Lake Terrace. Black Pond –
Ilya Glazunov ,1988
Russian, 1930-2017
Oil on canvas. 75 x 100 cm.
Lynne Cox is an accomplished American open water swimmer. Twice, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. Cox was the first woman to swim the Cook Strait and the first to swim the Straits of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope. Cox swam the Bering Strait from American soil to Soviet soil in 1987, at the height of the Cold War.
Look at her.
I know open water swimming isn’t really glamorous, but Lynne Cox is arguably one of the greatest overlooked athletes of the 20th century.
And quite possibly a mutant.
She can withstand water temperatures that you or I would die from because of her training and her body’s unique reaction to cold (you know how the blood will leave your fingers and toes when it’s cold, to preserve heat? her whole body does that, pooling her blood in her core and insuring her body temperature stays toasty where it counts).
She funded the Bering Strait swim herself, clearing out her bank account when she couldn’t get corporate sponsors. After she succeeded (to almost everyone’s surprise: if you get in the Bering Sea without serious gear you generally just die) Gorbachev mentioned her during treaty talks with Nixon: “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live.“
She wasn’t just the first woman to swim the Strait of Magellan. She was the first person to make it across.
On top of setting multiple world records, she swam a mile+ to the coast of Antarctica, in just a bathing suit, and did not die.
She’s swum over 50,000 miles.
And look at her. This is a photo from when she was young, at the peak of her career and setting records all over the world. She is a great athlete. She is a human who can do things most humans would die trying. I’m sitting here at 1 AM getting all teary eyed because this is the first time I’ve looked up a photo of her and I am so surprised, so gratified, so overwhelmed to find out that this world record setter, this literal superhuman, has nearly the same body type as me.
Since they wouldn’t let her be a fantasy creature in a video game, she just did it in real life, I guess.
Anyone who thinks there is just one athletic body type isn’t paying attention during the Olympics opening ceremonies.
Her body type is optimized for her sport. The shape of her body and the presence of fat both provide insulation to keep her core warm while she swims.
A lot of open water swimmers aren’t this chunky, but that’s because most of them are actually triathletes, and their body type is a compromise between the ideals for the different sports.
There really is no one way to be fit and athletic. For some reason, we tend to get ourselves hung up on the body type of track and field athletes, especially that of marathon runners (who tend to carry almost no extra fat) as the ideal.
She also wrote a memoir, Grayson, about her encounter with a lost whale calm while training and trying to find his mother.
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Man suing TTC claims violent assault a case of ‘racial profiling’
In early May, Reece Maxwell-Crawford jumped out of his mother’s car and climbed onto the railing of the Scarlett Road bridge. Through a blur of tears, the distraught 19-year-old stared at the rocks and treetops below and debated whether he should jump.
“I just wanted to give up, I really did,” he says. “I felt like a burden to everybody. I just wanted everything to stop.”
He was eventually coaxed down by police and taken to a hospital, where he stayed for four days and received treatment for major depressive disorder. Now 20, Maxwell-Crawford is no longer in crisis but the soft-spoken Black man remains haunted by the painful experience that brought him to the edge of that bridge.
Maxwell-Crawford is speaking publicly for the first time about that precipitating incident, which occurred on Feb. 18 and was captured by cellphone videos that have been watched tens of thousands of times.
In the videos, Maxwell-Crawford can be seen lying facedown on a streetcar platform near Bathurst St., where he is being forcefully pinned down by three TTC officers. As a concerned crowd gathers, Maxwell-Crawford can be heard sobbing and screaming repeatedly that he “didn’t do anything.”
“You’re hurting me. I’m in pain,” he shrieks.
After Toronto police officers arrived and handcuffed Maxwell-Crawford, he was released without charges. He says the scuffle left him with a concussion, dislocated shoulder and back injuries, which he continues to treat with painkillers and physiotherapy.
Man suing TTC claims violent assault a case of ‘racial profiling’
Mooncustafer 