The Water Cure

“Everything you have to do to get to the point of actually doing it is a hassle,” a friend groused to me recently as I extolled the virtues of swimming. I get it. If you don’t live close to a body of water, hauling yourself and your brood to the shore with all the attendant gear can be a massive hassle, like trekking the Oregon Trail. But once you arrive, once you’re in the water, is there anything so magical, so ecstatically right as floating there, your body suspended? The sun may beat down, but you’re comfortably submerged. You’re a cool and weightless mer-creature, returned to the primordial soup that formed you.

I should be clear: I do not technically swim when I’m in the water. I know swimming is incredible exercise, but when I’m in a lake or pool I want to splash and drift and look up at the sky, not toil or kick or perfect the pull of my crawl stroke. I have a group of friends, however, who are competing to see how many lake laps they can swim before Labor Day, and I’m intrigued by their industry. They take what I approach as the ultimate in relaxation and make it into an endurance sport.

August is high season for swimming the English Channel, a feat that, for a polliwog like me, is so impressive and impossible it feels hard to imagine. Twenty-one or more miles from Dover to Cap Gris-Nez, powered by your own arms and legs and all that bilateral breathing. Channel swims used to be big news. (“Willis Hanks, who walks five miles a day taking special delivery mail to the garment district, announced yesterday that he would try to swim the English Channel next month,” began a Times story from 1958.) Now, we’re accustomed to achievements of extreme athletic endurance.

Perhaps no one was more breathlessly celebrated than the first woman to make the crossing, a 20-year-old New Yorker and gold-medal Olympian named Gertrude Ederle. Monday was the 100th anniversary of Ederle’s first attempt at the Channel. She completed the swim in 1926, breaking the men’s record by nearly two hours.

If you find yourself with time when you’re not swimming this weekend, you might take a dive into Ederle’s life — archival stories about her contain delightful details. She sparred publicly with the coach for her first attempt, telling The Times, “I will never understand Mr. Wolffe’s statement that I sat around playing the ukulele when I should have been training.” At the start of her successful swim, she sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to the rhythm of her stroke, while her accompanying boat crew yelled at her to conserve her breath. While she swam, the crew held up signs reading “one wheel” and “two wheels” to remind her of the red roadster her father promised her if she finished. She was, according to a member of her team, “this pretty, tiny atom of humanity in her red bathing dress.” Calvin Coolidge called her “America’s best girl.” An estimated two million people turned out for the ticker-tape parade in New York on her return.

Ederle’s story is inspiring, but not enough to make me abandon my devotion to steeping languidly in the lake while hardier aquanauts complete their 97th, 98th lap of the summer. The water doesn’t care if you’re a wader or a whale. How wonderful that it will cool you off and surround your limbs and exert its upward force on you. No matter if you’re in it to break a world record or just to lie still like a buoy, face up in the late-August sun.