Swimming, as well as competitive swimming, is an ancient sport. Records exist of swim races being conducted in numerous civilizations all over the world from all periods throughout history. Water itself has always been attractive to human beings. We live and walk near it, travel on it, watch it endlessly by lake or ocean, river, stream or pond. By nature humans seem to be a competitive species. As children we like to race, and we never seem to outgrow that racing desire. "Let's see who's faster!" is apparently a natural urge, one that only intensifies on the organized level.
             Competitive swimming has become one of the most appealing sports in the United States for people of all ages. In the last ten years competitive swimming clubs for those over the age of twenty-five has been the fastest growing segment. Swimming has been increasingly exposed as one of the most health-enhancing sports of all is partially responsible for this surge of participation, especially by the older swimmers. In other aerobic sports, gravity plus age adds up to diminishing performance, not so in swimming. No other sport puts so little stress and strain on your body. "You have a sport where you don't have the muscular-skeletal problems that aging runners experience," says Patty Freedson, Ph.D., a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "These problems require them to cut back on training just to reduce the injuries." Swimming is a sport in which you can train and compete decade after decade.
             I personally have experience the benefits of this wonderfully gentle, yet very rigorous type of workout, swimming. I had a strained Achilles tendon, which refused to heal. At the time of injury I was running about twenty miles a week. But with the painful strain, I had to quit running completely. I even sought the advice of an orthopedic specialist for "relief&quo...