Cox, Lynne 1957-

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COX, Lynne 1957-

PERSONAL: Born January 2, 1957, in Boston, MA; daughter of Albert (a radiologist) and Estelle (an artist) Cox. Education: University of California at Santa Barbara, B.A., 1975.

ADDRESSES: Home—Los Alamitos, CA. Agent—Martha Kaplan, Kaplan Agency, 115 W. 29th St., 10th Fl., New York, NY, 10019; Bob Katz, 9 Meriam St., Ste. 14, Lexington, MA 02420.

CAREER: Writer; endurance swimmer; motivational speaker; swimming instructor; formerly a research librarian in Orange County, CA.

AWARDS, HONORS: World records for swimming across English Channel, 1972 and 1973, Catalina Island Channel, 1974, Oresund and Kattegut (both Scandinavia), both 1976; named Woman of the Year, Los Angeles Times, 1975; inducted into Swimming Hall of Fame, 2000; lifetime achievement award, University of California at Santa Barbara; named Woman of the Year, Glamour magazine, 2002; Alex Award, American Library Association, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer (autobiography), Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to New Yorker, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and European Car.

SIDELIGHTS: Lynne Cox is a champion swimmer in a field all her own. She is the best of a very small group of people who do open-water endurance swimming, often in some of the most inhospitable bodies of water on the face of the planet. Her most incredible swim, and the one from which she drew the title of her memoir, involved swimming over one mile in just-above-freezing water off the coast of Antarctica, but this is only one in a long series of feats that are chronicled in Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer.

Cox undertook her autobiography's title swim in 2002, after thirty years of training. Although most people would die of hypothermia after only minutes in thirty-two-degree water, Cox's body is uniquely suited to such a challenge: she has a higher percentage of body fat than most competitive swimmers, and the fat is evenly distributed under her skin, almost forming its own wet suit and more than adequately insulating her internal organs. (Unlike most swimmers, Cox is so well insulated that her core temperature generally rises rather than falls during extended cold-water swims due to exertion.) Her insulating body fat also helps Cox by keeping her afloat. Her fat and muscle masses, which are respectively lighter and heavier than water, are perfectly balanced, giving her neutral buoyancy in the water: she neither floats nor sinks. Cox also swam as quickly as possible through the Antarctic waters in order to generate body heat through a high rate of muscular activity.

Cox, her brother, David, and her two sisters, Laura and Ruth, were born in Boston, Massachusetts, and all became competitive swimmers while growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her father, Albert, moved the family to California when Lynne was twelve so the children would have better opportunities to work with Olympic swimming coaches. Lynne did not immediately appear to be the sibling with the most competitive potential, but once she was introduced to open-water swimming she quickly excelled, taking first place in two races and second in another when she entered her first open-water swimming competition that year. Cox writes about her first time training in the Pacific "with a zest that makes you want to tear off your clothes and jump in the ocean in January," Eric Nash commented in the San Francisco Chronicle. Not long after this Cox entered her first long-distance open-water competition, a twenty-six-mile race from Catalina Island, across the Catalina Channel, to mainland California. This race was conducted under English Channel Association rules, which forbid wetsuits and most other technological assistance. Swimmers wore only their bathing suits, swim caps, goggles, and protective grease if they chose. Lynne continued to swim with this gear only in all of her subsequent swims, even the most frigid.

Cox first came to international attention for her swimming in 1972, when she was fifteen years old. That year she broke the record for the shortest time to swim across the English Channel—the men's record. When another swimmer broke her record the following year, she swam the Channel again and reclaimed the record. After that, as she writes in Swimming to Antarctica, "I had had enough of swimming the English Channel; I wanted to do something else." Soon after Cox set out on a daredevil's round-the-world tour of dangerous bodies of water: the Cook Strait, between the north and south islands of New Zealand, where the currents kept pushing her far off track and it took her over twelve hours to cover ten miles; the Strait of Magellan, between mainland South America and the Tierra del Fuego, notable for its huge whirlpools; around the Cape of Good Hope, off South Africa, in waters infested with sharks; and across the horribly polluted Nile River in Egypt, where the raw sewage in the water left her with dysentery.

Endurance swimming is a sport with few major competitions, and Cox, who majored in history in college, soon began swimming not to win championships but to make political statements. She spent eleven years petitioning the Soviet Union to allow her to swim across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia. Permission was finally granted for her to make the journey in 1987, after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had begun the glastnost process of warming relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1994, to celebrate the peace process then underway between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Cox did a fifteen-mile swim through the Gulf of Aqaba from Egypt to Israel and then on to Jordan. Although a casual observer might believe that this swim, in 80-degree water, would be easier for Cox than her frigid endeavors, in fact she had to be very careful to keep from overheating in the warm water.

These adventures "would make a great story even if Cox couldn't write," Joan Wickersham explained in the Boston Globe. "But she can. In prose that is lucid, clean, and powerful she evokes the physical and emotional experience of swimming." Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Mary Gillespie similarly praised the book as "an engagingly gripping read, an often engrossing tale of an extreme, otherworldly existence." "This is one spectacular book about one remarkable life," Verna Noel Jones concluded in the Rocky Mountain News. "Read it and you will never look at swimming the same way again."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cox, Lynne, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Great Women in Sports, Visible Ink Press (Canton, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, November 8, 2004, Melinda C. Hall, "American U.: Brockovich Encourages Women to Take Political Positions"; December 26, 2004, Sanjay Gupta, "Encore Presentation: A Look at Limits of Human Endurance."

Booklist, December 15, 2003, Keir Graff, review of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, p. 719; January 1, 2005, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 771.

Bookseller, February 4, 2005, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 37.

Boston Globe, March 7, 2004, Joan Wickersham, "Fire and Water: Lynne Cox's Unquenchable Spirit Propelled Her to Awesome Accomplishments in Swimming."

Boston Herald, February 8, 2004, Judith Wynn, review of Swimming to Antarctica.

Chicago Sun-Times, January 4, 2004, Mary Gillespie, "Stroking across Oceans to Glory."

Current Science, August 29, 2003, Kirsten Weir, "Too Cold: Cold-Water Marathon Swimmer Lynne Cox Made the Ultimate Splash—in Artarctica," p. 10.

Entertainment Weekly, January 16, 2004, Joshua Rich, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 74.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2003, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 1347.

Library Journal, December, 2003, Deirdre Bray Root, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 129.

New York Times, January 25, 2004, Erica Sanders, review of Swimming to Antarctica.

People, May 4, 1987, Jack Friedman, "Swimmer Lynne Cox Braves for an Ice Water Ordeal, a Dire Crossing in the Bering Strait," p. 46; August 24, 1987, Kim Hubbard and Jack Kelley, "Lynne Cox's Brave Swim across the Frigid Bering Strait Breaks the Ice with the Russians," p. 32.

Publishers Weekly, December 1, 2003, review of Swimming to Antarctica, p. 51.

Rocky Mountain News, January 23, 2004, "Tales of Epic Swims Breathtaking."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 1, 2004, Patricia Corrigan, "Lynne Cox Chills Out around the Globe."

San Francisco Chronicle, January 25, 2004, Eric Nash, "From Phys-Ed Flop to Phenomenon in Frigid Waters."

Science World, March 24, 1995, Caroline Alexander, "The Aquatic Ambassador: To Bring Nations Together, Lynne Cox Swims across Troubled Waters," p. 14.

Sports Illustrated, October 17, 1994, Caroline Alexander, "The Aquatic Ambassador," p. B7; February 17, 2003, Andrea Woo, "How She Trained: Before Hitting the Water, This Swimmer Frequently Hit the Weight Room," p. A11, Kelli Anderson, "Deep Freezing: With Ice Water in Her Veins, Famed Ultraswimmer Lynne Cox Took the Plunge near Antarctica," p. A11.

Sports Illustrated Women, November 1, 2002, Bill Donahue, "Against the Tide: Swimmer Lynne Cox Braves Sharks, Ice and Hypothermia on a Mission to Change the World," p. 65.

Womens Wear Daily, January 20, 2004, Natasha Singe, "The Icewoman Cometh," p. 4.