Distance swimmer Lynne Cox describes swimming as flying

Lindsey LeCroy Associated Press Lynne Cox, 46, is a long-distance open water swimmer, and in her mind there are no walls, no body of water too cold or impossible to swim. She’s set records all over the world for distance open-water swimming, swimming in waters as cold as 32 degrees. And she only wears a bathing suit and a cap. She’s also done her part for world peace, in a landmark swim across the Bering Strait, helping in her own way for the United States and Russia to get over the Cold War. In 1987, after years of trying, she finally obtained permission from both the United States and the Soviet Union to swim the Bering Strait. It was a defining, not to mention daring moment in her career and opened the border for the first time in 48 years.

"I’m curious," she says. "I want to know things that I don’t know about. I want to know how things feel. I want to know what other places are like."

Like Egypt. In her book, one of the more graphic chapters describes her entry in a race in the Nile River. An Egyptian friend in Southern California urged her to give it a try so she made the trip. He couldn’t complete it, but knew she could. She wishes she never did. It’s enough to make your skin crawl. It all started when United Arab Airlines almost crashed twice.

Once in Egypt, she explains, distance swimmers are regarded highly, like the professional athletes here. She wasn’t respected because she was white and female. She grew sick shortly after arriving. After swimming federation gives her placebo pills, she finds a “real doctor” and is diagnosed with dysentery. Two days later, she was back in the competition. However, the Nile was filthy. She encountered packs of dead rats, garbage, and she even stroked right into the carcass of a dead dog. Still too sick however, she had to pull out and seek medical help.

Now if that wouldn’t make you want to give up open-water swimming nothing would. But it didn’t stop Cox. She just moved on to the next challenge.

Lynne Cox has accomplished in the water:

 At fourteen, she swam twenty-six miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland.  At 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, thirty0six minutes.  She was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous three-mile swim in the world.  She was the first to swim Cape of Good Hope and was followed by a shark. Before it got her, her boatman shot it so she could complete the race.