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Summary
Summary
Hodding Carter dreamed of being an Olympian as a kid. He worshipped Mark Spitz, swam his heart out, and just missed qualifying for the Olympic trials in swimming as a college senior. Although he didn't qualify for the 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, or 2004 Olympics, he never stopped believing he could make it. And despite past failures and the passage of time, Carter began his quest once more at the age of forty-two.
Maybe he's crazy. But then again, maybe he's onto something. He entered the Masters Championships. He swam three to four miles each day, six days a week. He pumped iron, trained with former Olympians, and consulted with swimming gurus and medical researchers who taught him that the body doesn't have to age. He swam with sharks (inadvertently) in the Virgin Islands, suffered hypothermia in a relay around Manhattan, and put on fifteen pounds of muscle. Amazingly, he discovered that his heartbeat could keep pace with the best of the younger swimmers'. And each day he felt stronger, swam faster, and became more convinced that he wasn't crazy.
This outrageous, courageous chronicle is much more than Carter's race with time to make it to the Olympics. It's the exhilarating story of a man who rebels against middle age the only way he can--by chasing a dream. His article in Outside magazine, on which this book is based, was the winner of a Lowell Thomas award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation.
Author Notes
W. Hodding Carter, the author of Westward Whoa!: In the Wake of Lewis and Clark, is a popular journalist known for this humorous adventure pieces in Outside, Esquire, and numerous other national publications. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Maine.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Simultaneously self-deprecating and self-affirming memoir by a college swimming champion trying to improve his times while in his mid-40s. Dissatisfied with his life as a freelance writer struggling to pay the bills, to get along with his lawyer wife Lisa and to rear four young children, Outside contributor Carter (Flushed: How the Plumber Save Civilization, 2006, etc.) found refuge in competitive swimming. He had been a Division III All-American and national champ while at Kenyon College, and although he realized that swimming on the U.S. Olympic team as he neared eligibility for AARP membership was probably just a dream, he decided to go for it. Training almost daily, he developed muscle mass and improved upon the race times of his youth. Perhaps more importantly, Carter discovered that the physical and mental routines provided satisfaction on many levels. ("I've been happy many times in my life," he writes, "but satisfied? Hardly ever.") That heightened satisfaction repaired a frayed marriage and family life. On almost every page, the author injects humor, usually at his own expense and most of it found in footnotes at the bottom of the pages--a clever device in an otherwise non-scholarly book. But he can also be serious, as when he shares the results of his study into whether the aging process can be delayed by rigorous physical exercise. Gurus such as Joel Stager, director of Indiana University's Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming, guided Carter through his challenge of the conventional wisdom that after age 25 muscle mass declines by one percent annually. Perhaps the most important guide, however (other than his wife), was Jim Steen, his former coach at Kenyon, who allowed Carter back on campus as part of the book project. The final pages project goofy optimism that Olympic competition is within his grasp. So well-written that even non-swimmers will enjoy reading about Carter's Olympic quest. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
JUST five pages into his memoir, W. Hodding Carter faces his version of a moral quandary: should he surreptitiously scoop up and conceal in his Speedo the floating feces loosed by one of his young swimming students, thus preventing a prolonged "biohazard" pool closing that will cause him to miss his workout later that day? It's a funny scene centered more on Carter's swim time than his soul - and it gives an accurate impression of "Off the Deep End: The Probably Insane Idea That I Could Swim My Way Through a Midlife Crisis - and Qualify for the Olympics." In 1984, swimming for Kenyon College, Carter won a national championship; he was tempted to delay postgraduation plans and train for the Olympics, but heeded his father, who told him it was time to move on. Almost 20 years later, at 41 and failing at his career and his relationship with his wife, Lisa (with whom he has four children), Carter decides to fix his life by taking another shot at his dream. The premise is irresistible for those of us who believe sport is a metaphor for life. Carter's best chance to qualify for the 2008 Games, the 50-meter freestyle, an all-out sprint that's over in about 20 seconds, also proves an apt metaphor for his writing; he tells his story with the same zeal, putting on a real show without going deep. Reading about a subculture like swimming provides an opportunity to appreciate the idiosyncratic details and quiddity of the sport. Carter demystifies some of the technicalities (like the importance of using your hips) but never expresses the sensations of the sport in vivid physicality, the way Lynne Cox does in "Swimming to Antarctica." Nor does he connect the sport to life's big themes, the way Akiko Busch does in "Nine Ways to Cross a River." As he says of his obsession's genesis: "Certainly I needed a fix, and swimming had always done its part in the past, helping me through the sketchier times of my life. So perhaps that's all it was: an unreflective fix to a faltering life." During the course of the book Carter and his wife move into separate homes, then later reunite, but this information is delivered almost casually. We witness the funny scene when Lisa discovers her newly buff husband flexing in front of a mirror, but there's scant dramatization of discord or reconciliation. You have to take Carter's word that he experiences the epiphanies that help him mend his family and start a rewarding career as a swim coach. He glides past sentimental moments by cracking jokes or summoning jaunty derring-do in the face of hardship. This is a guy's book, and Carter is a guy's guy, who flirts with pretty women and worries about developing a lisp from calling out moves like "ballerina toes" while teaching a Liquid Toning class. The liveliest chapter plays to Carter's strengths - on a lark, he and a friend swam between the British Virgin Islands, towing a surf board loaded down with their belongings. Carter has failed to make the Olympic team, and by the conclusion of the book he already seems to be conceding at least temporary defeat ("There's always 2012," he writes). He closes with a well-intentioned chapter declaring that family, not swimming, is what matters. You're not sure you believe he believes this himself, but you want to because he's a hell of a guy - just the sort of wise-cracking warrior you might someday like to swim between islands with - and because, despite himself, he usually ends up doing the right thing, like sounding the biohazard alert and clearing the pool. Bill Strickland is the executive editor of Bicycling magazine and the author of the cycling memoir "Ten Points."