Investor's Business Daily, October 4th, 2007
Lynne Cox has done more grueling ocean swims than anyone on Earth.
She's covered the English Channel twice, the Bering Strait and the frigid waters off Antarctica.
But had you been in her school's gym class, you never would have guessed she had a proclivity for any sport.
She was a slow runner and poor tennis player, couldn't play softball well and broke her elbow in basketball.
If land sports weren't her calling, Cox did find solace on water. Even so, on a swim team she joined in junior high in Southern California, Cox usually finished dead last.
But she stuck with it and tried harder. "I desperately wanted to be good at something," Cox said in a recent interview with IBD.
To train so she could keep up with her faster teammates, she'd keep swimming laps while they rested. When the coach finally figured it out, he was amazed at her endurance. He told her to work with more intensity on shorter sets.
Cox looked to stronger swimmers for tips and gradually sped up her times. To become an even better swimmer, she did double workouts.
She continued to improve. But after training for two years with U.S. Olympic swim coach Don Gambril, Cox's speed leveled off.
Gambril noticed that Cox got stronger toward the end of her workouts and realized the pool was too confining. He suggested that she join an ocean team at nearby Seal Beach, south of Los Angeles.
Cox credits Gambril with changing her life. "He realized no distance was long enough in the pool for me," she said. "He had an ability to look at a person and see what they were capable of."
In Harmony
With no walls in the ocean holding her back, Cox found her rhythm. She soon won her first ocean race, and then a second.
After completing a hair-raising 12-hour swim from Catalina Island to the mainland, Cox locked on a bigger goal: the English Channel.
Her family supported her. Cox's father, a physician, suggested she acclimate her body to the 50- to 60-degree water. To not miss school, she got up at dawn to swim in the chilly Pacific during winter.
Off to Europe she went. At 15, Cox broke the English Channel's men's and women's records. When another swimmer broke her record, Cox went back the next year and broke his.
Most swimmers would be satisfied to have made it across the English Channel at all, let alone to have broken the world record. Not Cox. She craved harder challenges -- "to reach a little further."
By the time she was 21, Cox had other credits to her name. She was the first woman to swim across the treacherous Cook Strait between the north and south islands of New Zealand and the first to swim around the Strait of Magellan in South America and the shark-infested Cape of Good Hope in Africa.
From early on, Cox trained hard for each swim, stroking for miles in the ocean. For Antarctica, she focused more on cardiac conditioning, walking up to six miles a day and then working out in the gym.
Careful about her safety, she always had a support team and rescue plan. She sought local experts who knew the currents and tides and planned accordingly.
"She's not a daredevil," said friend and fellow swimmer Bill Lee.
Still, she doesn't overplan. Lee, who was a team member on a recent swim, said Cox allows for "some degree of spontaneity and flexibility" once she's in the water.
As Cox neared the Russian shore in her historic 1987 Bering Strait swim from Alaska, the current took her away from where Russian well-wishers waited. She was cold and exhausted. Not wanting to disappoint 20hem or herself, she pushed against the current and angled in to meet the cheering party.
By then, Cox knew enough about her physical limitations to stop herself if she felt her life was endangered. She didn't think it was.
She learned the hard way at 17 in a race in the Nile River sponsored by the Egyptian government.
Though she felt sick from what was later diagnosed as dysentery, Cox plunged into the water anyway. She knew from training swims that it was badly polluted and contaminated. Sick to her stomach and near collapse, she finally gave up. She was rushed to a hospital dehydrated and hypothermic -- her heart racing at more than 200 beats per minute.
"I almost died on that swim," Cox said. "I learned when it's not right, you don't get in. I honor what I can do."
If swimming the Bering Strait in 38-degree water wasn't tough enough, Cox set her sights on Antarctica. It would be one mile in life-threatening, 32-degree waves -- and again she planned to wear only a swimsuit, bathing cap and goggles.
It would "move me far beyond what I knew" and would be "something that had never been done," she wrote in her subsequent book "Swimming to Antarctica," which was published in 2004, two years after the swim. She prepared for two years, working out on land and sprinting in the ocean. She did a test swim to gauge her limits.
"I couldn't have swum in Antarctica if I hadn't swum across the Bering Strait," Cox said. "I needed that time to become mentally and physically stronger."
At 50, Cox is still looking for bigger challenges. She just braved even colder water in the Arctic. "People say your body falls apart when you're 50, but I'm in better shape than I've ever been," she said.
Swimming is more than just a sport to Cox. "For Lynn, it is absolutely not about winning races or about personal recognition, which is kind of rare in the sporting world," Lee said.
As her swims involved ever colder water, she used them to advance science. Cold-water researchers studied how her body adjusted.
Also, Cox saw her swims as a means to bridge nations. Case in point: her Bering Strait swim across the U.S.-Soviet border in the waning years of the Cold War.
President Mikhail Gorbachev cited Cox's courage in easing tension between the superpowers.
In 1994, Cox finished a "peace" swim along the Gulf of Aqaba from Egypt to Israel, and then on to Jordan. A few days after the swim, Cox was invited to attend the signing of a treaty between Israel and Jordan.
"She seeks ways to translate new challenges into the kind of activities that can add an additional benefit to the world and mankind," said Tom Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador in the Middle East and Russia who helped Cox gain support for the Gulf of Aqaba swim and other sensitive projects.
The Write Stuff
Cox doesn't give up. It took her 11 years of letter writing and phone calls to gain permission from the Russians to land in Siberia.
Lacking corporate backing, Cox has financed her projects with grass-roots support. She also has used her savings from working in between swims as a librarian, swimming instructor and freelance writer.
Even corporations that don't finance her swims see Cox as a compelling motivational speaker. They invite her to speak on goals and leadership skills.
"I've been in the people business all my life," Jim Donald, Starbucks' chief executive, told IBD. "She has time for everybody. And when she talks about how she was able to overcome obstacles, she inspires people who are struggling to get to the next rung. That's leadership."
