Why We Swim Quotes

“You don’t have to be a great swimmer to appreciate the benefits of sensory solitude and the equilibrium the water can bring.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“For many swimmers, the act of swimming is a tonic, in that old-fashioned sense of the word: it is a restorative, a stimulant, undertaken for a feeling of vigor and well-being. The word tonic comes from the Greek tonikos, “of or for stretching.” About a dozen people”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Buoyancy, floating, weightlessness. Freedom. These are the words we use to talk about swimming. Is it a coincidence that this is also the language we use to talk about the lightness of being, the wellness of being, that we strive for in this corporeal world?”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Franz Kafka observed that “the truth is always an abyss. One must—as in a swimming pool—dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order later to rise again—laughing and fighting for breath—to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“I begin to realize that the physical repetition can be a kind of meditation that transcends the simple goal of winning a race.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Tanaka’s lab has pioneered new research on swimming’s effects on two of the biggest hallmarks of aging: high blood pressure and arthritis. “Over the last four or five years, a funky thing happened—we realized that the effects of swimming actually surpassed the magnitude of the effects of walking or cycling,” he tells me. “None of us knew that before.” Average reduction in blood pressure after land-based exercise training is five to seven points. Swimming, he found, reduces blood pressure by an average of nine points—in the blood-pressure world, that’s significant. It also decreases arterial stiffness, a condition in which the walls of your arteries become less elastic and add strain to the heart muscle.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“How nice it would be to die swimming toward the sun. —Le Corbusier”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“I will tell you the one thing that distinguishes swimming from all other forms of exercise.” I listen carefully. “People enjoy it a lot more.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Learning to swim meant learning how to relinquish control, to thrive in a space of uncertainty.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, & again, & forever again.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Over time, swimming has shifted from mere mechanics and survival—a military skill, practiced by men—to achieve a more intangible significance: a form of recreation, a pleasure, something that can sharpen your spiritual as well as physical health. This idea of swimming for wellness, emotional resonance, whole personhood, rings true to me. The physical is intertwined with the psychological.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Seawater is so similar in mineral content to human blood plasma that our white blood cells can survive and function in it for some time. I delight in my mental picture of this, the not-so-fanciful notion that we have seawater circulating in our veins.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“We dare to jump so we can see something new. And sometimes we do it to recover a sense of what we once had.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“As I learn more about the Baghdad swimmers, I start noticing how the water is a privileged space and what an invitation to that space can mean for all kinds of tribes.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Differences fell away in the water.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Swimming has always been a means of escape: physical, spiritual, mental. And if that’s true, then what better place is there for a swim team than a war zone?”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“The original prohibitions at public pools were put in place in fear of this very thing: people of different races, genders, and backgrounds mixing together.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Dave Rastovich: “We forget our bodies as we know them and we just . . . swim.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“(When I ask one swimmer, a middle-aged woman named Kate, how she’d characterize the two clubs, she confides that the Dolphin Club is “like living with your parents—we’re more conservative. The South End is like the frat house. They’re more risky.” Standing next to Kate is her friend, a South Ender, who laughs appreciatively at this.)”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“swimming as the act of moving in the embrace of water,”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Some of the benefits of swimming derive, ironically, from daring to come as close as we can to this very fight for survival. That’s the sublime: the awe and the terror, together. Those moments of panic, the electric flashes of fear, are elucidating, exhilarating. The act of getting in is a small defiance of death itself.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water. Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Swimming’s benefit, he argues, has as much to do with intellectual enhancements as it does the achievements of the body. The ideal modern swimmer focuses on the whole experience rather than the perception of exercise as a “tune-up.” Important, too, is the pride we feel in the well-exercised body. “The fuller sense of self we have,” Young once told an interviewer, “the more responsibility we take for it.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Athletes who can perform on demand—Torres, Phelps, Ledecky—are enough like SEALs that this was Bauman’s mantra for the American swimmers in Rio, in 2016: Swim like a dolphin, think like a SEAL.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“When we dive underwater, the spleen contracts as part of the mammalian diving reflex, shooting its supply of oxygenated red blood cells into circulation around the body. The heart rate slows, and blood vessels constrict, directing blood flow away from the extremities and toward major organs. These energy conservation measures kick in so we can use available oxygen more efficiently.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Important, too, is the pride we feel in the well-exercised body. “The fuller sense of self we have,” Young once told an interviewer, “the more responsibility we take for it.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“After Kim started swimming in the cold waters of the bay, she noticed a change in her severely nerve-damaged right leg: it had more feeling in it. She had a theory that she ran by her physicians in those early days. “All the blood is sucked from your extremities to protect your organs when you get in that cold water,” she explains, in her lilting New Zealand accent, during one of our marathon phone calls after work one evening. (When she’s not training or traveling the world for swims, she has until recently been working as a director of community engagement for Adobe, the software company.) “Couldn’t it be possible that when the blood rushes back into those extremities after you warm up again, that you’re getting a kind of oxygen therapy? That there’s a higher rate of it being flushed around your body?” Her doctors said they could see the validity in it, with oxygen circulating at a much faster rate than if Kim were sedentary or even exercising on land. The result: her nerves were regenerating at a swifter pace relative to that of the previous two years.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“It hits me that this kind of thinking is in alignment with the traditional adaptiveness of the sea nomads: that we should teach ourselves how to live with water, not how to keep it at bay.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“When it comes to swimming, the competition part has always unnerved me. I don’t like it all that much, and I still can’t quite make sense of it, so I admit it’s hard to write about. Thinking about racing makes me feel queasy. Even when I was a kid, contemplating a race would send me to the bathroom more than once during a single meet, my intestines in revolt. Fight or flight! I liked winning, and I liked swimming fast, but I couldn’t figure out how to control all the other stuff that went along with getting your body into the revved-up state required to slay your rivals.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“to be ignorant of “either letters or swimming,” Plato declared, was to lack a proper education.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim