‘If I go in like a Cranky Sea Lion, I Come out like a Smiling Dolphin’: Marathon Swimming and the Unexpected Pleasures of Being a Body in Water

Abstract

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport.

Swimming in Ireland: Immersions in therapeutic blue space

“…Swimming is a great leveller and can at times transform the unhealthy land body into a healthy sea-body (Throsby, 2013). This opens up space for a potentially rich exploration of health outcomes enacted by bodies of difference.…”

Swimming as an accretive practice in healthy blue space

“…In providing a shared space for all bodily sizes, shapes, genders and ages, the swimming spots operated differently to more public spaces of display such as the beach. Indeed Throsby (2013), notes that being overweight is a positive advantage for longdistance and endurance swimming. There were clear overlaps, but the focus on the act of swimming and specific changes in bodily potential created in the water, acted as important components of health promotion and suggest some new directions for public health.…”

Blue space geographies: Enabling health in place

“…Traditional landscape 'gazes' are potentially shifting horizons from green to blue, deepened through embodied engagements with waterscapes (Herzog, 1984;Strang, 2004;Wylie 2007;Anderson and Peters, 2014). The time is ripe therefore, to pay more specific attention to blue space and extend the scope spatially, methodologically and in inter-disciplinary ways as part of a broader hydro-social set of therapeutic geographies (Parr, 2011;Rose, 2012;Throsby, 2013;Budds and Linton, 2014).…”

“…One can consider in particular how blue space has the capacity to enable, e.g. the capacities of disabled or unfit bodies for immersive and contemplative encounters that almost completely re-cast those capacities (Andrews et al, 2012;Throsby, 2013). In addition, more spiritual encounters in/by water (as transcendental-affective moments) may emerge from a range of natural or built environments (Foley, 2011;Madrell, 2011;Pitt, 2014;Lea et al, 2015).…”