On the Fly

June 3, 2010 1:08 PM

"Of the four strokes swum in competition, butterfly is almost universally regarded as more exhausting than freestyle, breaststroke or backstroke. And therein lies its allure. In an age of ultramarathons, Ironman triathlons and crowds chugging up Mount Everest, long-distance butterfly swimming is becoming a new and less-crowded frontier for fitness fanatics."

First person to swim fly across the English Channel (as part of a "million dollar [butterfly] marathon" swim around the world)
First person to swim fly across Tampa Bay

posted by emilyd22222 (37 comments total)

I heard (maybe in swimming class) that the Butterfly is the first/oldest swimming stroke. It seemed kind of counter-intuitive. What's it good for if it's so exhausting? Is it faster? Is it just to show off?
posted by amethysts at 1:11 PM on June 3, 2010

I loved the fly when I was on swim team. It isn't fast and feels great when you hit your rythm.
posted by Uncle at 1:15 PM on June 3, 2010

What's it good for if it's so exhausting? Is it faster?

It's faster than the breaststroke, from which it evolved, because the arms travel through the air on the return, rather than through the water.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:22 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you're not exhausted after breaststroking, you're doing it wrong.
posted by mannequito at 1:33 PM on June 3, 2010

I have been spending small portions of my life in a quest to learn this stroke properly. I can swim 10-20 strokes of it in the ocean, where the added bouyancy really helps, but in the pool it makes me breathless pretty quick. And I can swim decent distances freestyle, breast, and backstroke. It's a really demanding stroke which I will probably never master, but so much fun to see and to do.
posted by Miko at 1:35 PM on June 3, 2010

When you swim in the three-lane pool in basement of the Greenpoint YMCA, it only takes one person attempting the butterfly to rock all the water out of the pool and send bystanders running for shelter.
posted by hermitosis at 1:36 PM on June 3, 2010

Why don't they just swim further?
posted by Flashman at 1:37 PM on June 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

I have always thought that having competitions in different strokes in swimming is incredibly strange. What is the point of that?

Imagine if there was not just a 100m sprinting competition (the equivalent of freestyle), but there was also a 100m skipping competition, a 100m hopping competition, and a 100m running backwards competition. That would be idiotic.

Of course, there is the compelling race-walking. Hurdles are more like an obstacle course, so that is a bit different. The triple jump doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Why not a double jump?

Anyway, I refuse to acknowledge any swim race that doesn't allow you to swim however the fuck you want to.
posted by flarbuse at 1:44 PM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

This was my fastest stroke when I swam competitively years ago. Love it love it.
posted by keli at 1:45 PM on June 3, 2010

Why don't they just swim further?

Because to increase fitness, you need to increase one or more of the following: workout frequency, intensity, or time (the FIT principle). If you maintain a low intensity, you have to then increase frequency or time to get fitter. Workouts at higher intensity are more time-effective. If you have limited windows in which you can work out, working out at high intensity (butterfly) can replace working out for a longer time using a less demanding stroke.

That kind of thing makes a difference in swimming especially, which can be a repetitive, lulling sport. If I have the choice between swimming a mile in 30 minutes or swimming a mile more intensely in 24 minutes, and I can do it in 24, my life got easier and/or my fitness goals can reach higher.
posted by Miko at 1:45 PM on June 3, 2010 [4 favorites]

I played water polo in high school on the frosh/soph team. One day, without any forewarning, the coach had all the varsity players start swimming laps of butterfly together, and Coach Drown (yes, his real name) would call out when the group would start the next lap. Some JV players swam along at first, but most dropped out after 50 or so laps, if memory serves right. The frosh/soph team sat and watched from the bleachers, as the varsity team would complete lap after lap. After lap. After lap.

A few hours later, the had swam over 600 laps, and beat the previous school record for most laps of butterfly swam. And with that, their practice for the day was over. Me? I'm still not very good at it.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:47 PM on June 3, 2010

god I hate butterfly. it's like being a circus acrobat - as long as you learn to do it at age 7, you're golden. By 9, the door is closed forever.
posted by GuyZero at 1:53 PM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

Imagine if there was not just a 100m sprinting competition

Yeah... but humans are made to run.
posted by atrazine at 1:57 PM on June 3, 2010

In an age of ultramarathons, Ironman triathlons and crowds chugging up Mount Everest,

Ray Mancini used to say that boxing is, by far, the most physically demanding sport there is:

"When you get tired running, you can slow down.

When you get tired boxing, you get the shit beaten out of you."
posted by three blind mice at 2:00 PM on June 3, 2010 [9 favorites]

As bad a swimmer as I was competitively, I always loved doing the fly. No one suspects the amount of pain you're in as every inch of your body screams at you for oxygen while you glide through the water with such finesse. To me it's truly beautiful both to watch and to perform.

For me it's not about being more efficient or faster than freestyle (it's not), it's about pushing through and seeing what I'm capable of. My body is great at telling me that one more lap would be entirely too hard and that I would be much happier moving to the hot tub. Most of the time I'm great at listening to it, but when i do force myself to push through it gives me a sense of accomplishment. I let that little bastard inside of me win entirely too often and beating him every once in a while puts a big smile on my face. For some reason a hard race/workout in the pool doing the fly gives me that. /shrug

I guess that's why I'm training for an ultra now. I want to see if i can fend off that little bastard for a full ~24 hours. Never stopping, never giving up. I don't know if i can but I know I'll have the company of an ever louder voice informing me of what an idiot I am and how much easier it would be to give up and drink a beer. Plus, the other voice in this argument isn't my wife's so I know I have a chance of winning.
posted by Quack at 2:05 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

To me it's truly beautiful both to watch and to perform.

Every time I do it the guards clear the pool and call in for EMS support for a seizure victim.
posted by GuyZero at 2:21 PM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

I have always thought that having competitions in different strokes in swimming is incredibly strange. What is the point of that?

I'll take a shot...

The mastery of different swim strokes shows mastery over different environmental conditions.

The breaststroke allows you to see where you're going at all times. The backstroke is better for swimming alongside someone, such as in a lifesaving or educational situation. A sidestroke (which isn't one of the four competition strokes, of course) is better for ultra-long distance and lifesaving. A water polo stroke helps keep control of the ball.

Also, the different strokes work different muscle sets. Weightlifting, power lifting and gymnastic competitions have different lift styles and apparatus, too, allowing one to excel at all of the competition or focus efforts on a subset of the sport.

Comparing running to swimming ... you get the same "mastery of the environment" analogy. 100 meters is a vastly different challenge than a 5K, requiring a completely different musculature, skillset and tactical approach.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:25 PM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

People say you can't just muscle your way through the stroke. But I've always found that ARGBGGGHHBLBLBBLB *cough*
posted by Smedleyman at 2:28 PM on June 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

Former swim coach & college swimmer: it is exhausting because both of your main forms of propulsion in water are raised up out of the water at the same time.

Body type matters and the women on the team I was on generally could outlast men in large distances. How the shoulders rotate is the key difference, and I should point out that it was the last of the common fast strokes to become popular. And having some buoyancy helps with this stroke so folks who float are going to find it easier.

You'll note that the only real competition to Vicky Keith, the crazy Canadian who sets records swimming across large cold bodies of water like the English Channel linked above, is Julie Bradshaw from the UK. One of her many records: doing 10.5 miles of butterfly in 6hr 42min. Yea. That is a great distance to swim in open & cold water, and extraordinarily fast for butterfly. It is rather telling that the guy who has swam the channel some 34 times, who's no slouch, can't believe the ladies who can do it.

I hope this catches on, because I expect women to continue to dominate it. Just think what a great addition to the Olympics: super long distance butterfly swim in large cold bodies of water.
posted by zenon at 2:36 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Anyway, I refuse to acknowledge any swim race that doesn't allow you to swim however the fuck you want to.

We have that. It's called the freestyle race. And how does everyone swim it? This way.
posted by dw at 2:43 PM on June 3, 2010 [5 favorites]

If'n it ain't dog paddlin', it ain't real swimmin'.
posted by infinitywaltz at 3:27 PM on June 3, 2010

dw beat me to it.

"Freestyle" means exactly that. Swim any style.

In practice, everybody swims the Australian Crawl, which is what the stroke is actually called.
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:07 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ray Mancini used to say that boxing is, by far, the most physically demanding sport there is:

"When you get tired running, you can slow down.

When you get tired boxing, you get the shit beaten out of you."

In boxing, you can at least rest a little while you dance away. In wrestling, you spend 6 minutes straining every muscle to keep on top or to resist being pinned, all the while intensely alert for your opponent's slightest let down in attention or balance. I've played soccer, baseball, softball, football, tennis, racquetball, squash, handball, volleyball, and golf, and lifted weights, biked, swum, run track and marathons, pole vaulted, and high jumped, but none of these wore me out anywhere near the extent a wrestling match did.
posted by Mental Wimp at 4:20 PM on June 3, 2010

Regarding the actual topic, my wife swam 'fly and back for her Division III college team. She is in her 50s now, but when I see her butterfly in the pool when someone else is also attempting it, I am (and anyone else who is watching is) impressed with how smooth and apparently effortless her stroke is in comparison. At the same time, she blows by the other swimmers. The stroke is very technique dependent, but it also takes enormous fitness.

I myself been swimming for fitness for about 25 years now, but she can kick my ass in the free, the back, and the breast. I cannot do the 'fly and if I did I would just look silly.
posted by Mental Wimp at 4:31 PM on June 3, 2010

Geez. and you can't even fall back on "at least I'm strong in the brains department"
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:50 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

The reason for the special difficulty of butterfly, for most swimmers, is that it doesn't have an aerobic mode. Most experienced swimmers can do a nice, efficient crawl, breaststroke, or backstroke without any real problems and maintain it pretty much indefinitely. With butterfly, however, it's difficult to do - taking your arms out of the water requires a certain amount of effort, and most people can't drop below that. Being able to do butterfly for long distances pretty much involves having a very, very efficient technique and a being able to maintain a pretty high level of exertion.

There's a degree of oxygen starvation, too - butterfly is very bad about demanding a huge energy price for every breath, since you have to raise your head and it just makes it that much more difficult to pull your arms up. So you definitely want to take as few breaths as you can survive.

On a side note, my father was the swim coach back in the day when I was on the team, and he always liked me to do the 200 meter butterfly because it usually had 1/5th the people in it as the shorter events. Coming in 3rd of out 3 people in the 200 fly scores more points for the team than coming in 10th out of 45 in the 50 meter freestyle. So sometimes I'd point whore for the team by doing the 200 fly, the 400 IM, the 1500 free, and all of the other annoyingly long events that nobody else wanted to do (and to be fair, it can be hard for some people to even do the 200 fly - if you get too tired, your technique will fail to the point at which you get disqualified.)
posted by Mitrovarr at 5:06 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

I hate hate hate doing the butterfly myself, but there is nothing prettier in the pool than butterfly being done well.
posted by QuarterlyProphet at 7:00 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Man, I never would've thought to do long distance butterfly like that. I used to swim the individual medley (IM) and transitioning from butterfly to the final freestyle leg was always a relief.
posted by Burhanistan at 8:40 PM on June 3, 2010

Burhanistan: Man, I never would've thought to do long distance butterfly like that. I used to swim the individual medley (IM) and transitioning from butterfly to the final freestyle leg was always a relief.

There's a place in the world where the IM isn't done Fly-Back-Breast-Free?
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:41 PM on June 3, 2010

[i]There's a place in the world where the IM isn't done Fly-Back-Breast-Free?[/i]

When I was in high school 20 years ago it was Back-Breast-Fly-Free. This was so you started from the water for the back. I think the order switched for good when they altered the backstroke turns in the early 90s.
posted by dw at 9:52 PM on June 3, 2010

I have serious respect for 'flyers. I swam competitively for years and could never both do the stroke correctly AND breathe. My coaches made everyone do both the 200IM* and the 500 free at least once per season and the IM was just HELL for me. Thankfully, my backstroke was fast enough to keep from totally EMBARRASSING myself, but man. Hell.

Anyway, I refuse to acknowledge any swim race that doesn't allow you to swim however the fuck you want to.

I guess swimming just isn't your sport. And no, from a competition point of view, you CAN'T swim any stroke during a freestyle event. If you, f'ristance, flipped onto your back, you'd be D/Qed. If you did a breaststroke style two-hand touch on the wall as opposed to a flip-turn... D/Qed. At least, this is how it was in my particular league.

Each stroke involves a different skill set. If you learn each stroke, you kinda start to understand that each race is testing totally different skills - unlike running which is the same skill no matter how far you're going. Breaststroke and butterfly involve entirely different muscle groups and are inherently different speeds. An IM tests a swimmer's all around abilities. A distance freestyle event tests endurance. Sprints test, well, sprinting. Each race has a totally different feel and most swimmers specialize in one, maybe 2, events for these reasons. For me, I swam 50back, 100back, 100free and 200free and just flat out sucked at everything else (50back and 100free were my strongest events). I wasn't a good sprinter and I had one hell of a flutter-kick (honestly, in a no-arms-allowed kick race, I CREAMED everyone else on my team in the flutter kick), but my breast stroke kick was too wide and my dolphin kick was pretty damn strong, but I couldn't get the arm coordination to go along with it in the butterfly. The reason you don't race any damn stroke you want is that each stroke is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT skill. It'd be like doing the long jump and the javelin toss in the same event, if you want to compare it to track and field.

*Individual Medley. Each stroke in order: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle. Includes harrowing backwards flipturn in which one's face comes perilously close to the wall. Or at least, that's the order I swam in the 90s. In the relay, you have to start with the backstroke because you can't dive in and then turn on your back without being D/Qed.

** Disqualified. The dreaded D/Q is the basis for silly tshirts that say "Swimmers D/Q" with the words "Don't Quit" spelled downwards in acrostic fashion.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:01 AM on June 4, 2010

And no, from a competition point of view, you CAN'T swim any stroke during a freestyle event.

This misunderstands the meaning of the term "freestyle". From the NCAA rule book:

In a freestyle event, any style or combination of styles may be used.

They do have rules on the start, the turn and the finish, however.
posted by Mental Wimp at 9:18 AM on June 4, 2010

Mental Wimp: I'll conceed that there are no rules governing the actual stroke during a freestyle event, but the start, the turn, and the finish are all parts of the stroke and you can't really do a proper free-style flip turn if you've been, say, swimming the breaststroke. I guess you could, but it'd slow you down big time. There are reasons why each stroke has specific starts, turns, and finishes - those are the most efficient ways of doing that stroke. A two hand touch turn works for fly, but not free and vice-versa. It's all about the shape of your body as you're coming into the wall. You can glide in and tuck yourself around doing free - not so with the fly.

There are also rules about when you can come up and how soon you have to kick after going off the wall and how soon is too soon to flip over on a turn - all of those things effectively prevent you from doing a freestyle event with a butterfly or breast stroke. Also, if I understand correctly, you can't go on your back during a freestyle event.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 9:35 AM on June 4, 2010

ou can't really do a proper free-style flip turn if you've been, say, swimming the breaststroke.

Well, the only rule on the turn (you can read them in my link if you're interested) is that you can't travel more than 15 meters underwater at the turn and that you have to touch the wall with some part of your body. You can do the turn in any inefficient way you desire, but you will lose, obviously.

Also, if I understand correctly, you can't go on your back during a freestyle event.

Nope, just talked to the Gopher women's swim coach, who confirms what the rulebook says. You can do synchro moves if you want (I hear the eggbeater gets you down the lane quickly ;>). However, that's for a freestyle event. If you're in a medley or relay, then you can't do the back, fly, or breast during the free leg.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:23 AM on June 4, 2010

Yeah, I swam summer league in the late 80s and the order was as dw mentioned.
posted by Burhanistan at 12:17 PM on June 4, 2010

You can do the turn in any inefficient way you desire, but you will lose, obviously.

This is really it in a nutshell why even if you can technically use an alternate stroke in freestyle (which is honestly news to me - who swam competitively for nearly a decade), you don't. The "Australian Crawl" is the fastest stroke and if everyone else is swimming it and you're not... Yeah, points for creativity, but you'll have to pin them on your purple "Thanks For Showing Up" ribbon.

I can't tell you how many of those I got. I said I swam competitively. I never said I won. *sobs*
posted by grapefruitmoon at 12:29 PM on June 4, 2010

Alternately, you can try the 200m freestyle for non-swimmers.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 12:31 PM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]