OT: Lynne Cox - overweight athlete?

She has neutral bouyancy

She has lowered her internal thermostat doing things like leaving her
windows open all winter

She can train for long periods at 70-80% HRmax

To look at her you'd designate her was morbidly obese. She doesn't have
great localized fat on isolated body parts like some obese individuals,
instead her body has the fat distributed more like a seal, with a 3" thick
layer over her torso, and arms and legs, istm, looking at her on 'The
Science Channel' show today..

When she's at the gym she gets dirty looks from other women, as though she
has no right to be smiling, or to be lifting as much weight as she does and
still not fitting the Western norm of beauty. (note, I'm not necessarily in
the overweight is beautiful camp, I still subscribe to Western standards,
and I'm not saying either is right or wrong, just reporting, here, as I
explain below.)

So when we talk about overweight cyclists this may have a small amount of
applicability, even though there's no advantage to having this all over
layer of fat.

A person who was built like this wouldn't have quite the flexibility issues
(getting in a tuck) on a bike that a person might have who has the large
localized amounts of back fat and waist fat and saddlebags that some
overweight person might have, which could arguably hold back their cycling.

What would be key to this type of athletic specialization would be if the
person could, on demand of her will and planning, be able to recompose
their body if they should decide to move from a sport like cold-water
swimming and apply her ability and endurance to something like long
distance speed skating or ultra-distance cycling.

IOW, they are not victims of their overweight like many overweight persons
may be, who have excess weight due to psychological reasons or because they
are insulin resistant due to overconsumption of refined sugar at the wrong
times, etc.

Just some musings...

jj

PS from her website:
"By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English
Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam
five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and
goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the
Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good
Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by
dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic"

.

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