Swimmer's Daily

  • Families of children with autism and other special needs will see changes at the animal interaction park Discovery Cove.

  • Stig Pryds is a Danish record holding freediver. He was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis in 2008, which disabled him so much that he lost his business. After 5 years of intense pain and increasing dependency on drugs, he decided to quit all drugs cold turkey, and find alternative ways to deal with his disease. He began practising yoga daily, changed his diet, and started practising freediving. This caused drastic changes: within months he could walk without a cane, and he could play with his two young daughters again.

    It also taught him how good he actually was at freediving; within a year he started setting Danish records. He started traveling the world going to freediving competitions, where the warm weather and sun also improved his condition. He used his increased exposure from the Danish records to tell the story of his recovery and inspire people to live a healthy lifestyle. He started teaching others how to deal with auto-immune disorders.

    The downside of his new fame was that the insurance company, who paid his monthly disability check, noticed that he was doing things a healthy person does. Despite the argument that he’s only healthy because he can do these travels and trainings, the insurance company threatened to sue him for lying -he’d have to pay back all the disability checks plus a fee. With the help from his doctors Stig managed to convince them his disease is real, just that he manages it well, but the insurance company decided to stop paying him his disability. The stress this whole procedure caused was enormous and Stig relapsed into severe pain.

    We shot this video in January, the hardest month for Stig, where he had to figure out how to proceed. We talked about how life can keep dealing you blow after blow, and how you know that you’ll be ok anyway. But it still sucks that you have to deal with the blows, and have to go through that uncertainty of what comes next. Stig has decided to focus on his new breathing program, in which he teaches people how to breathe properly to deal with stress and disease, together with yoga and diet. He might not be able to compete much this year, but he’s getting back up and doing his best to be of use to others. Find out more about Stig here:

    https://www.stigpryds.com/

  • This is a video from scientist Dr Regina Eisert in the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area of Antarctica starring a killer whale that beelines it straight for her after noticing her presence. That must have been exhilarating. After making contact with her camera and realizing Regina is neither threat nor prey, the orca then offers Regina the chewed tail fin of a fish.

    See Geekologie

  • KRQE News 13 This Morning

  • Sociology professor Ellis Cashmore believes sport should adapt to accept transgender athletes and embrace inclusivity – but Olympic medal winner Sharron Davies says it’ll create an unequal playing field.

  • In September, in the midst of major political campaigning in Iraqi Kurdistan for an independence referendum, Waterkeepers Iraq was quietly conducting a swimming expedition to promote clean water. With seven water advocates and a small staff from a local television station on board, three swimmers completed the first ever attempt to swim the entire distance of Dukan Lake.

    The expedition started at Darbandy Ranya in the extreme northeast of the Dukan Reservoir in the northern province of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan, Iraq. On the evening of September 19, the team traveled by boat across the waters of the vast lake formed by the Dukan hydroelectric dam. It took three hours to trace the path they would begin swimming the next day—a swim that would ultimately take more than 35 hours to complete.

    The television staff accompanying the expedition was from KurdSat TV. They covered the story as part of a 45-minute documentary about the efforts of Iraq Upper Tigris Waterkeeper Nabil Musa to promote swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters in Iraqi Kurdistan. No one, not even Nabil who has been doing long distance swims on the lake since 2012, had ever attempted the entire distance of 39 kilometers—24.2 miles—north to south.

  • The summer of 2018 wasn’t as successful as for Caeleb Dressel as he had hoped, while fellow sprinter Michael Andrew racked up win after win at the Phillips 66 National Championships.

    That’s all in the past now, and Dressel has returned to training, hungry for this summer’s FINA World Championships. In the meantime, Andrew has had continued success at the TYR Pro Swim Series in Knoxville.

    “Off the Blocks,” Season 2 follows Dressel, Andrew and the other top USA Swimming National Team members as they compete in the TYR Pro Swim Series and prepare for the biggest competitions of the season, including the 2019 Open Water National Championships and the 2019 FINA World Championships.

  • After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed the previous Moken settlement in Thailand’s Andaman Sea, Hook says, people were able to recover some belongings. This time, when fire broke out on February 3 this year, nothing was left.

    Now the community fears for the future as the authorities begin to reconstruct the village in Au Bon Yai bay, in its original design, using an unsafe housing model consisting of highly flammable structures, densely packed together. And it has reignited a row about the Moken’s rights to their ancestral lands.

    Read South China Morning Post

  • https://youtu.be/uRrUKWcahz0