Open Water Swimming

Rating:
Summary: Good content, erratic organization
Review: Highly recommended, but be prepared to search a bit for some things. Clearly the product of someone who is predominantly right-brained.

Rating:
Summary: Just right for a SERIOUS swimmer
Review: Penny Lee Dean writes like a coach, which she is. You can almost see her writing chapter titles and outlines with a magic marker on a board, with a group of swimmers taking notes. The book is as clear as water, and about as interesting. If you really want to swim long open-water swims, like the English Channel or across some big lake, this is clearly the book for you. She has excellent training tips, instructions for dealing with obstacles and injuries, and motivational ideas. But if you aren't quite so serious about long, excruciating, time-consuming swims, if swimming is only an important and not pivotal part of your life, you will find the book slow going, which, by the way, is how I swim.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: This is an excellent book. I am considering training for the English channel swim and found this book excellent as a source of vital information with regards open water swimming. Not only is the book from a world expert but there is great passion in the writing as well as superb technical aspects of swimming in open water. I especially liked the fact that it dealt with very long swims unlike many of the commercially available open water books out there that are catering for triatholon swimming distances as obviously that is where the money is with regards to publishing and selling.It is what most long distace swimmers train for. There are very few books on long distance open water swimming longer than a triatholon swim so this book for me is a must. As for the reviewer that felt she wrote the book like a drill coach, if you want to swim something like the english channel any approach unlike the one in this book will equal failure.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: This is an excellent book. I am considering training for the English channel swim and found this book excellent as a source of vital information with regards open water swimming. Not only is the book from a world expert but there is great passion in the writing as well as superb technical aspects of swimming in open water. I especially liked the fact that it dealt with very long swims unlike many of the commercially available open water books out there that are catering for triatholon swimming distances as obviously that is where the money is with regards to publishing and selling.It is what most long distace swimmers train for. There are very few books on long distance open water swimming longer than a triatholon swim so this book for me is a must. As for the reviewer that felt she wrote the book like a drill coach, if you want to swim something like the english channel any approach unlike the one in this book will equal failure.