Swimming Studies:
And yet, all this control and self-denial are what (in Swimming Studies at least) define swimming, as opposed to bathing. “Swimming” is what people who want to be the fastest, the best, do. It involves never letting your feet touch the bottom, never resting, both literally and metaphorically. “Bathing”, on the other hand, “implies having some contact with the ground while in the water – propulsion and speed are secondary”. Bathing is what the rest of us do. Shapton’s husband James, a poor swimmer who seems from Shapton’s account to be a grounded person in both senses of the word, is a bather. “Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn’t see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.” To be an Olympic contender you clearly have to be a swimmer, as defined above. But to be an artist? James, Shapton remarks, “is the opposite of a coach”: “He encourages me to sleep in, isn’t bothered when I cancel, shrugs at my whims, my mistakes, my detours into self-indulgence”.
There is a poignant moment towards the end of Swimming Studies when it begins to dawn on Shapton that art is not about pleasing your coach. Finding herself irresistibly drawn to the life stories of swimmers who, like her, didn’t quite make it, she wonders if this is just a case of sour grapes. But her interest seems to go deeper. After her own years of self-flagellation she is fascinated by “the athlete who hates practice”, the “self-loathing questioner of authority”. The others, “the ones who say and feel all the right things, are predictable”.
