I have Diana Nyad's books and Swiimming to Antarctica, Penny Deans Open Water Swimming, Marcia Cleveland's Dover Solo and a few more basic training books. I like Diana's best but for planning/training information I haven't found anything I liked yet but maybe you have?
Which are your favorite training books and which are your favorite inspriational stories?
Former Member
I liked the following book
Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way To Swim Better, Faster, and Easier
And for swimming drills
The Swimming Drill Book
I'm pretty excited about Lynn Sherr's new book, Swim: Why We Love The Water:
www.indiebound.org/.../9781610390460
It's coming out in April, and she's going to be one of the guests at our annual meeting of independent booksellers in January, in New Orleans. Can't wait to meet her!
50 Meter Jungle was great.
My favorite part is the history lesson about interval training. Before that era, hard training with little rest was thought to cause brain damage. Meyer, Burton and Spitz paved the way for every coach and swimmer who followed.
There's another bio of Gertrude Ederle that was published in the last couple years called "The Great Swim" by Gavin Mortimer. It actually follows the story of several women who planned to attempt the channel that summer, but since Ederle had the first successful swim the focus is clearly on her.
I'd love to get my hands on a copy of "The 50-Meter Jungle." I'm sure it's a great read.
Swimming to Antarctica by Lynn Cox -- Amazon.com: Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer (9780156031301): Lynne Cox: Books
I also picked up a signed copy of this one (:canada:) while in Portland this summer:
forums.usms.org/picture.php
Some of the ideas are dated (e.g., swimming is a young person's sport, look up and have the water line hit right above your goggles on free), but there are some good, classic technique and training reminders that still hold true today. And, let's face it, all of us would love to be able to swim like Alex, a great champion of the sport in and out of the pool.
Nice to see this thread resuscitated. What's surprising is that there really aren't that many books about swimming - much less open-water swimming (this is in the OWS forum, after all). I'm not sure what the reference point should be... for OWS, perhaps mountaineering? A search of Amazon.com reveals 245 books in the Exercise & Fitness > Swimming category, compared to 7,018 books in the Sports & Outdoors > Mountain Climbing category.
A few important OWS books have been published since this thread was originally active... off the top of my head:
- Young Woman and the Sea (Glenn Stout) - about Gertrude Ederle & the English Channel
- and two Lynne Cox books - Grayson and South with the Sun
If you're going to include instructionals like the TI book, it would be imperative to mention:
- Maglischo's Swimming Fastest
- Salo's Complete Conditioning for Swimming
- and Steven Munatones' Open Water Swimming
I'm not sure what the reference point should be... for OWS, perhaps mountaineering?
You'd be surprised how many times I use my experiences in mountaineering to describe many aspects of marathon swimming.
- Maglischo's Swimming Fastest
Just to date myself I had Swimming Faster memorized in the 80's. Unfortunately the book got dso much bigger and my memory got so much worse that it is no longer possible.
- and Steven Munatones' Open Water Swimming
I just finished this book and think it's a must read and offers information I have not seen anywhere else (including giving my friend Jason Lassen credit for his record setting breastroke crossing of the Catalina Channel in 2010). Of course Penny Dean Lee's book Open Water Swimming has always been my bible, and Lynne's Swimming to Antartica has been an amazing source of inspiration for me.
