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.
Dude HOLY FUCK she’s a badass.
I’ve read two of her books – Swimming to Antarctica and Grayson – and found them charming and enjoyable. Grayson is pretty sad, tho.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is aggressively advancing a false narrative about heavy oil’s deep discount. She presents the problem in two parts, neither of which stand up to scrutiny.
First, Notley purports that the abnormally wide price spread affects every barrel of heavy oil leading to millions of dollars a day in losses to the Canadian economy. And second, that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is crucial. Neither of these claims are supported by the facts.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau is claiming Canadian workers are currently seeing the “strongest wage growth” in years, but his own data tells a different story.
In last week’s Fall Economic Statement, Morneau congratulated himself for the Canadian economy’s “solid growth” and declared that “Canadians are seeing the strongest wage growth in eight years.”
In his speech to Parliament, Morneau claimed that “for the average Canadian worker, wages are growing faster than inflation. If current trends continue, this year will be the strongest year of wage growth in close to a decade.”
Except these claims are based on very selective reading of the data – a closer look at Morneau’s own numbers show real wages aren’t growing as quickly as he suggests.
Yall can be edgy and talk about how much you hate tumblr all you want but I will be real chief I value my undeserved clout on here and its also the only place that shoots all my niche interests directly into my brain at the speed of light
The idea behind Tumblr, namely the dashboard, how posts and reblogs work (kinda like mini-threads that stream endlessly onto your dash), and the tagging system, is actually superb and I have yet to find another social media site on par with this format. Hence why we all stay here.
But then there’s also the incompetent staff and the extreme cultural madness of the website, hence why we hate it despite staying.
US Border Patrol has just launched tear gas into Mexico. Breeze carrying it hundreds of yards. Parents running away with choking toddlers. #migrantcaravan”
why limit yourself between choosing between a pretty feminine aesthetic or a dark one? if persephone can be the goddess of spring & queen of the underworld at the same time so can you
This is both against the gender roles that God put forth and in favor of the worship of pagan God’s. This is blatant satanic blasphemy
frollo has logged tf on
Reblog if you too are against the gender roles that God put forth and in favor of the worship of pagan Gods.
Artisan Scribbles 