Florence Chadwick on WML

So yesterday, I came across an article that said that Jack LaLanne, the "father of fitness" had said he would swim the Catalina Channel on his 95th birthday. Incredible! The article was a few months old, and his birthday was in September. I hadn't heard anything about it, so I did a little more digging and discovered that LaLanne was a big swimmer, having swum Alcatraz in handcuffs among several other long distance swimming stunts. (And here, all this time I thought he was just into pumping iron!)I guess we'll just have to see whether he does swim Catalina at some point in the future-- he would crush the record for the oldest swimmer by a long shot!

Then this morning I moseyed on over to the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation's Facebook page and saw that they had posted a video of Florence Chadwick's 1955 appearance on What's My Line. Pretty incredible stuff. Not only did her shoulders give her away, but the English Channel record (England to France) she had set two weeks before the taping was the exact same time I did in the Channel this summer-- 13:55 (she mentions it at 5:07 in the video). Pretty incredible, huh? To think, I did the same time as a former world record holder-- granted that was more than 50 years ago when the training, navigation, and nutrition aspects were not nearly as well established, but still, it's a neat thought. Her record is listed on the CSA website in the 1875-1959 records listing here.