Off the Deep End | W. Hodding Carter | excellent and inspiring

Off the Deep End | W. Hodding Carter | A MUST READ for any Masters Swimmer!

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Off the Deep End

	Off the Deep End W. Hodding Carter Algonquin Books, 2008 - 209 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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excellent and inspiring

When I ordered this book, I was expecting sort of a literary reflection on swimming, discussing the experience of endless laps in ponderous prose. Of course, I forgot my experience of champion swimmers (driven, sometimes eccentric, sometimes manic, but not usually introspective). Actually, the book is more like a series of short stories about some interesting events in the course of the author's life over the last few years.

In the course of reading, you get some nice introductions to modern thinking about swimming training and technique and some introductions to personalities in masters swimming and Olympians. Like the author, my only image of Mark Spitz growing up was the golden boy. Quite an eye-opener here!

If you've enjoyed competitive swimming in your own past but have not kept up with the swimming world, I can say with certainty that you will like this book. If you haven't been a swimmer before, you can still enjoy it, as you don't need a lot of technical understanding to follow the stories.

The fact that the book is written for and was released at just the right time to make a financial windfall in case the author qualifies for the 2008 Beijing Olympic trials is a little off-putting, but it doesn't really detract from the quality or the inherent interest of the vignettes.

BTW, my sense is that the reviewer Geezerjock below just skimmed the book and missed the more important stories about the author beating his previous best times set when he was decades younger. In the future, when they have made more anti-aging technological breakthroughs, I think this book will be able to seen as a chronicle of someone living on the cusp of human transformation. The book does not make you cringe at every turn.

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A MUST READ for any Masters Swimmer!

As a Masters swimmer, I really enjoyed this book! I finished it in a couple of days and handed it off to one of our coaches, who really enjoyed it as well. I told the rest of the team to go buy the book... We have all had Olympic dreams of one sort or another and looking at someones thought process was really interesting. Plus, there are some really very funny parts of the book if you know anything about swimming, as well as some good training insights for those of us over 40. Good Luck Hodding!

Charming and intelligent!

This is a wonderful read! It is well-written, intelligent, and funny. I agree that this is a great read for Masters swimmers but also think it is a great read for any middle-aged person who decides that life is not on that downhill slide but rather that we can still accomplish tremendous things. Its about the joy of setting goals and then experiencing the day-to-day effort of working towards those goals - having a direction that is exciting.

I have been really inspired by Dara Torres making the Olympic Team at 41 - I know a lot of people have also been inspired by her performance. What is more interesting to me is that I am also inspired by Hodding Carter and his efforts to make the Olympics - he didn't make them but his journey and where he ended up are really something. Well done!

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Off the Deep End by W. Hodding Carter

Hodding Carter offers plenty of dry wit along with an incessant immersion in wildly entertaining self-styled swimmming regimens in pursuit of a lofty 2008 Beijing Olympic qualifying spot on Team USA...at age 45. Fabulous zeal and uttely shameless creativity in finding ways to train himself in odd places while dealing with the mid life pressures of job, husband, parent of young children. For the novice, this was also an, at times, deliriously funny direct window into what it takes to go after a dream this big. Who straps on a little surival basket of goodies and a flag to a surfboard, ties it to his torso and swims from island to island with a former Olympic Gold medal swimmer in the Florida Keys?!! All in a day's work for Carter. Truely was pulling for him to make the Olympic 2008 team. Thanks Hodding for all the extra info readers are able to follow. (Indiana University swimming/kinesthetics department for example. How else would I have found out chocolate milk is the recommended recovery rehydration beverage of choice for swimmers of multiple events. Yep, IU actually published findings on research entitled: "Efficacy of Chocolate Milk as Recovery Fluid....".) What's not to love about this zany and yet true watery vision quest for the Gold! A great read for anyone who feels the magnetic pull of water world, at any level, mild to mesmerizing. Training tips are a pleasant surprise bonus.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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