Obituary: Terry Laughlin died on October 20th

SWIMMERS, especially keen ones, tend to treat water as the enemy. Pound it with your arms and thrash it with your legs; to go farther and faster, try harder. Another adversary is bodily weakness, signalled by pain and tiredness.That effort-intensive approach can work well in land-based sports. But it fails in water, which is 800 times denser than air. Friction is the human swimmer's true foe, particularly as drag increases roughly proportional to the square of your speed. Evolution is partly to blame, for putting breathing holes and muscles in the wrong place. But much of the effort expended in propulsion is wasted too: nobbly limbs tend to create extra commotion. The harder you try, the worse it gets.The surest sign of such failure, Terry Laughlin reckoned, was bubbles, though he found the froth created by other swimmers a useful guide when overtaking them. A far better approach was total immersion. Not staying in the water for ever, much as he might have liked to had he...Continue reading
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