"Water yer think yer doin?"

This post from Andrew Sullivan's The Dish may also explain the newly revealed Spiritual Booze-Up at the Sea of Galilee:

Riffing on Leanne Shapton's new book, Swimming Studies, Carolyn Kormann points to the longstanding, if sometimes tragic, connection between swimming and sexuality:

"I believed, for a while, in the aphrodisiacal qualities of my swimming," Shapton writes. Sex and swimming go way back. The first swimmer in Western literature was Leander. He swam a mile across the Hellespont each night to see his lover, Hero. She guided him into port with a torch. Then, one night, storm winds blew out the torch and Leander drowned. Hero, devastated, flung herself into the sea. Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in 1810, and found it tough going, "so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise." (Shapton’s belief did not survive her experience, either. After watching one of her swim meets, her husband was "like a man who has just sat through an interesting lecture and is now peckish.")

Less clear is how it can explain Diana Nyad's latest try to swim from Cuba to Florida. Marielitos would probably tell her it's easier with a boat.