built their own backyard pools.

And you'll see this, you know, in California, it's interesting because California, especially Southern California, is such an epicenter for this backyard pool culture. And it's just beautiful. I mean, you look at these photos of like Palm Springs and L.A., and it is such a. It is this very golden light, perfect visual history, and yet where are the black people, you know, where are the people of color in these records?

And and I think that that that is being rewritten and pushed out.

And, you know, that that beautiful bubble is being punctured in a way that is starting to be and in a way that is really important to our understanding of what the images actually meant and exclusion.

Right. It feels it feels like. There's still some way to go, though, because the country is littered with these public works pools that are all over the place, many of which sit drained right and empty, like that pool in Central Park at the north end of the park, that massive pool, like most of the time, there's no water in that pool.

Like there seems to be a lot of establishments like that all over the place that either because they lack funding or for whatever reason that I'm unfamiliar with, they just don't they're not really, you know, they're like in disrepair. Yeah.

It's really expensive to maintain a pool. And what I learned in this pandemic period, I was reporting a story about a reopening of a public pool in my neighborhood.

And I learned that most municipal pools, you know, the public pools that are run by cities operate at a deficit even in normal times. So they're hemorrhaging money and that the season in which they would take in revenue is the summer, you know, camps and all like swimming lessons and swim teams. And for this entire year, they they did not have any of that.

And so now they're even more in the hole. And so now as as many pools have struggled to reopen and some limited fashion. Right. So but think about it. It's one lane per person, right. Spaced out.

They were losing money before, I think about what it means, because the sad fact is a lot of these pools will not reopen, you know, even after the pandemic.

And so that to me is I mean, it's hard to stomach because that means then another generation of kids might not get what we had. And that's just really it's hard.

I think, about, you know, in the course of researching this book, I learned that swimming education is universal. It's part of the public school education and so many other countries. And I think that would be amazing, you know, if that were the case right in this country, it would make such a difference.

But but you need an adequate pool access to do that. And most schools don't have pools or don't have a pool that's proximate enough or is accessible.

It just comes at a really huge funding issue. But I, I just think about these, you know, in Iceland, you know, there's every town has a pool, every town. I know a tiny, tiny town of like 100 people as well.

Well, let's talk about Iceland, because this is a big part of the book. It's super fascinating. I mean, first of all, we should mention, you said at the outset that you broke the book up into these various sections, survival being community competition and flow, which kind of cracked the code for you and helped you figure out a way in, like how do you write a book about swimming or how it's just like this ethereal, amorphous thing.

Right. But kind of planning your flag in these various categories provided you with like some footing to do this.

A big part of the book or the early part of the book is about Iceland and in particular this one fisherman whose name there's no way I'm going to be able to pronounce, but I'd never heard of this guy before.

And it's an unbelievable story I will tell you about. Good looker for. How long did it take you to figure out how to let that roll off your tongue with ease?

It's been some time, many years now. Say it one more time. Good luck for Thorson. But the thing that we have to know is that his nickname is Loihi and everyone calls him that. So I will lawyer Handsworth. Very good. I call him lawyer because that's way easier.

So I open the book with the story because how could I not write?

It's a story that my husband told me one night and he'd heard it from, you know, he works in with fisheries and the environment and oceans. And I think he'd heard it from an Icelandic friend.

And this story is famous in Iceland because in 1984, there was a fishing vessel that capsized off the coast of Iceland. And good luck for Thorsen. Loy was the ship's mate and he was like he was 22. He was super young, but it was the the fishing trawler caught on the sea bottom.

And then and then it overturned and everyone got thrown overboard. And everyone's in the water holding on to the boat's keel before it starts sinking. And, you know, this is bad news. It's 41 degrees water. It's freezing. It's the middle of the night.

And they are you know, they are unable to deploy the life raft. And the sad thing about it is that they were supposed to self deploying life rafts had become a sort of thing fairly recently at that time. And they were supposed to have installed that in the book. But they had. So this boat is thinking and the you know, the few of them are left are holding on to the keel and then they say, you know, we're going to start swimming captain and lawyer.

And so they start swimming. And pretty soon he's the only one left. Hmm. Was there a lighthouse?

Like, how are they us? Yeah.

So but it's six km, at least six kilometers away. Right. So he's it's the lighthouse on this island, which is off the coast of the main island of Iceland.

It's called home and it's part of the best Manyara archipelago I've been practicing. Yeah, you got that now, the Westman Islands.

But he so he saw the lighthouse, the light from the lighthouse, and he started swimming. And he's just wearing a swimming swimming. And he's wearing like a flannel shirt and jeans, you know, in a sweater.

Right.

That part confuses me because I would just take that off.

That's holding. You get better off.

I can't remember what I mean. He certainly lost his boots, but he's swimming and, you know, he's talking to seagulls and he and it's it takes him six hours, six hours, six kilometres, and he gets to shore.

Now, the thing to understand about this island is that it is a volcanic island like all of Iceland.

And I think it was ten years before that there was a volcanic eruption that had resulted in like the island got bigger by like 20 percent. But then there are also these like sheer 100 foot cliffs and like very spiky lava fields. So he gets washed ashore at the base of one of these cliffs. So it gets there and he cannot get out. There is no way for him to climb. So he has to get back in and start swimming.

So he swims around to a place where he can finally get out.

And he's walking across this lava field and he's, you know, his feet are bleeding because it's really sharpey like there's a frozen a sheep system and it's like a tub of water that feeds waters the animals. And he punches through because he's so thirsty, you know, he's been out there for hours and hours and then he trudges into town and, you know, I think day is breaking and there's like a light on the first house and he, like, walks up to the house and there's like bloody footprints behind in the snow.

And it is just insane because then they're like, I can't you know, they rush him to the hospital. They can't. I can't discern his, like, heartbeat, I mean, it's like very faint and his or his like they can't really read his body temperature, but he has no signs of hypothermia.

So, like you and I. Yeah, that's crazy.

Twenty minutes max, what, 41? One degree water would be dead. Everyone else and everybody would die.

And then how long was the trudge into tonight out there?

I really don't I don't even know if he knows how, you know, what was the what was the air temperature.

I can't remember what the air temperature was, but it was significantly colder than that. And he.

You know, they. He's just a little dehydrated. He's fine and he's they keep him in the hospital for observation and it turns, you know, and it's not for some time when they have done some research and studies that he's taken part in.

But he has this the reason he was able to survive, OK, he's a very good swimmer. Everyone swims. He was trained to be such as a sailor. And he has he's like a seal. His fate is two to three times normal human thickness. He's kept his core body temperature.

So a fat dude, he's a big guy.

He's six four.

I don't know how much he weighs, but that, you know, you can see photos of him from that. He's not unusually gigantic, but he's he's a solid guy.

But you think about plenty of guys who are really big who would die very quickly and, you know, water that cold.

It's not it's not about the fat, but certainly the quality of the fat, the crawl or where is where subcutaneous in the right places to protect the organs.

Yeah. It's crazy, right? So he becomes this massive hero and also a science project for a lot of people.

Yeah, and he he he gets so much media attention that it kind of compels him to become this recluse.

That's right. And so you can imagine that when I came across a story, I thought, this is I got to talk to this guy because. It just is so compelling and I know that he doesn't you know, he's told the story before, but has been a really long time since he talked to journalists.

But of course, the first thing you find when you Google him is that this happened to him and then also that he doesn't talk to journalists.

What what soured him on the whole thing?

He told me it just he felt that his story was being misrepresented.

And, you know, of course, he started to feel harassed. Right.

So like his friends died. Yeah. It's horrible to celebrated for something that's quite tragic.

Yeah. And I think at a certain point you just want to live your life. You just want everyone to leave you alone. And it kept kind of coming up and coming up. And to be honest, though, I mean, I want to I want to point out that he was very vocal in the first years after the accident because the conversation they had on the boat's keel was like and he told me this later on was if someone if someone makes it, they have to tell.

And he said, you know. Nine times out of 10, actually, nine point nine times out of ten, nobody survives this, and so they don't know what happened. And he said I was the person who could tell. And so he was advocating he spent quite some time advocating for for the mandatory life. Yeah, yeah.

Like self employed life rafts. And, you know, they have to swim every year in his honor for, like, you know, the last thirty five, six, seven odd years called Good Looks and Good Luck or Swim and it's everywhere.

It started out as something that the navigation college did, you know, all the sailors did with their clothes on too.

But in a pool. Right. In a pool. Absolutely. Yeah. Because everyone would die.

So that wasn't quite right that I know they breed them strong and very hardy, but not that crazy.

But it's interesting because he became the symbol of Icelandic resilience. Right. They embraced. Him and that story and the, you know, honoring him with the tradition of the swim, because to Icelanders as a people like this is this is what he's like, the epic symbol of their survival, resilience, you know.

And so he accepted that mantle. But then after a while, just, you know, he's he's a very well.

So I really it was hard for me to figure out then how can I approach him in a way.

That's right.

How are you going to engender trust from this guy who's been burned by the media and wants to be left alone? Right there was you being the dutiful journalist. I did. Didn't play that. You play the long game. I play the long game.

Well, there was a movie, I guess not too long after I found out about a story.

There was a movie by this like Blockbuster.

Icelandic director Kormákur, I think is his last name, but he like did some Everest movies, I think with like Denzel Washington or a really Mark Wahlberg and Denzel.

He's directed these like big blockbuster movies. And he but being Icelandic, he was obsessed with the story of calligrapher Thorson. And and when I guess he was a teenager when this happened and he said, you know, this to me is the story. This is like the adventure story. It's like. What does it mean to be? A person a speck in the sea and what drives someone right? And so he they approached the producers, approached a lawyer about the film, and he was just, you know, I think at this point he was he had kind of things had quieted down.

He was starting to live a life that was more to his speech. Now he has grandkids. He has kids. He has you know what he does here? He works. You know, he still works in a fishing for a fishing company and. He was just like, make the movie when I'm dead, like, I don't want any part of this, but they made the movie, they made it anyway, made it anyway.

Right. And so he felt betrayed.

He felt betrayed.

And his, you know, to you know, he lives in a very small town on a very small island, in a very small country. You know, everyone knows the town, you know, protects him. But people so I was just like, OK, how do I. How do I follow my, you know, sort of storytelling instincts and also I respect this person as a human, I respect his desire for privacy. What if I write him a letter?

So I wrote him a letter. I wrote him a letter, and then I ran it through Google Translate into Icelandic. And then I realized.

But but you can't pitch, right? So what's the gist? You know, I appreciate you like what is the letter? I think I said.

I said I I think I told him that I was I was working on a book about swimming and I knew about his story and that I would love to just talk to him about what swimming means.

I wanted to hear from him some way. Right. So he he wrote back almost immediately, but he said no.

Right.

And then I thought, oh, that's that's so disappointing. But then we started to have this, like, pen pal relationship.

And we just and I remember my husband had said, like, you could just write to him and see what happens, you know, just so we started because there's something about his opening message to me that seemed to leave the door open a little bit.

Mm hmm. He just said something about, you know, I have not had great experiences in the past with journalists, has anything to do with your project.

But he said something in that email. And I'm trying to remember what it was like.

If you the message being sort of if you can prove to me that you're trustworthy, not in so many words, but yeah, I got the sense and.

So I just kept writing and I would send him, you know, a little. Bits of trivia or when I was in Japan, you know, doing some research, I would send him a photo from there. And because I think he said that he he said something about swimming, saving lives. And and that was. And he used emoji. I thought it would be use emoji if he wasn't leaving the door open a little bit. I don't know.

It was interesting. Yeah, so I just persisted and then I didn't meet him in person until a year later. And I still like to the day that we actually met in person, I did not know if he was actually going to see me. Right. But you go out to Iceland, I go to Iceland, you end up getting an audience with him and the guy ends up being like your buddy.

He is this wonderful, funny. He loves jokes, storytelling. Like he's just a very. Endearing and he actually, you know, we got to the point where he he trusted me with a story and then he very quickly, you know, he had an interest in my family. And we we went, oh, my God. Now, it seems so long ago, the summer of last year, 2019, we went to the Faroe Islands and we went to Iceland to see him.

And, you know, he he and his wife being very experienced grandparents, like they just had all these snacks on the table for my kids.

You know, they just and my kids adored them because they were just like, can we go visit lawyer movie again?

Again and again and again.

And to I mean, yesterday my son told me, he said, can we go back there now? And, you know, on Christmas, you know, he sends a he sends me a text with a photo because he looks like Hemingway cross with Santa Claus. Now, that's kind of exactly how I would envision him.

He sent a photo of himself in a Santa suit and said, I think this guy says he knows Felix and Teddy.

I mean, it was hilarious.

Like, he's he's a great guy. That's cool.

But what did he tell me? I mean, he he told me his story. But also what I realized is that so much of. What his story means is what other people say about him, what he means to them. Mm hmm.

So I tried to do this kind of Twyning effect of like telling both stories at the same time. Because it is about the stories we tell ourselves. Yeah, and on some level, it's his story, but it's the national story, right? Right. And he's got to release that and allow people to have their own experience with who he is and what what he endured.

Yeah, I think that's right. But this kind of opens the book up to this, you know, kind of dialogue about not just human survival in the elements and in water, but also the unique properties of cold water and human exposure to cold water.

You talk about brown fat, like converting the white fat to the brown fat and all the new studies that are going on right now about how cold water exposure extends longevity and, you know, is healing to the body.

Right.

One of the studies that I looked at. Showed. OK, so you're, you know, warm, warm water versus cold water, right? So I think it was like an hour immersion in 90 degree water is like very comfortable, very relaxing, you know, reduction in pain.

You're just like you're very it's a positive effect on your body and a same amount of time in like fifty six degree water or something like dopamine levels through the roof, like metabolism revved up, like feelings of euphoria.

You know, I mean and it is, you know, and just like very alive wellness kind of, you know, things that are measurable, but also things that you experience that are a very acute, you know, reduction in inflammation, of course. And I just think it's so interesting, you know, the way it speeds up our metabolism, it's actually like on its face called exposure is not that great for you.

Right. Like cardiovascular. It's like terrible.

It's just like jacks up your blood pressure very quickly at first.

And then over time, you actually it lowers your blood pressure because it's just your your heart and your blood vessels are then able to handle it over time within a single session or with repeated exposure.

With repeated exposure. Yeah. So, you know, we talk about where the sort of longevity scientists I talked to Hiro Tanaka, he was talking about how he went to Japan, back to Japan, where he's from, and he studied the AMA. Right.

So those freediving grandma was really like, you know, they're they're all pearl divers, you know, diving for shellfish.

And they a lifetime of cold water exposure right there. Cardiovascular health is amazing. Their hearing is terrible.

I like the cold water really destroys your hearing.

But they they're you know, he wanted to know about the you know, they're like, how were their arteries?

You know, were they flexible or had the you know, was it like was their experience over time, had that made them something a little bit more akin to a marine mammal, you know, just like how they're able to, you know, cope with with the water? And he found that they were like, they're just there are cardiovascular health was really great.

And, you know, I think they lived to be quite old, you know, and the traditions, I think that there's been renewed interest.

And just, again, like these people who hew to a thousand year old traditions and are able to do things that we wouldn't imagine doing, you know, in our modern day. And they're not dying of heart disease, right.

Yeah.

And that, you know, here at Tenoch also did research with arthritis, you know, and cold water and swimming.

And what I was really interested in was that the swimming practice. Lessen the effects of arthritis, you know, from a pain perspective, from an inflammation standpoint, from mobility, increased mobility, and those effects lasted for much more, much more time beyond the actual time in the water. So it's just like the benefits are are are enduring. And I found that really compelling. Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah.

So your way into this cold water world quickly becomes our mutual friend, Kim Chambers.

Right. Who who's a looming figure throughout the book, like, you know, other than yourself, like almost the primary protagonist throughout this.

I mean, how could she not be. I know. Well, she's larger than life.

I mean, she's just I just I love her so much. And I just think the world of her, she's amazing. But she brings you down to the the Dolphin Club and introduces you to the whole aquatic park, the whole ecosystem.

That's exactly what it is. It's an ecosystem and it's a very explain what that is.

I used to live around the corner from there. So I never I mean, I've swum in Aquatic Park anytime someone swim from Alcatraz and, you know, all of that.

But I was never like a member of the Dolphin Club. I only know a few of those people. I know Vito and.

Yeah, yeah. People. But it's a I mean, so the Dolphin Club and the South and Rowing Club, they've been around since the late eighteen hundreds.

They, they share an actual building, you know, but their clubhouse rivals.

Yeah, they're rivals but they're friendly rivals and they love to trash talk and, and they are very much the members are like diehard bay swimmers, cold water swimmers, most of them. You know, take pride in the fact that they don't use wetsuits, do it year round and have this I mean, there is a celebration of like the heartiness, the vigor, the, you know, how long to stay in and. Right. You know, and cool to go and swim in Aquatic Park in a wetsuit.

Well, you can't you know, it's the first time I did it, I was about you know, I was afraid I was going to get ridiculed.

But, you know, people were very nice to me. But they just said, you can't bring your Watts's into the into the clubhouse.

Yeah. They said we outside like, OK. Huh. It's almost like.

You know, when the wet wet suit, like there's like a there's a line, it's like a no no passage through the state, no social space.

But so it's this and it's all ages, like all body types.

It is amazing to me that that there's this community there.

It still amazes me and I've seen it and it's just beautiful. And so, Kim, you know, Kim's the first woman to swim from the islands to San Francisco. She is the sixth person to the Ocean seven.

And she did all of this after almost I mean, I think all of your listeners will probably be familiar with her story, but that she almost lost her leg to amputation after this accident where she fell down the stairs and she it took her two years to relearn how to walk.

She was embarrassed about her scars. And part of the rehab was like, you know, maybe swim, you know, and she, by her own description, was a horrible swimmer when she started, had horrible technique.

And then one day she's invited by a couple of guys at the pool to to swim the Dolphin Club Aquatic Park.

And she said, this is a I love the way she describes this. She she says not many people have a visual record of their rebirth. And she said that they happen to, like, video her that day when she got in the water and started swimming.

And she said, like, you know, here's this like broken skinny, like 120 pound woman who is just like has been through hell and and is like a bigger shit eating grin on her face.

And she's in this water and she feels so alive and she feels so she feels reborn like it literally was her. It started this completely new life for her, you know, as a marathon swimmer, as a freakishly accomplished marathon runner. And I think a large part of that, of course, is that she is a very resilient person. Yeah.

She also talks about how she has a very, very high pain threshold which has gotten to her into a lot of trouble, you know. Well, I mean, the whole thing with her leg when she fell down the stairs that day, she kind of ignored it.

She ignored it, and she drove to work. And then her leg was like twice the size. Right. And then she passed out and then she got to the hospital and it was like, you, you know, all that swelling was killing all the nerves in her leg. And they almost had to. You know, amputate her leg and so she laughs at it and again, of course, then that pain tolerance, of course, allows her also to do extraordinary things.

Yeah, and she also had a bout with a couple of bouts with Greenberry. Right. That's more recent.

More recent. Yeah. How is she doing now? She seems to be doing pretty well. We talked recently, a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, she's swimming, you know, during during the pandemic.

She is she's back in the bay swimming and she's trying to knock out the seven summits also. Right. Is that did I get tabled for that was her big goal, I think, when that really was I mean, she was she was well on her way when Gambari happened to her.

And I don't know if that's something that's still on the table.

Right. But she wanted to be the first person to do both of those things. Yeah, nobody's ever done that, have they? Don't get any ideas.

People that can say I'm not doing it.

But what's, you know, even additionally compelling about her is not only her her, you know, love for cold water, like she took to it immediately her freakish, you know, endurance capacity, but also this interesting relationship with fear because she swam from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco Bay and she did it right to you can't see anything like I just it sounds like my worst nightmare.

It is pretty much everybody.

And she's like, oh, she thought it was fun, you know, like it's you know, so that's an a thing on top of all of this that makes her separates or I think.

Right. The fear. I mean, she'll be the first person to talk about. How she was afraid so many times about, you know, like people seeing her scars, you know, that's one thing. I mean, just that she had changed so much from that person who fell down the stairs that day. And then over the course of becoming this swimmer and then, you know, breaking these world records and then coming to this point where she wanted to make these swims bigger than herself.

Right. So then turning her attention from her own struggles outward to say, OK, if I have a voice, what can I use this for?

And she did that Colibri swim the Red Sea thing.

No, I want to call that one, too. But the one across the border. Oh, right. In Mexico City.

You want to and that you know, she did that with Mexican swimmer Antonio Vargas. And they were like the ambassadors, you know, across the and it was really to call attention to all the deaths of the border.

You know, it was she she kept saying that it wasn't.

She didn't want it to be political, she wanted to be about life and caring about life, and she said when they swam across and got out the beach in Tijuana, all these school kids were on the cliff wearing the Colibri t shirts.

Right. And cheering.

And she's like, it was this. It was like wanting to use the swimsuit as a way to bring people together. And I and I really I, I, I so admire her for for all of the, you know, this evolution that she's gone through in her life.

I mean, she always talks about how it's hard for me to imagine this, but she said she was a really shallow person like before all of this.

Really? Yeah. You can't imagine it, right? She's like this glowing light.

Yeah. Yeah. But something got activated in her, something that activated, you know, and in the van diagram of these various buckets or categories that you've divided the book up into, you know, she overlaps, you know, survival with community.

Yeah. For sure. Yes, she is that bridge because, you know, not just the healing part, but the you know, she survived so many things in her life because of swimming. And then what? And swimming was the thing that kind of brought her back from both her leg injury and then from Canberra and was a way for her to.

Rehab her life, she really did do that, but it was through this amazing community at the Dolphin Club and I think about I remember being in the locker room there, the locker room, and that's something that I super miss in this time, like the locker room at the pool, the post swim, just like the chatting and the secrets and the and you're in everybody's, you know, intimate space.

But I don't know what it's like in the men's locker room. Actually, what I want to ask you about this, because it's not I mean, at least from my perspective, it's like this.

I think Kim has described the Dolphin Club song as like a henhouse, like everyone's just sharing like, you know, stories of like illness or boyfriend troubles or things that they're struggling with. I don't know what it's like on the other side. Well, it's changed with different phases of life.

Yeah. Know, but I think the the unifying principle is that when you complete a swimming workout, you're kind of it's like this pipe cleaner for your mind and your soul. Right. Like you emerge from that experience, like feeling very grounded and and also open. Right. So that when you go to that, like, you know, like, listen, when I swim in college, you everybody goes into the hot showers and is in there forever.

Right. Just quick take a quick shower, get dressed. You stay in that hot shower as long as possible. And there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of conversation that goes on there. And even in Masters swimming, it's the same for sure.

I mean, I don't know what the women's locker room is like. Like, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, bonding. And I think, yeah, it's different with men because men, you know, are it's harder to get men to, you know, have kind of intimate conversations with their friends and their peers.

But there's something about that locker room experience that's inclusive to that in the wake of just enduring, like a difficult workout together, you know, maybe it's the same in track and field or any other sport, I don't know. But, yeah, it's certainly, you know, a tight knit bond that you have with those people that, you know, you do this hard thing together.

And even though it's individual, you are doing it as a collective.

Right. You're doing it. You're doing it apart together.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes it interesting.

Well, let's talk about the the wellbeing component of this, because I think there's a lot of people listening who either are swimmers or people who are perhaps intrigued by the idea of maybe getting into cold water for the first time or, you know, trying to learn how to swim when they didn't learn as a kid, there's so much wellbeing to be mined from the sport or just this activity.

I mean, I also want to you know, we talked a bit about the the physical and physiological benefits. Right. Of immersion.

But I also want to talk, you know, a big part of the wellbeing is the flow, the flow state.

It's it's where your mind goes.

When you're doing it, and I think, again, what's so? Interesting about swimming and makes it unusual and unique in the sort of sports world is that you are you're alone, you're in your head a lot, your senses are muted.

You're not really talking to someone else.

I mean, even if you're doing a workout together, even if you're doing the long swim together with someone you know in the bay or in the ocean or whatever, you're.

You're not chatting the way you would if you were going for a long run. And so your your awareness, I mean, I think it depends on. OK, so I want to talk about two things like pull something a super different from open water. Right.

So in a pool, what's so great about that is that it's this very known, circumscribed the distances known. Your body knows where to do the turns. And, you know, you you can your mind is freed in a way that is different from open water because open water, you have a sort of acute nowness. Yeah.

That I a little bit of hyper vigilance. Yes. And open water. Yeah.

And even if you're someone like Lynne Cox or Kim Chambers and you're swimming for like a shit ton of time, like just so long, you are still attuned to what's going on in your environment in a way that's like, again, you're attentive to dangers, potential dangers, although your crew is probably doing that.

But when you're out there, I mean, you're I find that when I'm swimming in the bay, I'm constantly scanning. You know, it's this you can't really stop yourself from doing that.

Even if you know this place, there's still some alert, you know? And I think that then then the acuteness and the present ness of being in the water is like, again, like taking you out of your head and all the shit that's going on outside of that, like, I think to be to be forced to pay attention to that.

Right. You're just compelled to be in the moment and present. Yeah. And you have for that hour or 45 minutes or whatever you have forgotten about, just everything. All of the things that are holding you down are occupying, preoccupying you.

And, you know, right now there's plenty of that. Yeah, but. I mean, actually, I just really like in this conversation with you, the way a great conversation can take you out. I haven't thought about it for a while, so thank you for that.

You know, like, I give you a 1:00 a.m. I really appreciate it. But just just. But I'm distracted here. Right.

But to be, you know, so that, you know, being in open water is a I don't want to say distraction because distraction sounds.

Negative like distraction sounds like it's not quite the right word because it seems like it's something that you shouldn't be focusing your attention, but it compels your focus in a way that I think is super useful. And again, it's a relief. It's it's it's a it's a breath away from the rest of everything, your normal state of being, your normal land self and then in a pool. It's I find it no less.

I know a lot of people don't love swimming in pools, but I really love pools.

I do too. And when people say it's boring, I don't find it boring at all. There's something about that constriction like how can you stare at the black line the whole time? But because you know exactly how long the pool is and you know that your environment is static, essentially that gives you the opportunity and safe. Right. That you don't have to think about it. Right. And it allows you to to like live in this state of presence.

But also kind of you talk about this in the book as well, like this liminal state, right. Where you're not you're not you're not on land. You're not underwater. You're kind of in between. And there's something about that. That place puts your mind in a in a in a place to problem solve or, you know, to be in this active meditation state. And that's very related to the breath, of course.

And you talk about that in the book as well, like the regulated, you know, inhaling and exhaling that comes with that that, you know, has some impact on your, you know, sympathetic nervous system in a certain particular way.

You're allowed to wander. I mean, you're allowed to make connections and things are floating around.

And you they're not tethered in the same way. I think that, again, I come back to the quality of the medium. It's like there are. Things don't have to be connected in the same way, at least for me. I have I have interrogated myself many times over the writing in this book when I'm swimming like, what the hell am I thinking about?

How am I thinking about these things? And, you know, I wrote a great amount of the book in my head when I was writing.

I'm sure. Yeah, because I'm sure you get stock, you go swim and then buy, you know, not focusing on it.

You are allowed you are able to free, associate and solve that problem so that when you are you're in the locker room afterwards, you're like, I got it.

I think that's the I love that term. The the soft fascination. There's something that's holding our attention, but not to.

Closely so that you're able to. Do that free association that you're talking about. Mm hmm. Which is so great. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's different from running.

Like running is analogous, I suppose, but the experience isn't quite the same.

I mean, summary's definitely not for me.

I don't I mean, I love running to. But the feeling that I have afterwards is different.

Yes, different. Yeah. Certainly something makes me more tired and definitely more hungry. So hungry. I don't know. Why do you get so hungry and also talk to me about this. When I after a swim workout, I have to pee like four times. I can't stop. Yeah, it is going on. That doesn't have to me running.

It's weird, right? Yeah.

It's got to be there's some weird thing about, like the hydrostatic pressure or something on your body that somehow then you're like, oh, the water gets right.

I literally have to go to the bathroom like 10 times over two hours.

If there's someone listening who knows why this happened, please email us. I think I tweeted that question really time and I got a bunch of answers. Well, it was a long time ago, but there is some biological reason. I think part of it has to do with being horizontal. Part of it has to do with the temperature. Water temperature. Yeah.

You know, even even when you're swimming in a 75 degree pool, it's still so much colder than your body. Your body is expending a large percentage of its resources just to keep you warm. Yeah. On top of, you know, the exercise that you're doing.

Yeah, I think that the tiredness and the hunger and also it's like a delayed thing.

Right. So you're not really thinking about I mean, I don't really get hungry when I'm swimming usually.

But then, like, you know, sometimes I'll be in the shower and I'll just be like, oh yeah, give me a I.

I'm so hungry, you know, but I get freaked out open water or something. Do you.

Well, I don't I don't mind it in tropical locations where I can see everything. But in the Pacific it's so murky and I don't like not being able to see the bottom.

And then your mind starts to wander in a bad way. You know, you're you're part of this food chain.

You're unbelievably vulnerable. And then it's difficult for me to, like, relax and enjoy it.

Well, part of it is definitely the temperature. Do you have particular moments that you recall as being super terrifying in open water?

I mean, I will say that when I'm with other people, it's fine. But sometimes I want to just go by myself. But I'm reluctant to do that. I just don't feel like that's a responsible thing to do.

So I've done it. But then I'm nervous because I'm alone and no one quite knows where I am.

Right. Yeah.

One of the things about open water swimming in the time of covid was I kept telling myself that you have to be more conservative than you might be otherwise because you don't want anyone to have to save you.

And I got freaked out when I did the Alcatraz swim a very long time ago. My buddies and I did it without a wetsuit because we were, you know, twenty five or whatever.

And it's like your purse if you wear a wetsuit. So we we did it without wetsuits and I just remember. Being halfway, I mean, it's not that far. What is it, like a kilometer and a half or something like that? It's like a what is it, a mile and a half maybe? Yeah. Being in the middle, like perhaps like smack in the middle. And I just stop for a moment and looked around and I was like, I'm in a shipping channel.

Like, you freak me out because these massive boats come and they're on you. And so it wasn't the marine life.

It was like the fact that, like, there's gigantic cargo ships that pass through there.

But my hands and my feet got so numb they just felt like nubs.

You're like doing the swimming. I didn't do that again without a wetsuit. I had a similar experience when I was doing Malcorra swim, and then I hit a patch of seaweed.

And, you know, when you hit something, when you're swimming, you you can't stop yourself from doing that jerk. Right.

And it was like my heart was like in my mouth. And then I just was like, oh, seaweed to do it. Because you just you can't you're right. You can't see anything. Yeah. And it's freaky, touchiest.

You know, I'm not I'm not really afraid of sharks.

Like, if I'm in Hawaii and I can see everything, even if I saw a predatory fish, like, I don't know that it would scare me that much.

I've been recently I've been working for the last couple of months on a story about fear and that involves the shark involved sharks and someone who spends a lot of time with them. And I was thinking to myself that I.

Have never talks, haven't been a thing for me either. It's not something that has occupied my mind, but I also have been really intrigued by how it occupies the imagination of so many people who would never encounter sharks.

But but it lives in their imagination and, of course, jaws, but also that it it's like a convenient receptacle for your fear. Right. So it personifies whatever fear that you have. Yeah, and actually. It just is a way for you to. Deal with it like it's all of these other things, and when we were just talking earlier about the, you know, being in the dark, deep ocean and the sharks like that being the most profound fear or the scariest place, like a primal thing.

And it is sort of this. Do you know this guy, Michael Muller, this photographer who's done all these?

Photo essays on great whites and he swims outside of the cage and it's incredible, he is on the podcast and now he's creating this virtual reality oh really?

Series where you put on the goggles and basically you're swimming with great whites outside of a cage.

Have you tried it? He let me test it in the middle of the podcast.

We took a break and I put him on and checked it out. And it's wild, right? But they're using this now in kind of a. Oh, like a kind of fear conditioning. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. To work with people who have PTSD and, you know, other kinds of fears to help help them, like, process all of that in a healthy way.

Yeah, I think that that fear exposure or exposure therapy is really interesting. And I and I think it's fascinating how VR can help with that. And I'm really curious about how the technology, you know, because that so much of the earlier iterations of it have made people so nauseous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think they're still working that out a little bit, like, you know, I think I would have been develop a fear of nausea. But but it's I think I don't know how you could possibly solve for that problem, though, because your body, your inner ear is just doing whatever.

I don't think that you. How do you correct that?

You know, how do you, I don't know, solve the disconnect. I mean, yeah. I don't know I don't know the answer that you can talk to Michael.

Yeah. I'll hook you up. You should interview him when you look at him or people like Lynne Cox or Lewis Pugh or Martin Strel, like these epic, you know, super long distance swimmers. Lewis like swam in the Arctic Circle. Right. And didn't Martin swim the Amazon swim?

You did like a ridiculous amount of butterfly, too, didn't they? Did you do.

Yeah, which I think is hilarious. I'm like, I don't. How is that? He's like he swam the whole Amazon River butterfly. I'm like, that's not humanly possible.

I don't know what it's like for a guy. Like, it can't be the butterfly form.

Like, I would like to see that it's still crazy.

Impressive. I can't imagine. I like what is it that these people share? Definitely a high pain threshold.

I think there's stuff I what I what I have gleaned from talking to some of these incredible endurance swimmers is that they they are different. They're definitely different from us or maybe not from you, your your endurance athlete. I don't like cold, though.

I go ahead. I think cold is a is a is a divisive thing. Yeah. Amongst I mean I like it after I've done it and I put myself in that situation and for that reason.

But I'm not like Kim who I can't wait to get into the water. Right.

She just jumps right in. They're very there's like a certain single mindedness, I think, and certainly an ability to, I think, disassociate from the right bodies in a lot of ways because their bodies are enduring so much, not just with the cold, but with the length of time and the distance that they're swimming.

But they seem like they have all kinds of different reasons for.

That they say that, well, Lewis, it's it's very much about environmental preservation, like he has a big y, you know, a big protest behind why he does what he does.

But he also talked about how before he started doing that, I think he was a lawyer. Wasn't he a lawyer? I think so. And then just started.

Yeah, I think that he he so wanted to swim, he kind of developed the reasons, reasons to swim over the course of time, but he was a very driven person.

So, like, I think that.

These athletes are do start out as very motivated people, whatever it is that Kim Kim was super motivated, like doing her, you know, and her, you know, Silicon Valley job or Adobe?

I think so. I think that they have just turned their focus and vision to something that they can really go all in on in a practice that rewards that. Right. Yeah, and it is very extreme, like, I don't I I am. I think I'm having trouble talking about it because I don't understand it myself, you know, even in the competition part of the book and actually this is interesting, I asked Lynne Cox and I asked Lewis Pugh about competition.

Right. Because and Lynne really chafed against me asking her that question because she said, I'm not competitive, I'm not swimming against anyone else. And then it kind of actually can still be internally compared.

Exactly. And that actually was she kept she chafed against it because she didn't see it as she she didn't see it as being externally motivated. But what anyone else was doing, I think that was the thing that she that rubbed her the wrong way to to think about.

But she you know, she she is the she is concerned with it like it was about being the first and, you know, coldness in the longest.

Right. But it was against herself for sure. I think that because once she started to talk about it, it became this it was clear that she is a competitive person, even though she didn't necessarily like to think of it.

Well, with Kim, it all seems so easy because she was laughing and smiling like nothing but the thing.

Yeah. Oh, she is like she's shakin her.

Did you talk to Ross agilely? I didn't talk to us. Edgerly, Ross. Edgerly. I remember. I remember when he did.

What was the last.

It was a year and a half ago I think when he did the Great British when it was the book was done.

But I remember reading about that and thinking he would have been an interesting guy. Yeah. And his own book. He's great.

Yeah. Yeah. He's I mean, he I mean, he's also a force of positive energy. Like he just he really he's he's insanely fit and trained like a mad man, but he's always laughing like it is play.

I mean this is another theme of the book, like the relationship between swimming and play.

And Kym has that. Ros definitely has that like he's a beast, but he's literally constantly cracking jokes and just, you know, lighting up whatever room that he walks into.

He's very charismatic in that regard.

And what's interesting about him is he looks like a bodybuilder.

Yeah, he's he has unbelievable endurance.

He wrote this book about this combination of endurance and strength and how that works because you would think like, oh, you've got to be really lean to be able to do something so long. But he swam all the way around Great Britain. It was bananas. And he he documented the whole thing along the way, like he had the rashes on his neck. I remember reading about we're just like you just got like open, sort of like gaping.

But you like to each one, you know, when he's doing this.

And he came out into the podcast, like right after work, like he literally had just could you see it was Scar's.

Yeah. You show if he was putting, you know, that heavy, heavy duct tape on it and all kinds of stuff.

But he's somebody who, you know, grew up as a water polo player, was kind of a competitive swimmer, but not at an elite level or anything like that, and just comes up with these events to do so.

He's internally competitive. He's competitive with himself and he's battling the elements. But it's not about there's never anyone else that he's competing against other than himself. Right.

And the elements here, I think that you have to do all these things. You have to have some motivation, that is. Just very consuming, you know, whether it's externally motivated or internally, it's just it is.

And I think that because you had conversations with all kinds of people who are pushed to do extraordinary things, I'm sure that the sort of outset, you know what you know, whether it's something that they were always striving for approval from someone or that they always just wanted to know that they were capable of something more than what everyone told them to could do or whether it's for some you know, I want to raise awareness about something, but it is there is how do we talk about it is important, I suppose, that it's not necessarily it doesn't necessarily matter what what the specific thing is, but there's got to be some force that is compelling us to do it right.

I love the backtracking into the history of swimming and in particular competitive swimming, tracing it back to its roots all the way to Ben Franklin, inventing the hand paddle, which was like, that's blew my mind. I can't stop thinking about that.

I mean, he is the true renaissance man. Yeah, of course. You see invented any battles. You know, it's unbelievable. And that cave in the Sahara where. Oh, yeah. It was basically a tomb, right. Where there were drawings of people swimming in a pond when at one time very long ago, the Sahara was a lush green.

The green green area wasn't the desert, it was dotted with paleo lakes.

You know, I love that story. I love that the you know, the first human record of swimming is in the middle of the desert. Right. In Africa, because, of course, it is.

But that you look at these images and it really looks like people are just stroking up the walls. Hmm.

And I also love that the the Hungarian explorer who discovered that cave at the time was almost he wrote a book about it and he speculated that. There were actual lakes, bodies of water around the cave at the time that the drawings were made and of course, the theory of climate change then was just outrageous and so radical. And he was like his ad, his editor reportedly was so upset about that that he put a footnote that said, I don't subscribe to this, like, harebrained idea of that at one time there was water and.

Right. But of course, of course, he was right. Yeah.

But at that time, it was pretty radical. And now, of course, there's so much evidence about about the green Sahara and that there are, you know, hippo bones, tortoise shells like fish, you know, middens of clamshells like it's just amazing to think about. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah. And to think that. Humans relationship with water dates back to the inception of mankind, yeah, and certainly before any you know, this is this is probably dates back up to 10000 years ago, but we likely knew how to swim way before that.

It's just that there's no there's no trace of evidence.

Yeah. Let's talk about the samurais and the martial art of swimming.

This is something else I had no idea about, which is super cool.

So there is of course, there is a swimming martial art in Japan. So Niono is the term for it. In Japanese, it's the Japanese classical swimming art. So much like judo or kando. There is there's the practice. And it originated with the samurai during the feudal period of Japan. And think about all these parts of the land that has to be protected by these different semi clans. And because of Japan being archipelago and there's different you know, there could be an ocean or could be on the edge of a lake or a river.

The clans each develop their own schools of swimming. So they had different techniques for how to protect their, you know, the land that they were protecting.

And there are these one of my favorite tidbits is that the sort of eggbeater technique of synchronized swimming has its has been described in samurai scrolls like hundreds of years old.

And if you think about some of the things that they taught in these schools of swimming, they called you. I'm not pronouncing it right.

Are y you that you know, you wouldn't learn how to cut through breaking waves with your arms, like in a parallel fashion, or that you would learn to approach in a very calm, like, you know, submerged by most of your body, submerged, and you would learn to leap up out of the water into a boat. There's a there's a move called the flying mullet. You can also Google this CNN Mollet. Yeah, I know you do.

But this is from a warrior culture where you can use water to your advantage. Exactly.

So it is much in the same way that now martial arts, you know, they are practice, right? They are a physical but also a psychological practice, a philosophical practice, a whole body practice and mind.

And I love I love to learning about Ninio because it it was a different way to think about swimming outside of this Western idea of competition and racing. And it is fascinating because, you know, anyone who is still practiced in Japan today and there and I went to Japan to research this.

And, you know, in the Tokyo Olympics, they were supposed to have an exhibition of, oh, wow.

Yeah, I spoke with the a lot of these masters of different schools of Ninio who were preparing this exhibition to kind of reintroduce to the world and perhaps introduce for the first time what the sort of foundation of Japanese.

Swimming, not the national team's success that we know it today, so much of it breaststroke, right? They've been Japanese swimmers have been really dominant breaststroke for a long time. And there there's an interesting historical link to the techniques of neon eho.

I mean, I remember talking to one of these masters of the art and and he was trying to explain and we were we were observing a class in Yokohama of of these swimmers taking the class.

And he said, you know, he was we were observing the glide and the certain formations that they would be swimming in.

And he said, you know you know, Kitajima, you know, Kitajima.

What, just like the world record holder at a restaurant, just this dominant breaststroker known for like this incredible glide. And he said that's like, wow, it's like that's the skill that we teach.

And that has been ingrained into, like, coaching.

Mm. Yeah. It's it's fascinating to track that, you know, the antecedent of Japanese swimming success back to that practice. And I didn't know that the Japanese were so dominant at the end of the 1920s, like the 1934 Olympics, they won like 12 medals or something like that.

I had no idea that they, like, blasted off. Yeah, yeah. That was crazy.

And it's all rooted in this practice, which my sense is it's not quite a taichi thing, but maybe where they might share some sensibility is this idea of.

Learning how to use learning how to work with the water, like being symbiotic with the water and using it to your advantage, like we all know the swimmer who isn't so experienced and they're in a race or in a triathlon or something like they're fighting the water, it's obvious they're making the water work again. So, you know what I mean?

And and really, you know, swimming is about fitness, of course, and technique, but it's really about fitness.

And it's it's this delicate relationship and this touch and this feel that you develop over time. And some have an innate talent for where they just know how to flow with the water and make it work for them. And those tend to be the most successful swimmers.

I think that the taichi analogy is really salient in this in this context. I mean, it is about working with the element and figuring out how to.

Use it to your advantage and be really efficient, too. I think that's something that people don't really think about with swimming and they think that it's like you said, when when there's when people are starting to swim, are starting to learn how to swim competitively and go fast.

Like there's so much muscle, there's so much over, like windmilling.

You know, you're just trying to, like, overpower it with brute force.

And really, it's about like your timing, your angle of entry, your the position of your body in the water.

And if you have that, it's actually quite you're not spending a lot of energy. Right. One of the things that's interesting about Lynne Cox is that her buoyancy is such that in in saltwater she's like neutrally buoyant.

So she's in that perfect body position to be swimming for hours and hours and hours and miles and miles and miles because she has that she's riding a little bit higher than the average person would, you know.

And she's talked about that. And so that also helps her, you know, with her very, very long swims.

But it's also about touch and finesse, like you said, for sure.

And in this practice, they have much like karate, like you get lines on your calf or whatever.

Yeah.

Like the level that she is like Stripe's in some cases, because I asked them, I said, how do you know who's the master? And they said, look at the caps. And they all have their special caps. And it was so cool to learn about it. And I, I hope to get the opportunity actually had been trying and planning to get to the Tokyo Olympics so I could see that, you know, happen see that sort of reintroduction of of right to the world.

But what's your sense of whether the Olympics are going to happen or not?

My gosh. Well, can they make a bubble big enough? I don't know. All right.

What do you think? I don't know. It's changing so quickly. I mean, the spikes that we're seeing right now make me feel pessimistic about it. But, yeah, we'll have to see. But at some point, they have to make a decision. There's so many moving pieces and so much money at stake.

They can't just snap their fingers right beforehand and say it's happening or it's not like at what point do you pass that point of no return in terms of the green light or the red?

Well, now we're getting and then we'll we'll be getting to the point where then it is in the same year as the Winter Olympics.

Right. Again, which is kind of ironic. Now, can you imagine being an Olympic athlete and living in that space of not knowing?

It's like a state of suspended animation. And I think it's so. I so feel for those athletes who are not knowing, you know, they're trained and then they have had to calibrate their training for another year, and I think it will break a lot of people if it doesn't happen.

I mean, it'll play to the advantage of the younger, less experienced athlete, I suppose, who who who benefits with additional time. But there's so many people that are hanging on and trying to make ends meet while they do it right.

And without that certainty, it's probably really difficult to get sponsor support.

It's got to be really challenging.

It turns out it's expensive. Yeah. To be right. It's expensive to live.

Another idea that I really love about the book is this idea that to be a swimmer is to be a seeker on some level.

And and when you track through history, there are so many leaders and great thinkers who had this profound relationship with the water from Thoreau to Lord Byron.

You know, even JFK like people who would gravitate towards the water in times of crisis or as a daily practice to basically help them be more self actualized, better human beings. Right.

I love that FDR was the one who put the pool right.

You know, FDR put the pool in the White House and it lives under the White House press pool briefing room, which is just is that what it's called?

Press get better? I don't actually know.

I've never quite been able to pinpoint if that's why.

But I recently had yeah. I recently was talking about this with someone and, you know, one of the reporters at NPR who who goes the who reports on the White House said, yes, you can see the tile.

So you'd be in the room. So it's underneath the room, but you can still see the tile. And like where where the pool actually is is is a bunch of like Internet servers down.

And I thought that is.

Oh, and that Hillary Clinton wanted when they moved in to the White House, she wanted to reopen the pool again.

Yeah. As a pool. Somehow that didn't happen. But I thought, wow, that would have been great. Right.

Well, I know JFK swam. A lot, and in particular, it was very helpful when he was in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis to try to, like, get some distance and balance so he could solve this unsolvable problem.

Isn't it fun to think about swimming as like a hidden actor? And in these moments of history, maybe that's a good one?

Well, imagine being FDR, the freedom, you know, of being able to get out of the wheelchair and move your ball and that he hit his.

Yeah, nobody knew, you know. Yeah. Has he hit his. It was so hard.

And then it finally became, you know, impossible to hide his physical, you know, limitations.

Right.

So how do you think about that relationship between being a seeker and being in the water?

Well, I, I, I mean, I certainly think it's true for myself. One of the I wrote my first book, American Chinatown, about how I noticed that when I would go to a city, I would the first the first thing I do, I look to see if Chinatown and I would go kind of see it.

Was it interesting?

It was just a little window to see how is this place different or the same to me across that the Chinese diaspora.

And then I realized what I do with swimming is that I look for a place to swell a pool or a body of water.

And how often is the pool in Chinatown? Oh, well, there is the Chinatown YMCA.

Francisco, I know. Gorgeous fall, but yeah, not that often. Right.

But I don't know. I think that water I think. Water and seeking it is something that. For me, it's about finding freedom. It's about finding a new perspective, is about finding a new way of looking at things. And I mean, isn't that what being a writer is? So I think for me, it's like these two things are hand in hand for sure about how my mind works that way. Mm hmm. What's the longest you've gone without swimming?

Oh, that's a great question. Even when I tore my ACL many, many years ago. Oh, God, I remember this, I had that stupid machine that, like, moves your knee at night.

And my husband made me sleep on, like, the couch because I was like, I'm not sleeping next to that day.

Oh, God. That was like five, fifteen years ago. I wasn't out of the water for that long, but I but it's because it's rehab. It's recovery, it's like one of the first like the only things you could do. When you're, you know, recovering from surgery and in many cases, right, it's interesting that when people get injured on land, they send them to the pool to repair themselves. Right.

And then they go back on land and then pound pound the crap out of the body. Yeah, I had Laird Hamilton here the other day and he's got this legendary pool workouts, you know, and part of the philosophy behind it is that very thing, which is when you enjoy yourself and you go to. Physio, they teach you all these rudimentary like things and you kind of do them for a while and then you're healed and then you stop doing them and he's like, we should just keep doing them.

And what if we do some of the more rigorous exercises in the pool where you remove the thing that's making you injured in the first place and create the supportive environment that allows you to do more with less risk?

Laird Hamilton is basically saying what every physical therapist is like yelling at their at their patient and saying, just keep it it. Why don't you keep doing it?

My brother's practice. Oh, yes, I hear. So you here lamenting all the time.

And he says to me, because I said my my elbow and my shoulder were sort of bothering me.

And he said, So did you stop doing the exercises I gave you?

And I decided I could go back and swim. So that was in the past. So then I stopped, of course. Right.

Let's talk about this guy in Iraq, Iraq, who was who was teaching swimming lessons, because this is another story.

I know anything about this guy. Well, Foreign Service.

Yeah, dude. Jay Taylor, this is another story. Actually, this section of the book came. He was also another pen pal of mine, but he was a pen pal like many like a long time ago.

He had read something that I've written for The New York Times about swimming as the last refuge from connectivity.

And he said. You know, I have a story for you about how it brought people together and it was about community, about connection, and he was this foreign service guy who got sent to Iraq for a posting for a couple of years, I think it was 2008, 2010.

And it was a time when Baghdad was seeing a lot of a lot of activity like shelling activity.

And so it was a pretty hairy time to be there.

And he was in the Green Zone, which at the time was part was in situated in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. Now, I don't know if you know this, but Saddam Hussein and his sons were very fond of swimming.

And so at all of their palaces and homes around Iraq, they had these crazy pools like just again, like luxury upon luxury in the desert is like having a pool that you keep filled.

And this pool had multilevel diving was in fact, you can see there are some I don't know if they're still up, but there are some YouTube videos of Army service soldiers.

The soldiers like jumping off of the diving boards, which doesn't actually it doesn't see watching them doesn't speak well of us. I don't know.

There's just something. So we just we descend upon the palace and take it over. Yeah, it's like a playground.

It's that kind of like imperialist. A view that has so gotten us into trouble, but anyway, so but in this time of war, of course, there is a community that forms around this pool because, of course, everyone is drawn to this. We want to be in that pool.

Yeah. And suddenly they're like, wait, we're allowed to use this pool. It is like got fountains and tiles and diving boards and it just is glorious. And again, it's peace. It's fine and quiet. And he said that when he would get in this pool, he would just then that's when he stopped hearing, like the firing range, you know, you'd be muffled. And otherwise it's like this incessant noise of like military exercises.

And, you know, the the people who were there were from all over the world, you know, they're diplomats, soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers, translators, local Iraqis who are, you know, they're providing support. And he.

Saw that that pool was, again, like everyone, all the animals flock to the watering hole, right? But this in this case, it was like a psychological space, like a coping mechanism, coping mechanism.

And he. With swimming, he taught swimming lessons for a long time, he was a lifeguard, you know, had grown up in the Baltimore suburbs.

I think you see and he he has, you know, great form. And he started to teach, let people come up to say, hey, you got any tips for me? And he would see his colleagues flailing around in the pool and he would offer some tips. And he's a very like when you read the book, you understand that he's just like a very he's a teacher. He's like a he's his his joy and his role in life is to be a teacher, you know, he's a very and to do it and and you've you've encountered many coaches over your life, as have I.

And the best coach is one who. Kind of instills a little bit of fear, but but but but that you want you it's authority, seek that approval and seek that approval. I wouldn't say that he is a person. I don't know what what he is like as a parent, but he's a very gentle guy at this point in his life. But you see that he has this quiet authority that you want to you know, that he knows things and you want him to share them with him.

And so he is able to kind of I mean, I think of him as a pied piper of all of these fires and in the Green Zone, because he kind of was he ended up building this, you know, Baghdad swim club of like a roster of two hundred and fifty. Some people rotated over two years and would be teaching swimming lessons. I mean, they kept having to add classes because they kept coming to it's like a feel good movie.

Yeah, it's totally a moon. Jay Taylor, folks, you can contact me for the rights with him.

I didn't realize what really struck me aside from that story is. This discussion around, you know, how beautiful the sunsets are and like how people would swim, like sort of at dusk or dawn, like not not at high noon, it's too hot.

But when the sand would kick up, that's when you would get the really epic sunsets. But that was also the danger signal because that's when the incoming mortars occur, right. Because that sand would obscure the ability to find the people who'd been hit.

Right. Right.

You it was cover for it was a good mortaring opportunity.

And it's just like to exist in that.

Reality like you're in this, you have this pool with fountains, but right outside of it, like people are getting shelled. Yeah. And, you know, he almost got hit by a mortar in his trailer, like on the third day he was in Baghdad.

You know, he oh, he really almost didn't live to have this club, you know, teaches people to swim.

And it is it sort of underlines this just how, again, porousness between states and that's one of the big themes of the book is like we're I think with swimming. What's so intriguing to me about it is that it is a sport, it is a practice.

It is something we do for exercise. But it is.

It is. It is the difference between life and death and water. That is the reality. I mean, that is crazy. And we don't we don't dance very often. It's that close these days to death, I mean, last year, this past year has been an exceptional year to that, but in our modern day, we don't experience that acute acuteness. Most of us don't anyway. Most of us are lucky not to.

And so I think sports, of course, competition is a way to experience this acuteness of being right this. The adrenaline rush, the the urgency of feeling just really alive and and oftentimes that.

You know that feeling. Is something that we we kind of can only really approximate with something that's a very heightened experience, right.

But swimming allows you to practice literally putting yourself in an unnatural environment.

Yeah. One that can really again, and certainly especially with the ocean, can really rob you. Of that. Life in pretty short order. Careful, I don't want to scare people. I know, but it is it. I don't think about that. Like I you know, that doesn't. I'm so acclimated to swimming like pool.

Forget about it. I'm like, I don't think about the will be dangerous. No, like, it's just that is my natural habitat.

Right. I'm more hyper aware of that when I'm in the ocean. Of course.

But you were telling me about it. Yeah, I know. I mean that's definitely a thing. But but like in the pool, the idea that that something bad is going to happen to me is not anything that I think about. Yeah, yeah. But that is a very real thing for a lot of people. Right.

I mean, and I think that's super interesting. And I wanted this book. To. Explore that with that reader, I wanted to acknowledge that reality, that that fear is real. Like so the people who don't like swimming, who are afraid of the water, that is very that is a profound fear. And that is is something that once you get to, you know, to become an adult, to be a certain age where you feel that that door is completely closed to you because that fear is so profound and it's so primal and it is something that you have to be fucking brave to actually push past that and say, I want to learn how to swim.

And I've talked to quite a few folks who, you know, had recently started to take lessons or had started to try to address their, you know, their their fears and their lack of swimming ability over the over the course of the last couple of years.

And it's you know, it is very much tied to like some bad experiences they've had maybe when they were kids.

But also there's there's just a lot of there's a lot of baggage.

You're very vulnerable. You're essentially naked. Yeah. You know, and you're putting yourself in this environment where you can't breathe.

Yeah. Your whole life you've like said talk to the hand, you know.

So it is it is courageous. It's doable if you submit to the process. Yeah. You know, you're it is a weird thing.

It's like violent or anything else. Like if you don't learn it when you're a young kid, it's a lot harder when you're older. But that doesn't mean that you can't do it.

And I know plenty of people who learn later in life and just love it. Yeah. Now and it does serve. You know, everybody has their own relationship with it. I know that your relationship with it has changed over time as has mine, but will always remain consistent.

Is this flow like experience that you have in water that I can't replicate in any other way?

Yeah, you it like Moby Dick in that right. Like this idea of sea dreaming, like like meditation and water are wedded forever, which is a line out of that book.

Yeah. Keeps me going. Yeah. It is meditation, it is and it isn't, it's a specific type of meditation. It's moving meditation. I think that's. Actually, someone had told me recently that they stopped doing yoga once they discovered swimming.

No, because it did serve their function for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not surprised. But you know what?

It's better when you do both are different. They are different and different.

And surfing is a whole different thing. Right. Which is another aspect of swimming, I suppose, on some level.

But yeah, its own unique relationship with water and symbiotically living elements and timing. I mean, I thought about that this morning when I got out was just you have to. But it's the same principle of you have to time it right, you have to read the water right, and then you have to move in just the right way to get on the way.

Otherwise, it's not pretty.

Yeah. So I suppose you're going to swim for the rest of your life. I hope so. They better open the bulls back up soon.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I know a lot of people out of water these days. They're just, they're not the same.

Don't you feel more. Just I feel like when I get in water in the morning, I'm just a better person. I just feel like it's all that way, but way better.

I'm way more capable.

When I said they better open the pool, let me please, like, couch that context. Like, I'm not saying be unsafe. I just wish we could be in a situation where it was where pools could safely open. Yeah.

Because I know that I'm a better person and I enjoy it and I and I miss it, you know.

I know you do too. What are you. Let's close it with this thought, which is what is it that you want people to walk away from after reading the book.

I think it's a sense of possibility, right? I just think about water these days, and I've given this a lot of thought lately, especially because I can't do it.

I can't do it as readily as I once could and take it. And I took it for granted, too, like anyone else. Right, that I could get in the water whenever I wanted to and find that peace, find that, you know, smoothing back of feathers and the time with myself.

And now it's like this juggling act of trying to find again, like the plane reservation or the window where, like, I know I have to manage all, you know, stuff at home with my kids and work and whatever.

And my husband, who only supports me, by the way, getting out in the water, he's just like, go, please, go, go, go.

We'll all be happy when he is. He's a pretty good swimmer. He enjoys the water. He hates the cold. He's like you.

He will not get in the cold water. I mean, when we woke up the other morning and it was it was like, you know, one of those mornings that where you could see your breath. And that's not that unusual here in California, guys.

This time of year, though, I mean, it's high 30s at night here, but then it'll be 80 to by like 2:00 in the afternoon.

So we got up and it was before dark and I was getting up to go surf. And he looks at me, he goes, boy, what I really want to do right now is jump.

Yeah, I just had to laugh because I said, you know, actually, I mean, I know it sounds insane, but it sounds pretty good to me and that's why I'm leaving.

I love you. Goodbye. That's hilarious. You know, and so he understands me, huh?

For sure. It took me a long time to come back to that kind of appreciation, though, because I was so steeped and competitive swimming for so long. And the idea of the early morning alarm clock, you know, and then standing on the freezing cold deck in the dark and I was like, I do not need this in my life anymore. I did that for many years. Yes. You know, but I've kind of come around to fall in love with it in a new way.

As long as I don't look at the clock.

Because that will give you is going to do. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it is interesting and I love to hear you talk about how. You had you had to come around full circle from from. What was a very intense and formative experience in your life, you know, which is to compete at a collegiate level and a very competitive and very gratifying and one of the highlights of my life, but also extremely difficult and not without its traumas right now.

And like, I needed to do other things. So there was a long period of time where I didn't want anything to do with it.

So, yeah, I mean, you have to have enough distance from it. And also to understand that. Yeah, like you're at a different stage of your life. And I think, you know, I like to think about how I came back to swimming as well. Like I.

There were times when I wasn't as present in my life and now it's going to come roaring back in a very wonderful and real way.

Do you have a sense that you're more creative when you're swimming consistently like you're you're more in touch with your creative voice? I think so.

I mean, and again, like, it was not something that I thought about until I wrote this book, like I did not, you know, examine or interrogate why I wanted to get in the water and then would go and sit and write.

But unconsciously, you were you would not have been compelled to write the book. You're right. I've been interested in exploring that. It kind of nudged me that way. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thank you. Thank you for talking to me today.

I love the book. Please go check it out. It's called Why We Swim. It's very direct.

I know it answers that question. I really loved it.

And I'm so happy that the book is being so well received and so successful. I know you've got another book right about it's like a children's book about a woman, big wave surfer.

It's it's Sarah and the Big Wave. And it's about Sarah Gerhart, the first woman to serve memoirs.

Yeah, she the one that's in writing Giants.

She's in the Mavericks segment.

Oh, she probably was one woman that's interviewed around the Mavericks discussion.

And I don't care how long since I've seen that documentary, but yeah, it was I mean, 1999, she then she lives in Santa Cruz. She's a you know, she's a professor. Yeah. It's it's like so she's a it's a wonderful story.

And it was my first children's book and it was such a joy to write. So funny.

How did you find, like, I assume you got an illustrator to work with. Sofija, she they asked my publisher actually asked me, like they don't normally do so in publishing, I only just found this out when I encountered this.

It was usually. Children's books, you think that the you know, the writer and the and the illustrators working together? No, it's like usually the writer writes the book and then they find an illustrator and. Really?

Yeah, no. Right. Because it's all these books seem. So how is that possible. Like you have to be simpatico. Exactly.

But and usually the publisher does not consult the author, the publisher just chooses. But in this case they let me choose. And she said, you don't consult. They don't do that. Get some illustrator.

It's two lanes.

It's like and they have the author and they have illustrator and they do the pairing. That's like 90 percent of the time. That fascinates shocking to me.

I know, because it seems like you have a braided together. Yeah, yeah. I mean I guess it works, but I feel like they're missing out on an opportunity as well to say. Yeah, I think so.

Speaking of which, why didn't you read your audiobook?

Oh, that's a great question. I, I don't know that the the option was offered to me, but they said I'm doing it.

And they asked me, well again, they asked me who I want it.

So they gave me a bunch of different professionals. Maybe they just thought they needed a professional. But I thought Angie Cain, she did a great job.

But I just think because you're so much a part of the narrative. Yeah. That I would have I would have liked to have heard you read. Thank you. Next time.

Next time. But to put down your book now throw my weight around it. Cool.

Well come back and talk to me again some time. This is really fun. I appreciate it.

Where should I direct people who want to learn more about what you're up to, what's the best place you're on Twitter and all the things on Twitter and Instagram and all the things you can find me on my website at Bonny Sudhakar and easiest way to do it.

Do it. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Let's go swimming. Let's do it. It's.

Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, you can visit the episode page rich role dot com, and you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Role. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and always appreciated.

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