Lynne Cox will give two presentations this Monday, February 4, in Santa Barbara!

Daniel sent me this regarding Lynne Cox's, probably the best extreme swimmer the world has ever produced. Lynne will be giving two presentations this Monday, February 4, in Santa Barbara. First, she'll be at the National Girls & Women In Sports Luncheon: [Link] Then she will be at UCSB at 7:00 PM: [Link]

From Wikipedia: Lynne Cox (born 1957 is an American long-distance open-water swimmer and writer. In 1971 she and her teammates were the first group of teenagers to complete the crossing of the Catalina Island Channel in California. She has twice held the record for the fastest crossing (men or women) of the English Channel(1972 in a time of 9h 57 mins and 1973 in a time of 9h 36 mins). In 1975, Cox became the first woman to swim the 10°C (50°F), 16 km (10 mi) Cook Strait in New Zealand. In 1976, she was the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile, the first to swim across the Skagerrak, and the first to swim around the Cape Point in South Africa, where she had to contend with the risk of meeting sharks, jellyfish,and sea snakes

Cox is perhaps best known for swimming the Bering Strait from the of Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede, then part of the Soviet Union where the water temperature averaged around 4°C (40°F). At the time, in 1987, people living on the Diomede Islands, only 3 km (two miles) apart, were not permitted to see each other, although many people had close family members living on the other island. Even more remarkably, her accomplishment eased Cold War tensions as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Washington, DC to jointly congratulate her success.

Cox's most remarkable accomplishment was swimming more than a mile in the freezing waters of Antarctica. Although hypothermia would set in most humans inside of five minutes, Cox was in the water for 25 minutes swimming 1.06 miles.