Courtesy of WOWSA, San Francisco, California.
Steve Walker knows his material.
The northern Californian wrote Where The Crazy People Swim: Outrageous goals, failure, and success in October 2016 and co-edited A History of Marathon Swimming in 2017.
Where The Crazy People Swim addresses the sport of swimming and being honesty about failure both in the water and out as Walker describes setting outrageous goals and definitions of success.
Walker completed an ice mile in 2.7°C (37°F) water in 1996 in Melbourne, Australia and a number of channels:
* English Channel in 1996 in 13 hours 31 minutes
* Strait of Gibraltar in 3 hours 59 minutes in 2015
* Catalina Channel in 2015 in 12 hours 14 minutes
* North Channel in 2016 in 11 hours 19 minutes
* Strait of Juan de Fuca where he was pulled out after 4 hours 26 minutes and 10.8 miles in 46°F (7.7°F) water
* Molokai Channel in 2017 in 18 hours 8 minutes
* Two Tsugaru Channel attempts in 2017
* Cook Strait in 2017 in 12 hours and 17 minutes
Walker also served as the co-editor with Dale Petranech of A History of Marathon Swimming, a 536-page book written by International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame Honor Administrator Joe Grossman. The book covers the sport of marathon swimming and its participants including swimmers, coaches, trainers, promoters and pilots, from 1875 to 1974.
Grossman wrote the initial draft of A History of Marathon Swimming back in the 1960’s. Walker wrote its final draft that was nominated for the 2018 World Open Water Swimming Offering of the Year.
Despite Grossman’s passing in 1974, Petranech faithfully maintained a huge stack of his personally typewritten pages for nearly 50 years. Walker edited the comprehensively compiled hundreds of pages of notes, observations, recollections and data from solo swims and competitions in numerous bodies of water around the globe.
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