When I swim for long distances, my mind constantly wanders on a wide spectrum of thoughts and ideas.

In a continuation of the Marathon Musing series, I put on a fantasy swim cap and thought of various scenarios of magical, mysterious, supernatural examples of when science fiction meets open water swimming:

• What if we were swimming and when we hit a certain critical velocity (4 km per hour), we took off from the water’s surface and started to fly? How fun would that be?
• What if we had gills? Would be only have to look up when sighting?
• What if we could swim as fast as a dolphin? With a fast cruising speed up to 16 km per hour, we could cross the English Channel in just over 2 hours.
• What if we could breach like a dolphin?
• What is we could immediately transport ourselves to any open body of water anywhere in the world with intense thought?
• What if we were cold blooded?
• What if our bodies could adapt to any water temperature?
• What if our cardiovascular system could withstand 300 beats per minute?
• What if our toes and fingers became webbed once they hit the water?
• What if we had an internal GPS system that fed us all kinds of data in real time?
• What if we could change the color of the water to hues and tones of our preference?
• What if mermaids and mermen were real?
• What if we could shapeshift and physical transform ourselves to squeeze between tight place in coral reefs – or stretch out our arms to out-touch an opponent?
• What if we could bodysurf 30 meter waves?
• What if we were swimming and suddenly became super buoyant? Would we skip over the water’s surface quickly?
• What if we could enable a force field and eliminate jellyfish stings? That would certainly help.
• What if we could dive to extreme depths? What kind of marine life could we encounter?
• What if our hands were so strong we could open a coconut with our bare hands?
• What is Atlantis existed?
• What is we were such strong swimmers, we could swim up waterfalls?
• What if we could communicate with whales and dolphins?
• What if Captain Matthew Webb had had Instagram and TikTok accounts?
• What if we could see well underwater without goggles?

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