Swimming To Antarctica

by Cox, Lynne

• ISBN13: 9780156031301
• ISBN10: 0156031302
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-07
• Publisher: Mariner Books

Summary

Now in paperback, with photos and maps added especially for this new edition, here is the acclaimed life story of a woman whose drive and determination inspire everyone she touches.Lynne Cox started swimming almost as soon as she could walk. By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic.Lynne writes the same way she swims, with indefatigable spirit and joy, and shares the beauty of her time in the water with a poet's eye for detail. She has accomplished yet another feat--writing a new classic of sports memoir.

Author Biography

LYNNE COX has set records all over the world for open-water swimming. She was named Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year, inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2000, honored with a lifetime achievement award from the University of California--Santa Barbara, and worked for six years as a research librarian in Orange County. She lives in Los Alamitos, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Prologue A Cold Day in August	1	(133)
1 Beginnings	7	(7)
2 Leaving Home	14	(13)
3 Open Water	27	(13)
4 Twenty-six Miles Across the Sea	40	(17)
5 English Channel	57	(12)
6 White Cliffs of Dover	69	(26)
7 Homecoming	95	(7)
8 Invitation to Egypt	102	(22)
9 Lost in the Fog	124	(10)
10 Cook Strait, New Zealand	134	(12)
11 Human Research Subject	146	(14)
12 The Strait of Magellan	160	(17)
13 Around the Cape of Good Hope	177	(17)
14 Around the World in Eighty Days	194	(10)
15 Glacier Bay	204	(20)
16 Facing the Bomb	224	(10)
17 The A-Team	234	(14)
18 Mind-Blowing	248	(17)
19 Debate	265	(17)
20 Across the Bering Strait	282	(20)
21 Success	302	(5)
22 Siberia's Gold Medal	307	(7)
23 Swimming to Antarctica	314	(44)
Afterword	358

Excerpts

"Please. Please. Please, Coach, let us out of the pool, we're freezing," pleaded three purple-lipped eight-year-olds in lane two.Coach Muritt scowled at my teammates clinging to the swimming pool wall. Usually this was all he had to do to motivate them, and they'd continue swimming. But this day was different. Ominous black clouds were crouched on the horizon, and the wind was gusting from all different directions. Even though it was a mid-July morning in Manchester, New Hampshire, it felt like it would snow.Cupping his large hands against his red face, and covering the wine-colored birthmark on his left cheek, Coach Muritt bellowed, "Get off the wall! Swim!""We're too cold," the boys protested.Coach Muritt did not like to be challenged by anyone, let alone three eight-year-old boys. Irritated, he shouted again at the swimmers to get moving, and when they didn't respond, he jogged across the deck with his fist clenched, his thick shoulders hunched against the wind and his short-chopped brown hair standing on end. Anger flashed in his icy blue eyes, and I thought, I'd better swim or I'll get in trouble too, but I wanted to see what was going to happen to the boys.Coach Muritt shook his head and shouted, "Swim and you'll get warm!"But the boys weren't budging. They were shaking, their teeth chattering."Come on, swim. If you swim, you'll warm up," Coach Muritt coaxed them. He looked up at the sky, then checked his watch, as if trying to decide what to do. In other lanes, swimmers were doing the breaststroke underwater, trying to keep their arms warm. More teammates were stopping at the wall and complaining that they were cold. Laddie and Brooks McQuade, brothers who were always getting into trouble, were breaking rank, climbing out of the pool and doing cannonballs from the deck. Other young boys and girls were joining them."Hey, stop it! Someone's going to get hurt-get your butts back in the water!" Coach Muritt yelled. He knew he was losing control, that he had pushed the team as far as we could go, so he waved us in. When all seventy-five of us reached the wall, he motioned for us to move toward a central lane and then he shouted, "Okay, listen up. Listen up. I'll make a deal with you. If I let you get out now, you will all change into something warm and we'll meet in the boys' locker room. Then we will do two hours of calisthenics."Cheering wildly, my teammates leaped out of the pool, scurried across the deck, grabbed towels slung over the chain-link fence surrounding the pool, and squeezed against one another as they tried to be first through the locker room doors.Getting out of the water was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I hated doing calisthenics with the team. Usually we did them five days a week for an hour, after our two-hour swimming workout. A typical workout included five hundred sit-ups, two hundred push-ups, five hundred leg extensions, five hundred half sit-ups, two hundred leg lifts on our backs, an

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Excerpted from Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.