Customer Reviews

Off the Deep End: The Probably Insane Idea That I Could Swim My Way Through a Midlife Crises, And Qualify For the Olympics

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Author Hodding Carter, sunk in the middle ages, takes up the quixotic quest to regain his old collegiate swimming form and qualify for the 2008 Olympics. To do so, he puts much of his life on hold to chase his dream and regain the speed he had as a collegiate at Kenyon College. This is either an act or audacious bravery or audacious selfishness. With four kids and a working wife, Carter's preoccupation is on none of them but rather on his long-shot quest. He pulls in very little money as a freelance writer but battles with age to regain his swimming form.

In the end, you do not know whether he succeeded or not in qualifying for the Olympic team. (I doubt it...) Viewing his story is like rubbernecking after a car wreck. You don't want to look but you just can't help yourself.

Is he swimming toward the Olympics or simply swimming away from the realization that we get older and certain physical limitations are imposed, limitations that can be minimized and managed but not totally transcended. Is he swimming against the notion of death and seeking some fountain of youth to regain lost youth through swimming? One wit once said, "The older I get, the better I was."

Anyone who has set - or thought about setting - big hairy audacious goals will enjoy Carter's book and the self-revelatory candor that he packs inside. I'm rooting for his wife, his kids and his family. They don't give gold medals for devotion to family, but the achievement doesn't lose its luster.

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.

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!

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!

This book is hysterical, yet inspiring. I spent hours on the spin bike reading and laughing out loud (peddling my way through my own mid-life crisis).

You don't have to be a "swimmer" to relate to this book. It's for anyone who has taken a look at their life and thought to themselves, "I can still do it."

As a fledgling swimmer who is close in age to the author, I can't say enough good things about this book. I absolutely loved it. I think non-swimmers will enjoy it as well, though swimmers will surely be able to appreciate it that much more. And while the literature on swimming is no doubt a bit thin, this surely ranks as one of the best books ever written about swimming. Bravo!

If you are in your 40s, for that matter 30s or 50s and struggling to keep up to what you physically could do before-this book is an inspiration. It is funny, a quick read, and really is a good chance to look inside yourself and see if you are trying as hard as ou can. I highly recommend it. For non swimmers, the author does not get lost in swimming jargon or discussions, and when he comes close, he apologizes. great book.

I wanted to like this book more. Mr. Carter's writing is personable, witty, colorful, self-deprecating, insightful, charming -- everything you want in a good read. But in the end, his mid-life quest for Olympic gold just seemed pathetic to me.

At the gym where I swim laps, there is this one old guy in a Speedo who preens at the end of the lane for ten minutes, preparing to immerse himself. He stretches, touches his toes, twists, contorts, grunts. He's tall, so there's a lot of him. You can see he's proud of the shape he's in, which is good for his age. But, really, I can't even look, it's so embarrassing, and all I can think is, "Put it away!"

That was my feeling by the end of this book. While Mr. Carter is off chasing his fountain of youth, his children are growing up, his wife is growing away from him and his chance of becoming a really great writer is slipping away. Enough already! Put it away!

To me, it seems that Mr. Carter had too many competing motives for writing this book: he needed money, he wasn't getting enough bylines, he wanted to justify extended absences from home, and he was fighting age and time. Most of all, though, this book -- in fact his entire quest -- seemed an exercise in getting back at his parents. His dad quashed his Olympic dreams when he was 21, and he was a famous dad at that (with a Wall Street Journal byline), whose success rankles this Mr. Carter. His parents divorced, something that wounded him deeply, so he makes sure to mention his own (somewhat) successful attempts at working through the rough spots in his marriage. I got the feeling that this was payback time.

The parts I enjoyed most were the author's experiences as a Y aquatics instructor and assistant director, and as a swim team coach. If he could write an entire book about those experiences, he'd have something like Bill Geist's Little League Confidential: One Coach's Completely Unauthorized Tale of Survival. That's a book I would love to read.

P.S. I would like to see the author's "swimmy dance thing," though. I could use some help with my freestyle.

I am a masters swimmer with four kids so I can really relate to him trying to get out of the house on a daily basis to train for the Olympics. I was more interested in the types of training that he was doing to prepare for the trials and less interested in his family problems but it was very enjoyable. I had trouble putting it down.

The book arrived ahead of time, in perfect condition. Having experienced eerily similar mid-life crisis, I thoroughly enjoyed Carter's self deprecating style, and the depth of his knowledge in the subject matter.