The Fastest Age

As for the anchor description, if you had left it as a term you had not heard before (and the literal interpretation made no sense to you), you probably would have had people lined up to clarify the isssue. But you had to start mocking people using the term... In Colwin's book, he points out that coaches must be able to describe both how the stroke looks and feels to the swimmer. (The "poetic" terms that Ion derides are usually when trying to tell the novice swimmer what the sensation should be. If Ion can come up with better terms, I think we would all be happy to hear it.) So Colwin writes: A once popular and comparitively apt description of the feel of the water likened it to the feeling of pulling through soft mud. More recently, however, a "fixed point of resistance" description has become popular. ... To convey the concept of a force acting on a mass of water, the act of propulsion has been variously described as feeling for undisturbed water, anchoring the hand on a fixed spot in the water and pulling the body past it, pulling along an imaginary knotted rope, and other similar descriptions.

As for the anchor description, if you had left it as a term you had not heard before (and the literal interpretation made no sense to you), you probably would have had people lined up to clarify the isssue. But you had to start mocking people using the term... In Colwin's book, he points out that coaches must be able to describe both how the stroke looks and feels to the swimmer. (The "poetic" terms that Ion derides are usually when trying to tell the novice swimmer what the sensation should be. If Ion can come up with better terms, I think we would all be happy to hear it.) So Colwin writes: A once popular and comparitively apt description of the feel of the water likened it to the feeling of pulling through soft mud. More recently, however, a "fixed point of resistance" description has become popular. ... To convey the concept of a force acting on a mass of water, the act of propulsion has been variously described as feeling for undisturbed water, anchoring the hand on a fixed spot in the water and pulling the body past it, pulling along an imaginary knotted rope, and other similar descriptions.