Swimming to Antarctica Read Online Free PDF

note. I showed her the X rays. She was angry that I had to take an adaptive physical education class. She didn’t realize that she was a great motivator: as soon as my arm healed, I asked Coach Gambril again if I could do double workouts. He agreed.
    My father set up a meeting with the principal, Mr. Hughes, and Miss Larson. Mr. Hughes was willing to let me out of physical education class, but Miss Larson fought to keep me in. She said that I needed the full range of athletic experience and the social experience. She said I was far too shy. My father argued on my behalf, explaining that I had a talent for swimming; it was both a gift and something I had worked hard for. He was able to convince the principal to let me out of her class, and I was overjoyed.

3
Open Water
    After I’d been training with Coach Gambril for two years, he noticed that my times were beginning to level off and I was getting frustrated. But Gambril also noticed something that I wasn’t aware of: I was stronger at the end of the workout than I was at the beginning. Gambril had insight that no one else had and realized that my problem was that there weren’t any races long enough for me in a swimming pool. At that time, there wasn’t even a 1500-meter race for women in the Olympic Games. He recognized that it didn’t make any sense to continue coaching me in the pool for a race that didn’t exist. So after one workout, Coach Gambril said, “Lynne, why don’t you enter the Seal Beach Rough Water Swim? There are one-, two-, and three-mile races. It’s an ocean swim, and a couple of other swimmers have done it and had fun. Why don’t you try the three-mile race?”
    I loved swimming in open water. That was where I’d first learned to swim, along with my brother and sisters. My grandparents had a camp on a lake in Maine called Snow Pond. It was the place where we spent our summers, learning how to kick and blow bubbles. Our dalmatian, Beth, would jump in and paddle over to us.
    My grandfather, Arthur Daviau, had been an excellent swimmer. He had swum across many of the lakes in Maine, and once rescued some college students who had fallen out of their canoe in theHudson River. He had taught my mother to swim, and she in turn taught us.
    Snow Pond was the center of our lives in the summertime; we swam along the edges of the pond, paddled our red canoe to explore the Messalonskee River, to the north, and at night fished with our grandfather near the islands in the middle of the pond. Once my grandfather told me he had swum all the way from our camp to an island and back, about three miles. He showed me the island he had swum to, and I always wanted to swim to it too.
    The three-mile race started at six in the morning. When we checked in we were given numbers to pin to the back of our swim-suits. Mine was lucky 13.
    We stood shoulder to shoulder along the shore, an official fired the starting gun, and we ran across the beach and dolphined under the waves. The water was cold, salty, buoyant, smooth, and the deepest blue. And I swam as if I had learned to fly I raced across the water. My strokes felt powerful, and I felt strong, alive, as if awakened for the first time. Nothing in the swimming pool gave me this pleasure. I was free, moving fast, feeling the waves lifting and embracing me, and I couldn’t believe how happy I was. It was like I had gone from a cage into limitless possibilities. With each stroke, my own strength grew; I felt the speed, the wake my body created, just like Hans’s did in the pool when he swam freestyle. It was such a tremendous sensation, as if I had found my place, finally, found my niche in the universe. I swam with all my heart, and found myself passing one swimmer after another.
I am really going somewhere. I am really moving forward.
I lifted my head up and I could see the oil rig that represented the halfway point in the distance, about a mile away. I couldn’t believe I had swum so fast, but there was nothing