Keep Calm and Swim to France

Author: Mark Ransom
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781719209922
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Swimming across the English Channel is regarded as one of the world's toughest endurance challenges. During a night out with friends, Mark Ransom made a drunken pact with one of them that they would swim the English Channel the following year. At the time he had no idea just what this was going to entail and it proved to be the toughest year of his life. This is a blow by blow account of Mark's journey throughout that year where he had to organise and train for this monumental event. He soon realised that this was not just about the challenge of swimming the English Channel but was also about overcoming many personal challenges and confronting his inner demons along the way. Mark talks openly about his low moments when he wanted to give up altogether and also his high points and the comical situations he found himself in. From the intimate details of a child's beginnings to a man's fears and troubles, Mark's story is so captivating and honest. Mark discloses his innermost thoughts and feelings including those he experienced during the swim itself. Following on from his successful solo swim Mark returned to the Channel a few years later to organise two relay teams to race to France. The final part of the book details the organisation of this challenge and finishes with an account of the race itself. Mark Ransom's book aims to entertain, inform and inspire. This is as close as you can get to experiencing an English Channel Swim without actually doing it!

Young Woman and the Sea

Author: Glenn Stout
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0618858687
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Book Description
THE PERFECT MILE meet SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA in this compelling tale of how nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.

Dover Solo

Author: Marcia Cleveland
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780967209111
Category : Long distance swimming
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

The Crossing

Author: Kathy Watson
Publisher: Headline
ISBN: 1472236149
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
*Now a Major Film* On the night of 24 August 1875 Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old British Navy captain, launched himself into the English Channel at Dover. Twenty-one hours and 45 minutes later he became the first man to swim the English Channel. In this acclaimed biography, Kathy Watson shows how Captain Webb was instrumental in bringing the sport of swimming into the modern era. It is also a study of the Victorian drive to push back the boundaries of endurance. In THE CROSSING, Watson uses this great British eccentric's extraordinary life as a springboard to explore themes of obsession and failure and the emerging force of the media, and swimming's place in our psyche.

Modern Sports around the World

Author: David Asa Schwartz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 515

Book Description
Modern Sports around the World focuses on the history, geography, sociology, economics, and technological advancements of 50 sports played from India to Ireland. Sports have become an international spectacle that influences nations' foreign policy, world economies, and regional morale. Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake as governments and multinational corporations rush to make sure they have a place at the table. And yet, sports come from humble beginnings. We are fascinated by who can run the fastest, lift the most weight, jump the highest, swim the farthest, and act with the most precision. The history of sports is the history of the world. Modern Sports around the World examines 50 of the world's most popular sports. Each chapter features one sport and details that sport's origins, global migration, economic forces, media influences, political environment, pop-culture inspirations, scandalous moments, and key individuals. Sports history is a tapestry of sociological variables; Modern Sports around the World weaves them together to create a unique history book that explains not only where humanity has been, but where it might be going.

Swimming in the Sink

Author: Lynne Cox
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101971835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
In this stunning memoir of life after loss, the open-water swimming legend and bestselling author tells of facing the one challenge that no amount of training could prepare her for. A celebrated athlete who set swimming records around the world, Lynne Cox achieved astonishing feats of strength and endurance. She was the first to swim the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, the Strait of Magellan, and the coast of Antarctica, and she was the fastest to swim the English Channel. But it is a different kind of struggle that pushes her to the brink. In a short period of time, Lynne loses her father, and then her mother, and then Cody, her beloved Labrador retriever. Soon after, Lynne herself is diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition that leaves her unable to swim and barely able to walk. But against all odds, and with the support of her friends and family, Lynne begins the slow pull toward recovery, reaching always for the open waters that give her the freedom and mastery that mean everything to her. What follows is a beautifully poignant meditation on loss and an exhilarating celebration of life as, to Lynne’s surprise, she begins to find, within the unfamiliar space of vulnerability, the greatest treasures—like falling in love.

Find a Way

Author: Diana Nyad
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804172919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
NOW THE NETFLIX FILM NYAD, STARRING ANNETTE BENING AND JODIE FOSTER Hillary Clinton said that Find a Way would stay with her through the general election: “When you’re facing big challenges in your life, you can think about Diana Nyad getting attacked by the lethal sting of box jellyfishes. And nearly anything else seems doable in comparison.” When Diana Nyad arrived on the shore of Key West after fifty-three hours of grueling swimming across an epic ocean, she not only set a world record—becoming the first person to swim the shark-infested waters between Cuba and Florida with no cage for protection—she also succeeded in fulfilling a dream she first chased at age twenty-eight and at long last achieved when she was sixty-four. Now, in a riveting memoir, Diana shares a spirited account of what it takes to face one’s fears, engage one’s passions, and never ever give up. For no matter what life may throw at you, or how many times you may have experienced defeat, it is always possible—as long as you commit to living life to the nth degree, no regrets—to “find a way."

Godspeed

Author: Casey Legler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501135775
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
“A memoir for our times.” —Michael Stipe “A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.” —Kirkus Reviews “I swim for every chance to get wasted—after every meet, every weekend, every travel trip. This is what I look forward to and what I tell no one: the burn of it down my throat, to my soul curled up in my lungs, the sharpest pain all over it—it seizes and stretches, becoming alive again, and is the only thing that makes sense.” At fifteen, Casey Legler is already one of the fastest swimmers in the world. She is also an alcoholic, isolated from her family, and incapable of forming lasting connections with those around her. Driven to compete at the highest levels, sent far away from home to train with the best coaches and teams, she finds herself increasingly alone and alienated, living a life of cheap hotels and chlorine-worn skin, anonymous sexual encounters and escalating drug use. Even at what should be a moment of triumph—competing at age sixteen in the 1996 Olympics—she is an outsider looking in, procuring drugs for Olympians she hardly knows, and losing her race after setting a new world record in the qualifying heats. After submitting to years of numbing training in France and the United States, Casey can see no way out of the sinister loneliness that has swelled and festered inside her. Yet wondrously, when it is almost too late, she discovers a small light within herself, and senses a point of calm within the whirlwind of her life. In searing, evocative, visceral prose, Casey gives language to loneliness in this startling story of survival, defiance, and of the embers that still burn when everything else in us goes dark.

Oceans Seven

Author: Martin Schauhuber
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
If you had to swim through hell seven times, wouldn't you try to get it done quickly? Attila Mányoki made it his life's mission to complete the Oceans Seven - and break the world record while doing so. This crowning jewel of marathon swimming comprises seven of the most dangerous channels in the world, tormenting swimmers who dare to cross them with freezing water, deadly wildlife, and massive waves. In this book, Mányoki takes you on his journey from his beginnings as a short kid with asthma through decades of painful struggles and unlikely successes, all the way to a night spent on life support. He relives the day a Greek stranger gave him the most valuable of life lessons, explains his secrets to enduring excruciating pain and opens up on how he faced the sea that had almost killed him for one final showdown.

America's Girl

Author: Tim Dahlberg
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429925582
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
America's Girl is an intimate look at the life and trials of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but broke the record set by men. The feat so thrilled America that it welcomed her home with a ticker tape parade that drew two million people. This fascinating portrait follows Ederle from her early days as a competitive swimmer through her gold medal triumph at the 1924 Olympics, to the first attempt the next year by Ederle to swim from France to England in frigid and turbulent waters, a feat that had been conquered by only five men up to that time. This is also a stirring look at the go-go era of the 1920s, when the country was about to recognize that women not only could vote, but compete on an international scale as athletes. At the height of Prohibition, Ederle's triumph over the formidable Channel was a triumph for women everywhere. America's Girl immerses readers in a pivotal era of American history and brings to life the spirit of that time.