Swimming To Antarctica(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Just about every other person in the world seems like an
unfocused dilettante compared to long-distance swimming legend
Lynne Cox. Soon At the age of 14, after several years of training
hard in pools and the open sea, she was swimming the 26 mile
stretch from Catalina Island to the coast of California. A year
after that, she surpassed a lifelong goal by not only swimming the
English Channel but setting a new men’s and women’s record in the
process. Rather than be satisfied, Cox aimed still higher,
conquering the Cook Strait in New Zealand, the Strait of Magellan
and, the Cape of Good Hope, none of which had been swum before.
Being the first to swim the Bering Sea from Alaska to what was then
the Soviet Union is perhaps Cox’s most impressive achievement,
requiring a phenomenal amount of physical strength and endurance to
withstand the chilly waters and diplomatic persistence to gain
permission from Gorbachev during the Cold War. Swimming to
Antarctica is Cox’s remarkably detailed account of her major
swims and all that went right and wrong with them. While there are
plenty of highs, as one might expect in a memoir by so impressive
an athlete, all is not sunshine and roses for Cox. She overcomes
extreme physical hardship, predatory sharks, and a swim through a
sewage-soaked Nile while suffering from dysentery. There is plenty
in Swimming to Antarctica to encourage even non-swimmers to
work hard to achieve the seemingly impossible, but Cox, a skilled
and highly readable writer, sticks to the swimming, leading the
reader by example. For thrills and inspiration, it’s hard to find
anyone better than Lynne Cox. 

　　At age fourteen, she swam twenty-six miles from Catalina
Island to the California mainland.
　　At ages fifteen and sixteen, she broke the men’s and women’s
world records for swimming the English Channel—a thirty-three-mile
crossing in nine hours, thirty-six minutes.
　　At eighteen, she swam the twenty-mile Cook Strait between North
and South Islands of New Zealand, was caught on a massive swell,
found herself after five hours farther from the finish than when
she started, and still completed the swim.
　　She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most
treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world.
　　The first to swim the Bering Strait—the channel that forms the
boundary line between the United States and Russia—from Alaska to
Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time
in forty-eight years, swimming in thirty-eight-degree water in
four-foot waves without a shark cage, wet suit, or lanolin
grease.
　　The first to swim the Cape of Good Hope (a shark emerged from the
kelp, its jaws wide open, and was shot as it headed straight for
her).
　　In this extraordinary book, the world’s most extraordinary
distance swimmer writes about her emotional and spiritual need to
swim and about the almost mystical act of swimming itself.
　　Lynne Cox trained hard from age nine, working with an Olympic
coach, swimming five to twelve miles each day in the Pacific. At
age eleven, she swam even when hail made the water “like cold
tapioca pudding” and was told she would one day swim the English
Channel. Four years later—not yet out of high school—she broke the
men’s and women’s world records for the Channel swim. In 1987, she
swam the Bering Strait from America to the Soviet Union—a feat
that, according to Gorbachev, helped diminish tensions between
Russia and the United States.
　　Lynne Cox’s relationship with the water is almost mystical: she
describes swimming as flying, and remembers swimming at night
through flocks of flying fish the size of mockingbirds, remembers
being escorted by a pod of dolphins that came to her off New
Zealand.
　　She has a photographic memory of her swims. She tells us how she
conceived of, planned, and trained for each, and re-creates for us
the experience of swimming (almost) unswimmable bodies of water,
including her most recent astonishing one-mile swim to Antarctica
in thirty-two-degree water without a wet suit. She tells us how,
through training and by taking advantage of her naturally plump
physique, she is able to create more heat in the water than she
loses.
　　Lynne Cox has swum the Mediterranean, the three-mile Strait of
Messina, under the ancient bridges of Kunning Lake, below the old
summer palace of the emperor of China in Beijing. Breaking records
no longer interests her. She writes about the ways in which these
swims instead became vehicles for personal goals, how she sees
herself as the lone swimmer among the waves, pitting her courage
against the odds, drawn to dangerous places and treacherous waters
that, since ancient times, have challenged sailors in ships.

　　Lynne Cox was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in
Los Alamitos, California. She received her B.A. from the University
of California at Santa Barbara. Cox was named Los Angeles
Times Woman of the Year in 1975, inducted into the Swimming
Hall of Fame in 2000, and honored with a lifetime achievement award
from U.C. Santa Barbara. Her articles have appeared in The New
Yorker, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and European Car
Magazine. Cox lives in Los Alamitos, California.