Competitive Swimming
Having left one seaside town behind, I discovered one other within New York City—this one providing smoked fish and Czech beer at my favourite Russian restaurant on the boardwalk, the place I’d retreat after I’d had sufficient of the water. But even at Brighton Beach I swam solely in the summer, when the city streets were so broiling that I might overlook the murky water and the shreds of Styrofoam bobbing along beside me. In 1587, Sir Everard Digby, a scholar from Cambridge, wrote a treatise on swimming, “De Arte Natandi,” by which he shared methods for preserving afloat and for getting in and out of water safely. The textual content, originally written in Latin however translated to English a couple of years later, was accompanied by woodcuts of nude swimmers performing a sequence of now unfamiliar strokes.
Swim Styles
Advocates of cold-water swimming dwell less on its …