Let Me Call You Sweetheart

I spent last weekend in Palm Springs with Julie, Megan and Kari, celebrating our collective 40th birthday.

While I was there, I finished a book about another accomplishment. It's the new Glenn Stout biography of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel.

Trudy was a member of the 1924 U.S. Olympic team, the first year a women's swim team was fielded. She swam to two bronze and one gold medal in the Paris Games, disappointing because her achievements up to that point had proven her the best American woman swimmer, if not the fastest female swimmer in the world.

She was crushed, but it didn't take her long to set her sights on the even greater challenge of the Channel crossing. It took her two tries, but when she completed the 21 mile swim in 14 hours and 31 minutes on August 6, 1926, she became not only the first woman to successfully cross, but she set a record time, beating the handful of men who had traversed the Channel before her.

The book describes how Trudy would retreat into her own "sphere" while she swam. A state of almost automated bliss and communion with the water. Sound familiar, mermaids?

Another cool thing about the book was the discussion of the evolution of freestyle, which was an adaptation of an overhand breastroke style of swimming called the Trudgeon (which Kari and I tried to replicate in the resort pool in Palm Springs after researching it on youtube. We called our version the Curmudgeon).

After her swim, Trudy revealed that she sang the words to "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" over and over in her head as swam from Gris-Nez to Dover.

Trudy passed away at age 98 in 2003. She never married.

Trudy and the other women swimmers on the 1924 Olympic team were breakthrough athletes, at a time when training and participating in sports was still a considerable taboo. So in a quiet and grateful tribute, I have posted the long-promised "grinning idiot" Danskin T1 photo above.