Eirik Ravnan is a Norwegian open water swimmer who was previously a member of the Stanford varsity swim team. A time back, he posted a video on his Facebook of swimming the IM backward, but it wasn’t of great quality.
Now, Eirik has upped the production value, and posted a new version of the video.
The value of this exercise: showing off? Demonstrating will-power? Improving body awareness? Just to prove he can? Because it’s a more fun way to swim a 400 IM? Did I just say a 400 IM could be fun?
I’m sure we could all come up with a justification if we tried hard enough, but ultimately, we enjoyed watching it, and thought you might too. there’s a short 60-second clip above, and you can watch the full video on Eirik’s Facebook page below.
what does IM stand for?
I am amazed that backward swimming is only now making it on the internet large-scale. We did this over a decade ago after practice all the time! I still do backwards free for the last 25 of my workouts (if you can calm them workouts) to “unwind.”
That being said, Eirik has the best backward breaststroke I’ve ever seen.
Great! I am a backwards swimmer myself. One concept I came up with is getting some water in your mouth, and then walking to a water fountain backwards, and then spitting the water from your mouth into the fountain. Do this after a few backwards laps to really make people question reality 🙂
awesome. we should add 5th stroke, free backwards.
That was cool, but what was his time?
To me it looks like 100m IM.
Great coordination and awareness
Great catch, also I am a triathlete not an open water swimmer, but the story is better this way I guess 😉
You would, Eirik. You would. Glad to see that you’re putting your fluid mechanics expertise to good use in the pool as well. Proud to have been your roommate in college!
Haha, yeah I’m still in the pool about 5 times a week, so I need to have some fun 😉 Proud to have been your roomie as well.
His Facebook page isn’t linked in the article, but this looks hilarious
PVSFree – you can click on it through the Facebook post, but just in case, here’s the direct link: https://www.facebook.com/eirik.ravnan?fref=ts
Thanks!