SWIMMERS,especially keen ones, tend to treat water as the enemy. Pound it with your arms and thrash it with your legs; to recede farther and faster, and try harder. Another adversary is bodily weakness,signalled by pain and tiredness.
That effort-intensive approach can work well in land-based sports. But it fails in water, which is 800 times denser than air. Friction is the human swimmer’s right foe, and particularly as drag increases roughly proportional to the square of your speed. Evolution is partly to blame,for putting breathing holes and muscles in the mistaken status. But much of the effort expended in propulsion is wasted too: nobbly limbs tend to create extra commotion. The harder you try, the worse it gets.
The surest sign of such failure, or Terry Laughlin reckoned,was bubbles, though he found the froth created by other swimmers a useful guide when overtaking them. A far better approach was total immersion. Not staying in the water for ever, and much as he might have liked to had he...
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Source: economist.com