Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not naturalborn swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; today, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world.

Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein's former palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times contributor Bonnie Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep, from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what it is about water that seduces us, and why we come back to it again and again.

An immersive, unforgettable, and eye-opening perspective on swimming—and on human behavior itself.

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Why I Picked It Up

I bought this one in the summer of 2022 from an adorable indie bookseller and café while visiting the (quaint) town of Camden, Maine for the wedding of two friends. I'd seen it around quite a bit on various lists related to my interests.

In college, I did a history of science project related to breakthroughs on human endurance, specifically in sports and medicine (which is actually what my brother-in-law does—he's a sports scientist!) For that class, I chose to read Endure by Alex Hutchinson and Extreme Medicine by Kevin Fong. I, for one, am all about externalizing to the body when stressed, since most of my work and passion tends to be more interior, like writing and reflection. It balances me out and gives me a win no matter what intangibles I'm grappling with.

Swimming has always been a huge part of my life. As a Floridian, I grew up on swim teams and vividly remember chlorine and fried hair and Sharpie'd arms and goggle marks, the exact drive to practice after school. I go through phases in swimming laps nowadays as the ideal low-impact all-body workout; for some reason, I have this sense of people who regularly do laps (and enjoy them) as being beyond put-together. Ex: Olivia Pope from Scandal.

Then, of course, there is the ocean element. Blue Mind is a cornerstone of my personal philosophies related to nature, awe, and the like. I knew after my college graduation that I wanted to be near a significant body of water. Since then, I've gotten to write about water a ton in my travel journalism career, from reviewing swimwear brands to visiting boutique hotels in Aruba to trying float therapy in Park City.

I also love any sort of informative work that blends a microhistory deep dive with personal reflection (nearly memoir.) The passion really seeps through and that sense of curiosity is vital to stoking my own—plus, it usually coincides with my preference for poetic prose.

What It's About & What I Remember

Bonnie Tsui does a fantastic job in Why We Swim. Her writing is cohesive and elegant, making it easy to segue between topics. She discusses Icelandic swimmer Guðlaugur Friðþórsson (the inspiration for reporting I did on lagoon culture in Reykjavík), swimming to Alcatraz, the psychology of engaging in hobbies we once needed for survival, the relaxation awe induces, etc,.

Tsui's writing is voicey but clean, focused in turn on each element of swimming, from the exercise component to the otherworldly sensation of full immersion in water, which aligns with how flow states work better for my brain than traditional meditation. It also dovetails nicely with how commitment to a pursuit (grit) can be most satisfying, which is very in line with my personal beliefs.

The Benefits & Sensations of Swimming

Tsui has some gorgeous reflections on lightness and buoyancy, pointing out that water reduces our perceived weight in a giddy way. Lightness has majorly been on my mind this year, so it felt like a particularly clever connection. (See: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.)

People supposedly enjoy swimming more than any other form of exercise, as tested by a group maintaining fitness-related New Year's Resolutions. Swimmers were the most likely to stick with their pursuit and to actually enjoy it. (So pro tip: pick the water ahead of 2025!) Personally, I love the efficiency of swimming laps and getting the most out of a shorter period of time too.

One of the reasons I enjoy being underwater is also the silence; under the surface, you're usually divorced from noise in a way that's hard to master. (I do swim laps with bone-conduction headphones though.)

Also, crucially, you can't be on your phone while swimming. On a run, I might haphazardly tap into a different playlist; when on a stationary bike, I'll read or watch a show while I pedal. In swimming, there's only the present. It forces you to be in the moment, here-and-now processing vs. dopaminergic.

She argues that swimming operates shockingly similarly to sleeping in how it taps into our unconscious states, boosting creativity. To swim, perchance to dream? She pulls in notes from Oliver Sacks (a favorite writer of mine) and altered states of consciousness. Thoreau in Walden, for example, swam as "a religious exercise," and ritual has always been crucial to humanity. You might see some musings as being woo-woo, but I found the overall narrative incredibly grounded, albeit interdisciplinary in my favorite way.

She pays homage to the awareness of and appreciation for sensory details—also a common thread in my reading list lately—with notes about how open-ocean swimmers become incredibly calibrated to the precise temperature of water and the sensitivity of various conditions. Tsui also points out that swimming optimizes deep breathing, which soothes us. The concept reminded me of an old swim coach's notes that you only improved your technique when exhausted because your body aimed to be as efficient as possible on that final lap.

Personally, I also love a lot of the sensations bundled around water. Getting a hot shower or drink after a frigid swim. Wet hair dripping down my back, purely at peace, as storm clouds build over a lake. (O'ahu, water-based as it may be, doesn't quite get "dark and stormy" in that way.) But moments like those flash me back to childhood and make me feel more connected to myself.

Competition, Adrenaline, Ritual, History

It's not solely psychological in basis, either. Bonnie Tsui covers nuances like the reliance on swimming for military success, citing Plutarch's descriptions of Julius Caesar as a nautical fella. She argues that sports ultimately resulted as a way for participants to channel the drive and glory of battle, which coincides with what I learned while studying the political landscape of the Olympics (another obsession of mine) in college. My personal appreciation for excellence makes me sympathetic to the lifelong pursuit.

Tsui even ruminates on the therapeutic and socially cohesive effects that swimming lessons had on a group of soldiers often divided by rank (a curious connection or stretch); ultimately, researchers realized that part of the sport's impact on their ties was because they were each suddenly out of uniform, dissolving some of the rigid structures that had previously dominated their interactions. Swimming: the great equalizer, stripped down to nothing.

She talks about the particular devastation of close calls within races (1/100th of a second, for example) and how racing trains athletes to clear their head of everything unhelpful to them, an effect mimicked when in the pool the rest of the time. The goal of mastery, she says, is to "grind it out forever and ever in the pursuit of autopilot," pulling the emphasis back to this idea of swimming (or any flow state hobby) as joyful because of the way it makes you narrow in on detail and euphoria within these states of repetition — a good framework for living, for sure.

“Meditation and water are melded together.—Herman Melville, Moby Dick”

And then exercise, of course, creates pride and balance and clarity—not just a physical benefit, but a mental one too. (Tsui has a book on muscle, aptly titled On Muscle, releasing in spring 2025 that I can't wait to read.)

Of course, sociologically, she also covers the racial history of swimming pools, and how neighborhood aquatics turned into a microcosm for the civil rights movement, which is why swimming itself can get demographically dicey in terms of access. (I think she handled the discussion well, personally; that was always a conversation at my school, which had a mandatory swimming test you have to pass before graduation.)

The Open Ocean, or the Last Great Frontier

Tsui talks about the danger and unknown of the ocean open, how it's even less explored than space. I think I've been reading so much about self-sufficiency and flow lately that it's naturally turned into a sort of collected mourning for the unexplored. (Shortly after this, I discovered that the author Alex Hutchinson I mentioned above has a book on this exact subject coming out in March—The Explorer's Gene, and I can't wait to read it.)

Overall Thoughts

I have so many details from Why We Swim that I want to dissect, analyze, and bust out at trivia. One of my 2025 goals is to swim more—it always is—and this book is a helpful reminder why it matters so much to me.

I can and have lived in places that weren't close to the ocean (and have an immense appreciation for mountains and forests) but a relationship with water does feel crucially important to my well-being, especially as an indirect method of processing—something I've realized I love and rely on. I also loved the richness of her connections to other works, and added quite a few references to my reading list.

Why We Swim really is such a love letter, and it fully encapsulates so many of my favorite writing qualities, focuses, and topics. It's an enduring favorite, one I want to give to everyone who loves hobbies or sports or wilderness or excellence or awe or water.

For fans of:

Endure by Alex Hutchinson; Extreme Medicine by Kevin Fong, M.D.; Drunk by Edward Slingerhand; Awe by Dacher Keltner; Silence: In an Age of Noise by Erling Kagge; Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols; The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen; Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Everything in Its Place by Oliver Sacks; Altered States of Consciousness by Marc Wittmann; Walden by Henry David Thoreau; The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long.

The book also unlocked a wry, near-forgotten short story for me: The Swim Team by Miranda July.