The Rich Roll Podcast - Bonnie Tsui On Why We Swim

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Unlike other land mammals, humans are not natural-born swimmers. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival. Now it’s one of the most popular activities in the world. So why do we swim? What is it about water that seduces us despite its dangers? A lifelong swimmer reared by swimming parents, this week’s guest couldn’t shake this question. What she discovered is far more compelling than you might imagine. Bonnie Tsui (@bonnietsui) is an alumnus of Harvard University, where she did not swim but instead rowed crew—and graduated magna cum laude in English and American Literature and Language. In 2009, her book American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods won the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. She has been the recipient of the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for travel journalism and the Jane Rainie Opel Young Alumna Award at Harvard University. In 2017, she was awarded the 2017 Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship by the San Francisco Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier. She is also the recipient of a 2019 National Press Foundation Fellowship. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and California Sunday magazine, Bonnie’s latest book—and the focus of today’s conversation—is Why We Swim. Propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck, Bonnie dives into the deep, from the chilly San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating the ancestry and essence of water’s allure. Widely lauded, Why We Swim was named to TIME magazine’s list of 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. It’s also received praise from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Buzzfeed, Bustle, Booklist, Kirkus, and more. Beautifully written and completely immersive, it definitely ranks among my 2020 favorites—I couldn’t put it down. So let’s talk about it. This conversation is a love letter to swimming—a sport, lifestyle and obsession that Bonnie and I share. It’s a deconstruction of humanity’s relationship with the transformative power of water—an archeological dig that unearths mankind’s historic and fraught yet undeniably alluring connection with the sea. It’s about swimming as a means of survival. It’s about swimming as a conduit for well-being, competition, and community. It’s about the unique power of water—when combined with breath—to produce that elusive state called flow. But underneath it all, this is a conversation about why to be a swimmer is to be a seeker. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll574 YouTube: bit.ly/bonnietsui574 It was an absolute delight to share space and passion with a woman who hopes, as Oliver Sacks writes in Water Babies, to “swim till I die.”  I concur with that idea. This conversation sheds light on why. Peace + Plants, Rich

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 and unburdening i think is 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 firehose 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 Choi, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. 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. But first... But first, we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care,

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to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Bonnie, lifelong swimmer, magna cum laude 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 must-read books of 2020. 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 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. It's 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 horribly disappointed if you didn't go swimming before our conversation

about swimming. 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. Jaded. Jaded. 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. Even his after being out here, he could enjoy it. Well, there's a lot of reasons to complain about Los Angeles, but the beaches and the weather is not one of them. When I see, you know, when I hear you talking about surfing at Ocean Beach, like I used to live

in San Francisco, I'm like, oh my God, so cold and like unforgiving and uninviting on some level compared to when you get down here. It is a battle, it's a battle to get out. But that's part of the thing, right? 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, I like to think about it as making a date to go wrestling with the ocean in the morning. And I expect it, right?

At OB, you always expect that it's going to be somewhat hellacious, even on an easy, low baby day. But I kind of like that. I kind of like being challenged. I kind of like being challenged and I partly am okay with it because my surf buddy, Caroline Paul, she was one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco. Oh, wow. And so she's just like this, you know, she's a pilot. She's just tough. And she has basically had like nine ten eleven twelve lives of adventure and she will go out and look stand 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 go, we'll try it, you know, we'll be repelled back. We'll be, you know, booted out of the whitewater. But I think just like having that mindset is a good way to be. And I, and I like that about. It 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 still being unable to jump in 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? You know, it's still the membrane. It's like an invisible membrane between you and it.

And yet, 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're never like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. Yeah. Are the pools still all closed up north?

They've started to reopen. So my local pool, the Albany Aquatic Center, sort of just north of me in Berkeley, that's sort of my home pool. And 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. 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 South End Rowing Club, the facilities. So even now, you know, I have friends who-

And that seems like pretty low risk. But I think in the beginning, it seemed just the flock. We didn't know enough. Right, right, right. So there's the flocking together. But now we know, of course, being outside, great. You know, in the water, ocean breezes, 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 lane. Yeah, you've been doing that, right? I have, but every time I look at, I log in and all the, everything's booked. Yeah, it's like zero, zero, zero. You gotta be way ahead of it.

And I never know, like, I just like to go, I'm like, oh, I got an open hour, I'm gonna 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 some intervening. You just weren't throwing a bunch of things on the wall.

Yeah, because it's a long drive actually from my house too. And it's just, you know, I'm struggling with how to figure that out. I did the exact same thing that you just did this morning. You did. Because they opened up and I said, I'm just gonna, this one's open, this one's open. I'll just, you know, snatch it and see.

Grab them, yeah. 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 other people are having the same issue. Any luck? I'm hit or miss with that, I know.

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 100 must-read books of 2020. I mean, that's incredible, right? That was pretty special. It was. As a writer, if somebody's been writing for a very long time, 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 figure out how to frame such a big topic, right? Swimming is a topic. 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, was just very strange.

And then, of course, over the months, I mean, it came out in April, the hardcover, and then 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'd always taken it for granted. They'd never interrogated why it made them feel good. They would just show up at the pool, do their workout, see their friends, and go home. 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 would never have thought

that the book would get people to swim in open water. I didn't have any specific intentions. Yeah, there's no agenda like that. There's no agenda, exactly. It was meant to be this cultural and scientific exploration of our human relationship with water and with swimming and how it's so curious that 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 higher order primates. Right.

You make the point that we're the only land mammal that doesn't instinctively know how to swim already. And I'd never really thought about that. Think about, I mean, 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 can swim. Right. Bats can swim. Bats can do a crazy like butterfly. Really?

Yeah. Look, after we finish talking, please Google bats swimming. Some YouTube rabbit hole. talking. Please Google bats swimming. It's just, so we have this, you know, 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 it as land animals. 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 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 at all of that because I wanted it to be this expansive and really inviting, an invitation to come in the water and look at it. I took it to be very, like sort of a swimming version of Chris McDougall's Born to Run. That was my, I joke with him about it. That was my goal. 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, thank you. 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. That'd be too, you know, too much in there on the head, right? Right, but it has that vibe, it has that feel to it. And, you know, I'm somebody who's passionate about the water and somebody who's had a, you know,

on a personal level had a relationship to swimming from as long back as I can remember. And I've thought deeply about it and I've written, you know, snippets about it over time. I wrote my college essay about- You did. What 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. And you captured it perfectly. Like it's the perfect book that fires on all cylinders. And it is this weird, 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, you know, real estate is expensive for a reason. Right. There's something about being by the water 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 that 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 don't call themselves that, don't think of themselves that way. And why is that, right? It's because of this tension that you speak of between life and death you know immersion submersion flotation like this this kind of i talk about in the book this porousness between states that i think is like it's the um 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 want to get in it. I mean, kids, you look at babies, like they just are just in the bathtub, you know, they're just enamored with it because 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, the water cure. The samurai, which 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 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 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 brain activity, our alpha waves, like, you know, increase. And that's calm, relaxation, creativity. I mean, that's good stuff.

And we know that to be true. Yeah, it's no mistake that images of sunsets at beach beaches are on meditation apps. And there's something about the gestalt of the waves crashing and the light bouncing off the surface and the smell too, 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, 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 combine to create this, you know, very different experience that I think is healing to the human body and mind. Flotation, weightlessness, and unburdening, I think is really what happens physically

and mentally, emotionally, I think. You can't help but respond to the medium in that way, I think. And there have been times... I mean, the swimming in my life has changed over time. I mean, it has played different roles. But especially over the last year, 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. I think just to have a momentary pause from that, a relief from that is just, it's such a gift because it's so easy to do. And yet not everyone does it. Right.

Everyone thinks to do it. And it's kind of the last frontier if you want to get away from the phone and all the signals and the noise and the stimuli. And it changes your perception and your relationship with time. 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. And you kind of have to like let that go. You are left alone with your own thoughts in a way that can definitely be. The worst, right? Why would I do that?

Why would I do that when I have airtime? But 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. 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 some time. 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 on any given day, 98% of the people are not using anything like that.

Right. I hope it stays that way. I know. Well, let's take it back to the beginning. I mean, you know, the obvious question is like, you know, why write this book? 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 this story so many times, but maybe you haven't heard it.

I've heard it, but people listening might not have heard it. So this is the book tour. You answer these questions. This is the book tour that I never had. We'll go in different directions, but you got to, I like this story. So 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 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 been in a swimming pool because it was just, it was too perfect. Of course they did, right? Yeah, there's that black and white photo of your parents. They were 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 have the hots for each other. You know, I just want to read them. It's all happening. Yeah, I know. Cause 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, both of their smiles are so big, you know. 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 when 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, early high school. Our parents were together, ostensibly. And then my father started kind of, they separated, but we didn't really know it as such. And so he started traveling back to Hong Kong and then to China. He's an artist. He's a, you know, he's, I actually, for someone- He won an Emmy. He won an Emmy. Yeah, he won an Emmy. And, you know, he and I were so close when I was a kid.

And I was the one who accompanied him on trips. You know, I grew up in New York and 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 his studio. 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 that I think about it, they still are me. I knew from a young age that those three things were so essential to who I was.

Certainly, 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 stayed the same. Many things stayed the same. You know, essentially this relationship I have with the water and also with writing and creativity, that's something that I trace back to my dad. Yeah. 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 actually hasn't changed that much, but I have. Was your mom more of the taskmaster then? Oh, totally. She was the strict one. I don't actually remember her smiling. It's terrible. It's so terrible. But after they divorced, which was really, really painful, they didn't finalize their divorce until I was in college. But then I got to know my mom 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 had stories to tell. And that's when I got to know her as a real person. You need both of those. I think you need the artistic sensibility,

but you need the regimented person as well. Oh, yeah. She was the one who said, my desire for order, my desire to prepare, all of those things come from her. My risk-averse older person self is because of her. And I say those things lovingly 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 really ruined our family, the 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 that I- Yeah, you came out pretty good. Oh, thanks.

So it worked out. It could have gone terribly wrong. You go to Harvard, right? Like, so, but, and yet you're an artist. So you have, you know, you know how to focus and 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. friend of mine uh and it was not in a this was when i was 22 and i took off for a few months to go on a 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 you know take a waitressing job or something in New York while I'm doing it. And she turned to my friend and she said, Bonnie is such a free spirit. And it was not a compliment. Right. 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 there we go. That was probably a big step for her. It was. Actually, now that I think about it, it really was. I have to ask her about that if she remembers. Yeah, 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 rode crew in college. Yeah. By the time I got to college, and I wasn't good enough to swim in college, like not, no. But I was done with competitive swimming because college to me represented like something new, like something 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 do new things. And I very much felt that I wanted to do that because I wasn't, you know, I think I was a very old person when I was like a kid. You know, I was like, I want to be 20 and I am eight. Something like that. I get it.

I just wanted to have autonomy, I think. And I rode crew. And I, you know, it's so quintessential. It's almost, it's a cliche to be like rowing. Right. Sculling in the Charles. At an Ivy League college. Yeah.

Right. It's like the Ivy is like, you know, within sight as you're on the water. It's still a water sport though. It is. I want to, and I was talking to a friend about this recently. You know, I just thought it was so cool to have a different perspective of water. And when you're swimming, it's so solo, right? You're on a team, but the experience of swimming is very much you in the water. And when you're in a boat with seven other people and you

have to become one, you have to move in unison almost all of the time. I would say like 98% of the time, you can feel like the slight tug of someone else who's not quite in your sync. And then the 2% of the time when you are flying together, it's 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, I'm probably between like a coxswain size and a lightweight rowers size.

You're not small enough to be a coxswain. I was not. I'm only 5'4". I was like, 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 pounds. And I had already packed on, like, I was eating like a crazy person, you know, in the freshman dining hall. I was working out in the weight room.

I was erging 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 this. It was weird. It was- So you were like, I'm done? Well, and then I joined maxed out. I don't know that I can gain any more weight to do this. It was weird. So you were like, I'm done? Well, and then I joined water polo. Oh, you did, okay. Again, another water sport.

But it was fun. I mean, 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, that's all you're doing. It's pretty all encompassing. And, um, I didn't want that. You wanted to broaden your aperture, your horizons. Yeah, I get it. Um, 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 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. 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 did this kind of archeological dig into the history of the United States and its relationship with swimming and in particular, pool building and access to pools and how that changed over time. So let's talk about that a little bit. Cause I think it's pretty interesting. I know, like I grew up in the Northeast

bit because I think it's pretty interesting. I know, like I grew up in the Northeast and, you know, most high schools don't have pools, whereas in other parts of the country they do. And that tracks back to our, you know, sort of checkered relationship with race and segregation. Yeah, I really did not appreciate, meaning I didn't understand the extent to which the current 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 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. black kids are five times, they drown out five times out of white children. Right.

I mean, that is just, it's horrible. 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, you're swimming, you love it. And then you feel like you're the only one or you're the, 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 stories. I think that that has a really profound effect on whether you want to keep doing something, you know? So like I recently got to talk to the founders of an organization

called Black Kids Swim and Ebony Roseman is the founder and she was talking about how when her daughter started swimming and then I think the reason that they started the organization is because when they Googled like black kids swim, 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,

oh, but you know, black kids can't swim or they have a higher body density or something like that. Like some crazy reason why black people weren't good at swimming, which is just ridiculous. And then that is pervasive and it persists. And those are the ridiculous things that I heard growing up too. At the same time, I think of my experience,

At the same time, I think of my experience, 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 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 onlys in my high school, a town away, two towns away, that pool was super diverse. You know, the head guard, you know, at that pool where I lifeguarded, the Freeport rec was black, you know, the head guard, you know, at that pool where I lifeguarded the Freeport wreck 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.

Yeah. Yeah. The section in the book where you talk about this era, you know, in the 1910s and early 1920s, when America was building these massive public pools. We've all seen pictures of that extraordinary pool in San Francisco that just looked like the size of a mall. Yeah.

It was like massive. I think there was one in Chicago too. There were a couple of these gigantic glass ceiling, they look like arboretums almost that were gigantic that went the way of the dodo, right? Like they just disappeared. Yeah. So this was a shift in public pools from being, you know, during the progressive era, 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, from women. And so, so it was much more a gender split with these pools. And then once they became what you described, these like pool palaces, basically like pools, then public pools were then for recreation. basically like pools then public pools were then for recreation and so then were for families and were then um you know public authorities you know that the sentiment was that uh people of color could not swim in these pools with white people and so there were they were turned away from a lot of pools um there were um you know and then during the civil rights era,

the public, the pool spaces, the watery spaces, even public beaches, they were sites of protest. And in the book, I talk about how there was this incident called 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 and many of these pools um that happened there was violence um 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 thing was not available to everyone. And I think the right of leisure, the right of recreation was something that was seen as symbolic of this fight for equal rights and equity. Yeah. And so ultimately these pool palaces closed down. They just shutter, right?

And then hence begins this movement towards the backyard pool. So the public pool kind of isn't a primary focus anymore because it's complicated for those reasons. Yeah. After desegregation, you know, you'd think that the fight is, you know, is over, you know, equality won. But actually a lot of whites then, you know, of means like fled the public community pools and built their own backyard pools. And you'll see this, you know, in California, it's interesting, right? Because California, especially Southern California, is such an epicenter for this backyard pool culture.

And it's this beautiful, I mean, you look at these photos of like Palm Springs and LA. 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 I think that that is being rewritten and pushed at and, you know, that beautiful bubble is being punctured in a way that is starting to be, in a way that is really important to our understanding of what those images actually meant. It meant exclusion, right? 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 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. 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 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 did not have any of that. And so now they're even more in the hole. And so now as many pools have struggled to reopen in some limited fashion, right? So, but think about it, it's one lane per person spaced out. If they were losing money before. Yeah. I hate to 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 in so many other countries. And I think that would be amazing, you know, if that were the case in this country. It would make such a difference. But you need 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's a really huge funding issue, but I just think about these, you know, in Iceland, you know, there's every town has a pool.

Every town. I know. Tiny, tiny town of like 100 people has a pool. 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, wellbeing, 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? Like, it's just like this ethereal amorphous thing, right? But kind of planting 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 but kind of planting 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 who's named, there's no way I'm gonna 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 Fridthorsen. 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. Say it one more time. Good-looker Fridthorsen.

But the thing that we have to know is that his nickname is Loyer. And everyone calls him that. So I will- Loyer. Henceforth, very good. Call him Loyer because that's way easier. So I opened the book with the story, because how could I not, right? It's a story that my husband told me one night.

And he'd heard it from, you know, he works 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 Godlíkurfrðórsson, Lói, was the ship's mate. And he was 22. He was super young. But it was the fishing trawl caught on the sea bottom 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 this is bad news.

It's 41 degrees water. It's freezing. It's the middle of the night. And they are unable to deploy the life raft. And the sad thing about it is that they were supposed to, the 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 boat, but they hadn't done it yet. So this boat is sinking and the, you know, the few of them on our left

are holding onto the keel. And then they say, we're gonna start swimming, Captain and Loi. And so they start swimming and pretty soon he's the only one left. Was there a lighthouse? Like how are they finding their- There's a lighthouse. Okay.

Yeah, so, but it's six, at least six kilometers away. So he's, it's the lighthouse on this island, which is off the coast of the main island of Iceland. It's called Heimei. And it's part of the Vestmannair archipelago. I've been practicing how to say that. Yeah, you got that down. The Westman Islands. But he, so he saw the lighthouse, the light from the lighthouse, and he started swimming.

And he's just swimming and swimming and swimming. And he's wearing like a flannel shirt and jeans, you know, and a sweater. Right. That part confuses me because I would just take that off. Like, that's holding you back, right? And then he took his sweater off. I can't remember what the, I mean, he certainly lost his boots. But he's swimming and, you know, he's talking to seagulls.

And it takes him six hours. Six hours, six kilometers. 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 10 years before that there was a volcanic eruption that had resulted in like the island got bigger by like 20%. But then there were 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 100-foot cliffs. So he gets there and he cannot get out.

There's 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 his feet are bleeding because it's really sharp, and there's a frozen sheep cistern. It's like a tub of water that waters the animals, and he punches through because he's so thirsty. 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 him in the snow and it is just insane because then they're like i cannot you know they rush him to the hospital. They 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. 20 minutes max. Yeah, 41 degree water. We would be dead.

Everyone else would die. Almost everybody would die. And then how long was the trudge into town once he got there? I really don't, I don't even know if he knows. How, 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, you know, they, he's just a little dehydrated. He's fine. And 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, okay, A, he's a very good swimmer. Everyone in Iceland swims. He was trained to be, okay, A, he's a very good swimmer. Everyone in Iceland swims. He was trained to be as such as a sailor. And he has, he's like a seal.

His fat is two to three times normal human thickness. He's, it kept his, you know, core body temperature stable. Was he a fat dude? He's a big guy. He's six, four, I don't know how much he weighs. But I thought, you know, you can see photos of him from that. He's not, four, I don't know how much he weighs. But you can see photos of him from that. He's not unusually gigantic, but he's a solid guy. But you think about plenty of guys who are really big, who would die very quickly in water that cold.

It's not about the fat, but certainly the quality of the fat. Right, the quality or where the, is the fat subcutaneous in the right places to protect the organs. It's crazy, right? So he becomes this massive hero and also a science project for a lot of people. And 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 this 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 this 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 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 a horrible tragedy. He's being 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 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 makes it, they have to tell.

And he said, you know, nine times out of 10, actually 9.9 times out of 10, 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 the mandatory- The lifeboat thing. Yeah. The like self-deploying life rafts. And, you know, they have the swim every year in his honor for like you know the last 35 six seven odd years um called good looks and which means good lookers swim and it's everyone 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 was the point, right? You can't have that. I know they breathe them strong in Iceland, but not that crazy. But it's interesting because he became this symbol of their survival resilience, you know. And so he accepted that mantle. And then after a while, just, you know, 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 gonna engender trust from this guy

who's been burned by the media and wants to be left alone? Right, there was a- But you being the dutiful journalist. I did my duty. 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 his story. There was a movie by this like blockbuster Icelandic director.

Kormakor, I think is his last name, Baltasar Kormakor. He like did some Everest movies, I think, with like Denzel Washington. Oh, really? Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington. He's directed these like big blockbuster movies. And he, but being Icelandic, he was obsessed with the story of Goodlicker Frithorsen. And when he, 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. 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 they approached, the producers approached Loye about the film, and he was just like, you know, I think at this point he had kind of things that quieted down. He was starting to live a life that was more to his speed. You know, he has grandkids.

He has kids. He has a, you know, 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. They made it anyway. They made it anyway. Right. So he felt betrayed.

He felt betrayed. And his, you know, he lives in a very small town on a very small island in a very small country. Right. You know, everyone knows him. The town, you know, protects him. So, but people, so I was just like, okay, 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 mailed it. But you can't pitch, right? So what's the just, you know, I appreciate you. Like, what is the letter? I think I said, I said, I think I told him that 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 to him. I wanted to hear from him in some way, right? So

he wrote back almost immediately, but he said no. And then I thought, oh, that's so disappointing. But then we started to have this like pal relationship. And I remember my husband had said, you could just write to him and see what happens. So we started, because there's something about his opening message to me that seemed to leave the door open a little bit. He just said something about, I have not had great experiences in the past with journalists. It has something 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, 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 he, I think he said that he, he said something about swimming, saving lives. And, and that was, and he used emoji. I thought, would he 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 guy. And he actually, you know, we got to the point where he trusted me with a story and then he very quickly, you know, he had an interest in my family and we went, oh my God, now it seems so long ago, the summer of last year, 2019, So the summer of last year, 2019, we went to the Faroe Islands and we went to Iceland to see him.

And, you know, 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 Loya and Maria again? Like again and again and again. And I mean, yesterday my son told me, he said, can we go visit Loya and Maria again? Like again and again and again. And I mean, yesterday my son told me, he said, can we go back there? Wow. And, you know, on Christmas, you know, he sends me a text with a photo because he looks like Hemingway crossed 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 a great guy. That's cool. But what did he tell me? I mean, 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.

So I tried to do this kind of twinning 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? And he's got to release that and allow people to have their own experience

with who he is and 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. And 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 is healing to the body. Right. One of the studies that I looked at showed, okay, so 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, it has positive effects on your body. And a same amount of time in like 56 degree water or something like that. It was 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 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, cold exposure is not that great for you,

right? So like cardiovascularly, it's like terrible. It 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 heart and your blood vessels are then able to handle it. Over time within a single session or with repeated exposure? With repeated exposures. Yeah. So, you know, we talk about where the sort of longevity scientist 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 free diving grandmas, really. Pearl divers.

Pearl divers, diving for shellfish. And they, a lifetime of cold water exposure right their cardiovascular health is amazing um their hearing is terrible because the cold water really destroys your hearing but they um they're you know he wanted to know about um were their arteries, were they flexible? Was their experience over time had that made them something a little bit more akin to a marine mammal? Just like how they're able to, you know, cope with the water. And he found that they were, like, they're just, their cardiovascular health was really great. And, you know, I think they live to be quite old, you know.

And the traditions, I think that there's been renewed interest in just, again, like these people who hew to thousand-year-old traditions and are able to do things that we wouldn't imagine doing in our modern day. And they're not dying young of heart disease. Right. Right. And that, you know, Hira Tanaka also did research with arthritis, you know, and cold water and swimming. And what I was really interested in was that the swimming practice lessened the effects of arthritis, you know, from a pain perspective, from an inflammation standpoint, from increased mobility. you know, from a pain perspective, from an inflammation standpoint, from increased mobility. And those effects lasted for much more time beyond the actual time in the water.

And so it's just like the benefits are enduring. And I found that really compelling. Yeah, that's super interesting. So your way into this cold water world quickly becomes our mutual friend, Kim Chambers. That's right. Who's a looming figure throughout the book. Like she's, 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 Dolphin Club and introduces you to the whole aquatic park. The whole crew. Ecosystem down there. 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 many times and I've swum from Alcatraz and 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 a couple other people, but. It's a, I mean, so the Dolphin Club and the South End Rowing Club, they've been around since the late 1800s. They share an actual building, you know, but they're clubhouses. They share an actual building, but they're clubhouses. Yeah, they're rivals, but they're friendly rivals, and they love to trash talk. And they are very much, the members are like diehard bay swimmers, cold water swimmers. 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 hardiness the

vigor the um you know how long to stay in and right you know and uh not cool to go and swim an aquatic park in a wetsuit well you can't can. You know what? You can. The first time I did it, I was afraid. Oh, that's cute. Right? 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 wetsuits into the clubhouse.

Yeah, they said, leave them outside. I'm like, okay. It's almost like, you know, when the wet wetsuit, like there's like a, there's a line. It's like a no, no passage through the space, no wet suit shall enter the 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 Farallones to San Francisco. She is a 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 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. And she, by her own description, was a horrible swimmer when she started, had horrible technique.

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 swim at the Dolphin Club at Aquatic Park. And she said, I love the way she describes this. She says, not many people have a visual record of their rebirth. And she said that they happened 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 um 120 pound woman who's just like um has been through hell and and is like the biggest shit-eating grin on her face and she's's in this water, and she feels so alive, and she feels reborn. It literally was her... It started this completely new life for her as a marathon swimmer, as a freakishly accomplished marathon swimmer. And I think a large part of that, of course, is that she is a very resilient person. She also talks about how she has a very,

very high pain threshold, which has gotten her into a lot of trouble. Why? 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 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 Guillain-Barre. 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 weeks ago. And, you know, she's swimming. You know, during the pandemic, she's back in the bay swimming. And she's trying to knock out the seven summits also, right? Is that, did that get tabled for? That was her big goal. I think when, and that really was, I mean, she was well on her way when Guillain-Barre happened to her. And I don't know if that's something that's still on the table, 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.

But what's, you know, even additionally compelling about her is not only her, you know, love for cold water, like she took to it immediately. Right. Her freakish, you know, endurance capacity, but also this interesting relationship with fear because she swam from the Farallon Islands, you know, to San Francisco. That is not for the faint of heart. She did it at night too. You can't see anything. Like, I just, it sounds like my worst nightmare. It is pretty much everybody's worst nightmare.

And she's like, oh, she thought it was fun, you know? Like it's, you know, so that's a thing on top of all of this that makes her, separates her, 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 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, okay,

if I have a voice, what can I use this for? And she did that Colibri swim. The Red Sea thing? No, the one, well, that one too, but the one across the border. Oh, right in Mexico. Yeah, Citi Juana. And that, you know, she did that with Mexican swimmer Antonio Arguelles and they were like the ambassadors, you know, across the, and it was really to call attention to all the deaths at the border. You know, it was, she kept saying that it wasn't, she didn't want it to be political. She wanted it to be about life and caring about life. And she said when they swam across and got out at the beach in Tijuana, all these school kids were on the cliff wearing the Koli Breed t-shirts and cheering.

And it was like wanting to use the swim as a way to bring people together. And I really, I so admire her for all of this evolution that she's gone through in her life. I mean, she always talks about how, and 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 got activated. And in the Venn diagram of these various buckets or categories that you've divided the book up into, she overlaps survival with community. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, she is that

bridge because not just the healing part, but she survived so many things in her life because of swimming. And swimming was the thing that kind of brought her back from both her leg injury and then from Guillain-Barre 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, 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. Right, the post swim. Just like the chatting and the secrets and you're in everybody's intimate space. But I don't know what it's like in the men's locker room. I actually 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 sauna as like a hen house. 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.

But I think 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 also open, right? So then when you go to the, like, you know, like listen, when I swam in college,

everybody goes into the hot showers and is in there forever, right? You don't just take a quick shower and get dressed. Like you stay in that hot shower as long as possible. And there's a lot of, you know, yeah, there's a lot of conversation that goes on there. And even in master swimming, it's the same. For sure.

I mean, I don't know what the women's locker room is like, but like, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, bonding. And I think 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 conducive to that in the wake of just enduring like a difficult workout together. And, you know, maybe it's the same in track and field or any other sport. I don't know, but 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 this sport or just this activity. I mean, I also want to, you know, we talked a bit about the physical and physiological benefits, right, of immersion, but I also want to talk, you know, a big part of the well-being is the flow, right? It's the flow state.

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 um you're alone you're in your head a lot your senses are muted um you're not really talking to someone else i mean even if you're doing a workout together even if you're doing a long swim together with someone you know in the bay or in the ocean or whatever, you're not chatting the way you would if you were going for a long run together. And so your awareness, I mean, I think it depends on, okay, so I want to talk about two things. Like pool swimming is super different from open water swimming, right? So in a pool, what's so great about that is that it's this very known circumscribed every the distance is known your body is it 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're have a sort of acute nowness yeah um a little bit of hyper vigilance yes in open water yeah um and even if you're someone like lynn 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 supposed to be doing that. But when you're out there, I mean, I find that when I'm swimming in the bay, I'm constantly scanning. It's this, you can't really stop yourself from doing that. But even if you know this place, there's still some alert, you know, and I think that then the acuteness and the presentness 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 forced to pay attention to that moment. 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 right now there's plenty of that.

Yeah. But I mean, actually actually i just realized like in this conversation with you the way a great conversation can take you out i haven't thought about covid for a while so thank you for that okay you know like i gave you a one hour yeah i really appreciate that but just but i'm distracting you right but to be yeah so 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 on. But it compels your focus in a way that I think is super useful. And again, it's a relief. It's a breath away from the rest of everything, your normal state of being, your normal land self.

And then in a pool, 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. And safe, right? That you don't have to think about it, right? And it allows you to like live in this state of presence, but also kind of that, and 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 that 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 they're not tethered in the same way. I think that, again, I come back to the quality of the medium. It's like things don't have to be connected in the same way, at least for me.

I have interrogated myself many times over the writing of 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 swimming. Right, I'm sure. Yeah. Because I had to come back. Well, I'm sure you get stuck, you go swim, and then by, you know, not focusing on it, you are allowed, you're able to free associate and solve that problem so that when you're in the locker room afterward, you're like, I got it. I think that's the, I love that term, the soft fascination, right? There's something that's holding our attention, but not too closely so that you're able to do that free association that you're talking about, which is so great.

Yeah, and it's different from running. Like running is analogous, I suppose, but the experience isn't quite the same for some reason. Definitely not for me. I don't know about you. I hate running. I mean, I love running too, but the feeling that I have afterwards is different.

It's different. Certainly swimming 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. After a swim workout, I have to pee like 400 times.

I cannot stop peeing. What is going on? That doesn't happen to me running. It's weird, right? It's gotta be having to do something about like the hydrostatic pressure or something on your body that somehow, then you're like, all the water gets forced out.

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 because we want to know. I think I tweeted that question out one time and I got a bunch of answers. It was a long time ago. There is some biological reason.

I think part of it has to do with being horizontal. Part of it has to do with the water temperature. You know, even when you're swimming in a 75 degree pool, it's still so much colder than your body. So your body is expending a large percentage of its resources just to keep you warm on top of 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 sometimes I'll be in the shower and I'll just be like, holy shit. I'm so hungry. I know. But I get freaked out open water swimming. Do you? Well, 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. Oh yeah, in a bad way. You know, 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 that 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, this was a very long time ago. My buddies and I did it without a wetsuit, because we were 25 or whatever, and it's like, you're a puss if you without a wetsuit because we were, you know, 25 or whatever. And it's like, you're a puss if you wear a wetsuit.

So 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. Being in the middle, like perhaps like smack in the middle. And I just stopped for a mile and a half maybe? Yeah. Being in the middle, perhaps smack in the middle,

and I just stopped for a moment and looked around, and I was like, I'm in a shipping channel. Like that freaked me out, because there's massive boats out there. And they're on you in a second. So it wasn't the marine life, it was the fact that 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 this, the fist swimming. I didn't do that again without a wetsuit. I had a similar experience when I was doing my Alcatraz swim and then I hit a patch of seaweed. And you know when you hit something when you're swimming, you can't stop yourself from doing that jerk upright. And it was like my heart was like in my mouth. And then I just was like, oh, seaweed, seaweed, seaweed.

Because you're just, you can't, you're right. You can't see anything. Yeah. And it's freaky. It touches you. I'm not, I'm not really afraid of shark. 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 a shark, involves sharks and someone who spends a lot of time with them.

And I was thinking to myself that I have never, sharks haven't been a thing for me either, right? 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 it lives in their imagination and of course, jaws, but also that it's like a convenient receptacle for your fear.

Right. Right. 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. deal with it. Like it's all of these other things. And when we were just talking earlier about that,

you know, being in the dark, deep ocean and the sharks, like that being the most profound fear or the scariest place in any way. Like a primal thing that we have inside of us. 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's on the podcast and now he's creating this virtual reality

series where you put on the goggles and, you know, 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 them on and checked it out. It's wild, right? But they're using this now in kind of a- Oh, like a fear conditioning? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, to work with people who have PTSD

and other kinds of fears to help them process all of that in a healthy way. Yeah, I think that that fear exposure or exposure therapy is really interesting. And I think it's fascinating how VR can help with that. And I'm really curious about how the technology, you know, because 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. I got a little bit like that. I think I would have then develop a fear of nausea. But 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? How do you how do you- I don't know. Solve the disconnect, I mean.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. You can ask Kim. Go talk to Michael. You should, yeah, I'll hook you up. You should interview him. When you look at Kim or people like Lynn Cox or Lewis Pugh or Martin Strahl, like these epic, you know, super long distance swimmers,

Lewis like swam in the Arctic Circle, right? And didn't Martin swim the Amazon? He swam the Amazon. He did like a ridiculous amount of butterfly too, didn't he? Did you, are you aware of this? Yes, 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 kind of butterfly he's doing. He seems like a kooky guy. But like, it can't be the butterfly. What's your form like? I would like, that's not humanly possible. I don't know what kind of butterfly he's doing. He seems like a kooky guy. It can't be the butterfly that- What's your form like? I would like to see that. It's still crazy impressive, I can't imagine.

But like, what is it that these people share? Definitely a high pain threshold. I think there's, what I have gleaned from talking to some of these incredible endurance swimmers is that they are different. They're definitely different from us. Or maybe not from you. You're an endurance athlete. I don't like cold though. Go ahead.

I think cold is a divisive thing. Yeah. Amongst us. I mean, I like it after I've done it and I've put myself in that situation for that reason. But I'm not like Kim who like can't wait to get into the cold water. Right, she just jumps right in.

There's like a certain single-mindedness, I think, and certainly an ability to, I think, disassociate from their 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. Right, well, Lewis, it's very much about environmental preservation. Like he has a big why, a big purpose 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 um yeah i 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 I think that these athletes do start out as very motivated people, whatever it is they're doing. Kim was super motivated, like, doing her, you know, and her, you know, Silicon Valley job before. Right, 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 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 Lynn Cox and I asked Lewis Pugh about competition, right? And Lynn 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 as she said- You can still be internally competitive. Exactly. And then actually what she kept talking, she chafed against it because she didn't see it as, she didn't see it as being externally motivated about what anyone else was doing. I think that was the thing that she, that rubbed her the wrong way to think about. But she, you know, she is the, she is concerned with it though. Like it was about being the first and the coldest and the longest, 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. But with Kim, it all seems so easy. Like, cause she's always laughing and smiling, you know, like, hey, nothing but the thing. Yeah. Oh, but she is like,

she's got some shark in her. Did you talk to Ross Edgley? I didn't talk to Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley, I remember, God, 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 Swim. It was, the book was done.

But I remember reading about that and thinking, he would have been an interesting guy. Yeah, he's great. And he has his own book. He's great. Yeah. Yeah, he's, I mean, he's also a force of positive energy. Like he just, he really, he's insanely fit and like trains like a madman, 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 Kim has that. Ross definitely has that. Like he's a beast, but he's literally constantly cracking jokes and just 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, but he has unbelievable endurance. So he wrote this book about this combination of endurance and strength and how that works. Because you would think like, oh, you gotta 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 documented the whole thing along the way. Like he had the rashes on his neck from his wetsuit. I remember reading about that. You just got like open, so like gaping by the sea water too. Like on week one, you know, when he's doing this.

And he came out and did the podcast like right afterward. Like he literally had just completed it. Did you see his scars? Did he show you? Yeah, he's got a massive scar. He was putting that heavy duct tape on it and all kinds of stuff. But he's somebody who 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 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 and the elements. Yeah. I think that you, to do all of these things, you have to have

some motivation that is just very consuming, whether it's externally motivated or internally, it's just, it is. And, and I think that because you've had conversations with all kinds of people who are pushed to do extraordinary things, I'm sure that the sort of like 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 they could do. Or whether it's for some, you know, I want to raise awareness about something. But it is like, there is, how do we talk about it is important. Talk about it is important. I suppose that it's not necessarily,

it doesn't necessarily matter what the specific thing is, but there's gotta be some force that is compelling us to do it. Right. I loved 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 paddles, of swimming and in particular competitive swimming, tracing it back to its roots, all the way to Ben Franklin inventing the hand paddles,

which was like, that just blew my mind. I can't stop thinking about that. I mean, he is the true Renaissance man. Yeah, of course he invented hand paddles. It's unbelievable. And that cave in the Sahara where it was basically a tomb, where there were drawings of people swimming in a pond when at one time very long ago, the Sahara was a lush green area. It wasn't the desert.

It was dotted with paleo lakes, you know? I love that story. I love that, you know, the first human record of swimming is in the middle of the desert in Africa, because of course it is. But that you look at these images and it really looks like people are just breaststroking up the walls. And I also love that the Hungarian explorer who discovered that cave at the time, Lazo Amleste, he wrote a book about it, and he speculated that there were actual lakes and 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 editor reportedly was so like 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 in the middle of the Sahara. He was right. 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 um fish you know you know middens of clam shells 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 wreck, this is probably dates back up to 10,000 years ago, but we likely knew how to swim way before that. It's just that there's no trace of it. Evidence. Let's talk about the samurais. Okay.

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 nihoneho is the term for it in Japanese. It's the Japanese classical swimming art. So much like judo or kendo, 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 had to be protected by these different samurai clans. And because of Japan being archipelago and there's different you know there could be on the ocean or it could be on the edge of a lake or a river the clans each developed their own schools of swimming so they had different techniques for how to protect uh their you know the the land that

they were protecting and um there are these one of my favorite tidbits is that the sort of eggbeater technique of synchronized swimming 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're called ryuyu. I'm not pronouncing it right. R-Y-U, that, you know, you would 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 lake, you know, submerged, like most of your body's submerged, and you would learn to leap up out of the water into a boat. There's a move called the flying mullet. You can also Google this. The flying mullet?

Yeah, on YouTube. But this is from a warrior culture. This is from a warrior culture. This is how you use water to your advantage. Exactly. So it is much in the same way that now martial arts, they are a practice, right? They are a physical, but also a psychological practice, a philosophical practice, a whole body practice and mind. And I loved learning about Nihon Eho because 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, Niho Neho is still practiced in Japan today. 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 a lot of these masters of different schools of Nihon Eho 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, the national team success that we know it today, so much of it breaststroke, right? So they've been, Japanese swimmers have been really dominant in breaststroke for a long time. And there's an interesting historical link to the techniques of Nihon Eho.

I mean, I remember talking to one of these masters of the art and he was trying to explain, and we were observing a class in Yokohama of these swimmers taking the class. And he said, you know, we were observing the glide and the certain formations that they would be swimming in. And he said, you know, Kitajima, you know, Kosuke Kitajima, which is like the world record holder in inner breaststroke. Right, just this dominant breaststroker

known for like this incredible glide. And he said, that's Nihan Eho. Like he was just like, that's the skill that we teach. And that has been ingrained into like coaching. Yeah, 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- were crushing it back then. That was crazy. And it's all rooted in this practice, which my sense is it's not quite a Tai Chi 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 that. And they're, they're, they're fighting the water. It's obvious. They're making the water work against them. You know what I mean? And, And really, you know, swimming is about fitness, of course, and technique, but it's really about finesse. And 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. flow with the water and make it work for them. And those tend to be the most successful swimmers. I think that the Tai Chi analogy is really salient 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 people are starting to swim, are starting to learn how to swim competitively and go fast, like there's so much muscling. There's so much overall, like windmilling. You're just trying to 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 expending a lot of energy.

Right. One of the things that's interesting about Lynn 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 unique- She's riding a little bit higher than the average person would. And she's talked about that. And so that also helps her 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 cap or whatever at each level that you achieve. I think it was like stripes 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 hope to get the opportunity.

I actually had been trying and planning to get to the Tokyo Olympics so I could see that happen, see that sort of reintroduction of, of to the world. But what's your sense of whether the Olympics are going to happen or not? Oh my gosh. Well, can they make a bubble big enough? I don't know. Right. What do you think? Yeah. I don't, 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 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 light? Well, now we're getting, and then we'll be getting into the point where then it is in the same year as the winter Olympic year, right? Again, which is kind of ironic. I know.

Can you imagine being an Olympic athlete and living in that space of not knowing? Yeah, 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 training and then they have had to calibrate their training for another year.

And I think it will like 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 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. Like it's just gotta be really challenging. It turns out it's expensive. Yeah. To be an athlete. It is, 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 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, and 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, right. I love that FDR was the one who put the pool in. 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 why it's called the press pool?

It cannot get better than that. 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 one of the reporters at npr who who goes the who reports in 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 um where the pool actually is is a is a bunch

of like internet servers and stuff and i thought that that is, oh, and that Hillary Clinton wanted, when they moved into the White House, she wanted to reopen the pool again 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, and balance so he could solve this unsolvable problem. Isn't it fun to think about swimming as like a, a hidden actor in these moments of history, maybe that's a good one. Well, and imagine being FDR,

the freedom, you know, of being able to get out of the wheelchair and move your body. And he hid his yeah nobody knew you know yeah his he hit his it was so hard um and then it finally became you know uh impossible to hide um 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 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, the first thing I'd do, I'd look to see if they had Chinatown and I would go and kind of see. It was interesting. It was

just a little window to see how is this place different or the same to me across the Chinese diaspora. And then I realized what I do with swimming is that I look for a place to swim. The pool, yeah. A pool or body of water. How often is the pool in Chinatown? Oh, well, there's the Chinatown YMCA in San Francisco. I know. There you go.

Gorgeous pool. But yeah, not that often, it turns out. Right. Um, but I, 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. It's 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. 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 he was like, I'm not sleeping next to that thing. Oh God, that was like, what, 15 years ago.

I wasn't out of the water for that long, 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 in many cases. Right, it's interesting that when people get injured on land, they send them to the pool to repair themselves. And then they go back on land and injure themselves.

And then pound the crap out of their bodies. Yeah, I had Laird Hamilton here the other day, and he's got these legendary pool workouts, and part of the philosophy behind it is that very thing, which is when you injure 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 this 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 patient and saying, just keep doing it. Why don't you keep doing it? My brother's PT, so I hear him lamenting all the time. And he says to me, cause I said my elbow and my shoulder

were sort of bothering me the other day. And he said, so did you stop doing the exercises that I gave you? Of course I did. 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 who was teaching swimming lessons, because this is another cool story. I didn't know anything about this guy. Well-

Like a foreign service 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 a long time ago. He had read something that I had 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 to 2010. And it was a time when Baghdad was seeing a lot of 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 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 multi-level diving boards in fact you can see um there are some i don't know if they're still up but there are some youtube videos of service soldiers yeah soldiers like jumping off of the diving boards um which doesn't actually

it doesn't see watching them doesn't speak well of us. I don't know. There's just something sort of- Well, we just, we descend upon the palace and take it over and turn it into like a playground. It's that kind of like imperialist 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 i wouldn't want to be at 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 finding quiet and he said that when he um would get in this pool he would just then that's when he stopped hearing like the firing range,

like, you know, you'd be muffled. And otherwise it's like this incessant noise of like military exercises. And, you know, the people who were there were from all over the world, you know, they're diplomats, soldiers, UN peacekeepers, translators, local Iraqis who were there providing support. And he saw that that pool was, again, like everyone, all the animals flock to the watering hole. But in this case, it was like a psychological space. Like a coping mechanism.

A coping mechanism. And he was swimming. He taught swimming lessons for a long time. He was a lifeguard, you know, had grown up in the Baltimore suburbs, I think, D.C. And he has, you know, great form. And he started to teach. A lot of people would come up to him and 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 kind, he's a teacher. He's like, his joy and his role in life is to be a teacher. You know, he's a very, and to do it. and his role in life is to be a teacher. You know, he's a very, and to do it, and 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 that you want, it's authority.

You seek that approval, though. You seek that approval. I wouldn't say that he's a person, I don't know 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 you. Uh-huh. And so he was able to kind of, I mean, I think of him as a pied Piper of all of these swimmers in the green zone because he kind of was. He ended up building this Baghdad swim club of like a roster of 250 some odd people rotated over two years and would be teaching swimming lessons. I mean, they kept having to add classes because they kept coming to inquire.

It's like a feel-good movie. Yeah, it's totally a feel-good movie. 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 how beautiful the sunsets are and like how people would swim like sort of at dusk

or at dawn, like not at high noon, it was 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 would occur, right? Because that sand would obscure um the ability to find the people who'd been hit right right you it was cover for um it was a good mortaring opportunity and it's just like to exist in that reality like you 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, Jay almost got hit by a mortar in his trailer, like on the third day he was in Baghdad, you know, he, he really almost didn't live to have this club, you know, teaches people to swim. And it sort of underlines this, just how, again, porousness between states. And that's one of the big themes of the book is like, 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? The adrenaline rush, the urgency of feeling just really alive. That feeling is something that 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.

Right. One that can really, again, and certainly, especially with the ocean, can really rob you of that life in pretty short order if you're careful. I don't want to scare people, but it is. I don't think about that. Yeah. Like, you know, that doesn't occur. I'm so acclimated to swimming. Like, pool, forget about it. Like, I don't think about pool being dangerous at all.

Like, that is my natural habitat. Right. I'm more hyper aware of that when I'm in the ocean, of course, but. Right, but you were talking about how you don't like it. Yeah, I know. I mean, that's definitely a thing, but like in the pool, like the idea that something bad is going to happen to me is not anything that I think about. 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, who are afraid of the water, that is a profound fear. And that is something that once you get 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 and say i want to learn how to swim and i've talked to quite a few folks who um you know had recently started to take lessons or had um uh 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. Well, you're very vulnerable. You're essentially naked, 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 courageous. Yeah.

It's doable if you submit to the process. Yeah. You know, it is a weird thing. It's like violin or, you know, 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 learned later in life and just love it 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 what will always remain consistent is this, you know, flow-like experience that you have in water that I can't replicate in any other way. Yeah. You cite like Moby Dick in that, right? Like this idea of sea dreaming, 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. Really? Because it did serve that function for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not surprised. But you know what? It's better when you do both.

They're different. They are different. They are different. And surfing is a whole different thing, right? Which is another aspect of swimming, I suppose, on some level. But its own unique relationship with water and symbiotically living with the 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 wave. Otherwise it's not pretty. Yeah. So I suppose you're gonna swim for the rest of your life i hope so they better open the pools back up soon yeah right yeah i know a lot of um mer 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 smooth back. Way better, I'm way more capable. And when I said they better open the pool soon, let me please like couch that in context. Like I'm not saying be unsafe. I just wish we could be in a situation

where pools could safely open. Yeah. Because I know that I'm a better person and 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. Yeah. I know you do too. What do you, let's close it with this thought, which is, what is it that you, you know, 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 I took it for granted too, like anyone else, right? 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 that time with myself. And now it's like this juggling act of trying to find, again, like the lane reservation or the window where like I don't 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, please go. We'll all be happier. Does he swim? 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, we woke up the other morning and it was like, you know, one of those mornings that where you could see your breath. And that's not that usual here in California, guys. It's many places. This time of year though.

I mean, it's high thirties at night here, but then it'll be 82 by like two 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 and goes, boy, what I really want to do right now is jump in the freezing ocean. And I just had to laugh because I said, you know, that actually, I mean, I know that sounds insane, but it sounds pretty good to me.

And that's why I'm leaving. I love you. Goodbye. That's hilarious. And so he understands me for sure. It took me a long time to come back to that kind of appreciation though, because I was so steeped in 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, you know, but I've kind of come around to, you know, fall in love with it in a new way, as long as I don't look at the pace clock. Because that will give you PTSD.

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

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 the swimming pool. 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, right? Or been interested in exploring that. It kind of nudged me that way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. It kind of nudged me that way. 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 a very direct title. And 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 Sarah and the Big Wave. And it's about Sarah Gerhardt, the first woman to surf Mavericks. Yeah.

Is she the one that's in Riding Giants? She's, I don't know. In the Mavericks segment? Oh, she probably was. There's one woman that's interviewed around the Mavericks discussion in that movie, but I can't remember her name. It's been so long since I've seen that documentary. But yeah, it was, I mean, 1999. She lives in Santa Cruz.

She's a professor. It's a you know she's a professor you know it's it's like so she's a it's a wonderful story and and it was my first children's book and it was such a joy to write so fun how did you find like do you i assume you got an illustrator to work with um sophie deal she they asked my publisher actually asked me like like, they don't normally do it. 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 illustrator is working together? No, it's like usually the writer writes the book and then they find an

illustrator and parent. Really? Yeah. No way. Because all these books seem so- How is that possible? Like you have to be simpatico. Yeah, exactly. And usually the publisher does not consult the author.

The publisher just chooses. But in this case- No way. They let me choose. And she said, yes. They don't consult the author? They don't do that. They go and get some illustrator?

It's two lanes. And she said, yes. They don't consult the author? They don't do that. They go and get some illustrator? It's two lanes. It's like, and they have the author and they have the illustrator and they do the pairing. That's like 90% of the time. Isn't that fascinating?

That's shocking to me. I know. Because it seems like you have to have it braided together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess it works. But I feel like they're missing out on an opportunity is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think so. Speaking of which, why didn't you read your audio book?

Oh, that's a great question. I don't know that the option was offered to me, but they said- You should have just said, I'm doing it. They asked me, well, again, they asked me who I wanted. 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 that I would have liked to have heard you read it. Well, thank you. Next time. Next time. Put your foot down. It's your book. Now I throw my weight around have heard you read it. Well, thank you. Next time. Next time. Put your foot down. It's your book. Now I throw my weight around all the time. Cool.

Well, come back and talk to me again sometime. This was really fun. I appreciate it. Thank you, Rich. 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.

I'm on Twitter and Instagram and all the things. You can find me on my website at bonnietoy.com. Easiest way to do it. Do it. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Let's go swimming.

Let's do it. Peace. 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 at richroll.com. And you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter

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footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis. Portraits by Allie Rogers and Davey Greenberg. Graphic elements, courtesy of Jessica Miranda. Copywriting by Georgia Whaley. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

Namaste. Thank you.