Swimmer's Daily

  • Club Borgosub Freediving freediving on a sunken ship

  • Her doctor’s words shook her like an earthquake: “If you don’t lose weight, you won’t get to your 60th birthday.”

    Vivian Stancil, a retired Long Beach schoolteacher, was 50. She stood 5 feet tall and weighed 319 pounds.

    “A bowling ball wouldn’t even describe what I was,” Stancil says. “I could barely walk. But I wanted to live, so I instantly knew what I had to do: change my diet and start exercising.”

    That would not be easy. Stancil’s social life revolved around going out to eat every day with her friends. As for exercise, Stancil hadn’t done it in 40 years — ever, really. She not only didn’t know how to swim but was so afraid of water that she couldn’t dunk her head in past her eyes.

    On top of that, she was legally blind.

    Read LA Times

  • A rich horde of fossils from the Sahara has revealed that the largest known predator to ever walk the earth was also a superb swimmer, overturning the common view that dinosaurs were terrestrial beasts.

    In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, an international research team described how it had uncovered the partial skeleton of a semiaquatic dinosaur, Spinosaurus, in Morocco. They estimate that the creature—not yet fully grown—measured 50 feet, at least nine feet longer than the largest documented Tyrannosaurus rex.

    “We’ve resurrected a giant from deep time…a lost world buried for more than 95 million years,” said Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. “It is arguably the most enigmatic dinosaur” yet described.

    The Wall Street Journal

  • First man home was Ger Wilkes, from Malahide and a member of North Dublin swimming club.

    “The hardest bit thinking people are coming up behind you, thinking, ‘Am I doing enough?’ I knew I was in the lead from about the Hal’penny Bridge. It was only a matter of hanging on then. O’Connell Bridge is liking going through a big dark tunnel, but it’s great. I put a lot of training in during the year, so I’m delighted, but shattered.”

    Rachel Lee, a member of Guinnness swimming club and a paramedic with Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB), was greeted by cheers from many of her colleagues on duty by the quayside, as she came in first in the women’s race.

    “I can’t believe it. I’m delighted,” she said. The hardest moment for her, she said, was “finding the finish point at the end”.

    See the Irish Times

    http://youtu.be/jlx3-SAWnv8

  • Sudbury’s Derald Balson competes in swimming at a national le​vel at the age of 86.

    That’s pretty impressive but consider also that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis more than 40 years ago.

    Swimming using only his arms, he won two gold medals last month at the Canada 55 Plus Games in Strathcona County, Alberta.

    “A lady said to me once, you remind me of a seal,” Balson recalls.

    “And I said, ‘Gee, they’re not very nice looking things.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but did you ever see them swim?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have.’ She said, ‘You know how their tail fin goes just like that? That’s what your legs do.’”

    See CBC

  • Police are appealing for information about this man who was caught on camera rifling through a purse a Birmingham swimming baths.

    See ITV

  • Kyiv wants its combat dolphins back, but now they’re swimming for Russia.

    Read Foreign Policy via KiyvPost

    http://youtu.be/P0mJqjcfGwM

  • An 81-year-old Korean War veteran is making a big push to raise money for a local war memorial by making the one and a quarter mile swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in the 19th annual Alcatraz Invitational on Sunday.

    Wally Stewart got in some final training laps at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Thursday morning.

    See ABC7

  • Sun Yang has always been different from China‘s other top swimmers, as much a maverick as a pioneer.

    And not just because he is the first Chinese man to win an Olympic swimming gold medal. Or that he spent time in jail.

    While most of China’s best swimmers prefer to keep a low profile, Sun just cannot escape the spotlight, courting drama and controversy wherever he goes.

    Read Reuters