Swimmer's Daily

  • Though Rice freshman swimmer Ahalya Lettenberger has barely finished her first week of college classes, she already has an excused absence from the University for September while she attempts to bring home gold.

  • The teens broke into a water tower in the city of Snohomish and recorded themselves as they went for a swim. That recording eventually made its way into the hands of police, who busted them.

  • The FASTEST (and strongest) 180kg swim you will EVER see! After eating 7,000 calories of chicken and cheesecake, me and Eddie took to the pool for some interval sprint training and we talk about how he’s used swimming conditioning throughout his ENTIRE career! Just an INCREDIBLE human (and apex predator in the water) this is PART 3 of 3 which took place in the pool.

  • The celebrities have to swim 500m in Lake Windermere, but can Alex Brooker complete their first big task?

  • When 50 year old Paul Wilcox was taken by a great white shark off Byron Bay, he became the fourth confirmed shark fatality in Australian waters in just 12 months. It seems shark attacks are becoming more frequent, and being at one of the country’s most iconic beaches, makes it all the more confronting. However, a leading group of shark researchers believe we might have it wrong when it comes to sharks, especially great whites. And they’re going to extraordinary lengths to prove it, taking reporter Allison Langdon on the dive of her life. Face to face with a great white shark, outside the cage, and totally exposed.

  • How do jumping in the pool, and fearlessly speaking with impact relate? Discover more in this video with speaker coach Elizabeth Van Den Bergh.

  • Olympic swimmer Stephen Milne returned to his roots, joining children at Perth Leisure Pool to celebrate the success of the Learn to Swim programme. There are already almost 2,500 youngsters of all abilities in the Perth Live Active Leisure Programme.

  • I’m a cardiologist and academic and this is an overly detailed look at the Wim Hof Method.

  • Smartphones conveniently take the blame for just about every other societal ill, from rising anxiety to declining sex. But Farrey assured me that screen culture is not the culprit here. What’s telling, he said, is that the children of high-income parents are playing as much as ever. Kids from homes earning more than $100,000 are now twice as likely to play a team sport at least once a day as kids from families earning less than $25,000.

    The deeper story is that the weed of American-style meritocracy is strangling the roots of youth sports. As parents have recognized that athletic success can burnish college applications, sports have come to resemble just another pre-professional program, with rising costs, hyper-specialization, and massive opportunity-hoarding among the privileged.

    Before kids enter high school, they tend to participate in youth sports leagues, which have become one big pay-to-play machine. It’s now common for high-income parents to pull their kids out of the local soccer or baseball leagues and write thousand-dollar checks to join super-teams that travel to play similar kids several counties away. As I wrote last year, it’s not a crime for parents to spend money on their children. But as travel teams hoard talented (and, typically, high-income) kids, they leave behind desiccated local leagues with fewer resources and fewer players. As a result, many low-income children lose the sports habit (or never gain it to begin with), and simply stop playing altogether by the time they get to high school.

    Another crucial factor is the rise in sports specialization. Once again, it might seem harmless that ambitious parents and coaches want talented kids to pick a sport and focus on it. But the frenzy around early specialization might be misplaced. A 2015 paper from Harvard concluded that specialization—defined as at least one year of intensive training in a single sport that requires quitting other activities—increased risks of “injury and burnout.” In July, ESPN published a two-part story on specialization in basketball and its correlation with injuries and emotional exhaustion. One coach likened the overwork of young athletes to “an epidemic.”

    What’s more, it’s simple math that specialization means fewer kids per high-school sports team. A teenager who plays three sports counts as three distinct participants in the NFHS data. So the decline in participants partly reflects the fact that students who, 20 years ago, played football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring are now just focusing entirely on, say, basketball.

    Read The Atlantic