Young Woman And The Sea – BionicOldGuy

I simply learn the inspiring story of Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle’s historic swim of the English Channel in 1926, changing into the primary girl to take action and breaking the present report by two hours.

It is Young Woman And The Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered The English Channel And Inspired The World by Glenn Stout.

Glenn is a superb historic author. He went into element in regards to the geology of the channel and the way that led to its tough tides, currents, and climate. He additionally lined the historical past of channel swimming, main to 5 profitable makes an attempt, all by males, and plenty of unsuccessful, each female and male, by the Nineteen Twenties. There can be glorious background on the historical past of prevailing attitudes in direction of ladies, the so-called “weaker sex”. When it got here to swimming, this was exacerbated by prudish attitudes towards apparel, making it tough to give you sensible swimwear. He covers a key occasion that led to alter, the General Slocum Disaster. Hundreds of individuals have been killed when the passenger ship General Slocum caught fireplace within the East River in New York. The ship had insufficient lifeboats and lifepreservers, and a lot of the passengers couldn’t swim to make what would have been a brief voyage to security. This led, amongst different issues, to a big outcry that swimming instruction ought to turn into widespread for each women and men. There adopted the founding of the Women’s Swimming Association, which promoted swimming for security however later additionally pursued swimming as a part of Women’s athletics.

These modifications have been going down whereas the outstanding younger girl Trudy Ederle was rising up. How this led to her changing into a world-class swimmer and conquering the channel takes up a lot of the e book. It culminates within the story of the completely epic swim itself. Upon studying that I assumed “this is at least as inspiring as stories like Chariots of Fire, somebody needs to make a movie about it”. I used to be happy to be taught that Disney+ is doing simply that, primarily based on this e book. The film Young Woman And The Sea is presently in post-production.

I extremely advocate this e book to anybody who likes inspirational tales of sports activities and overcoming adversity.