Engineering view of things. Engineering view of things What's new in the training diary

Best Swimming Books March 31st, 2016

As you have already noticed, I love to read with passion, you need to read everything, because everything is needed and there is always not enough. But, wait, do you really need to read something about swimming? You have to swim there. Of course, the books that I will cite below are meaningless if you are not studying, but they will be very useful if you want to have more fun with the practice and make some progress. Therefore, even if you swim for yourself, these books will be very useful.

I will tell only about two of them. One will seem good to you and the other bad. Which one is up to you, but you need to read everything.

1. Terry Laughlin and John Delves Total Immersion. How to swim better, faster and easier” — you immediately feel that this book is about swimming. Reading it is the same as swimming. Moreover, you can swim without moving your legs and arms, holding on to a rope that, as if by magic, pulls you, and you just have to relax and get this cosmic pleasure from water “weightlessness” and sliding. Actually, you can get so drunk on the book that you can only read this book and not even go to the pool :)) In fact, seriously, this book may appeal to those who swim for themselves, for pleasure, for their simplicity and intelligibility. does not claim any sports achivments, but just wants to get high in the pool. And the book is very good for those who just want to start swimming. It simplifies and somewhat elevates the process itself. After this book, you start to think that there is no greater pleasure in this life than swimming.

2. Paul Newsom and Adom Young Efficient Swimming is a giant book. Reading it is the same as giving it your all in the pool. There is a sea of ​​useful and systematically organized information. Those accents in style that were offered by the first book are referred to here as the type of swimmer "Glisser" - one of six possible individual options for freestyle technique. Accordingly, you will learn about five others only from this book. Here, the mistakes of each type of swimmer and their causes are very well understood. For example, the reason for the “scissors effect” (when the legs get confused, cross) is not in the legs, but in laying hands behind the middle line (nose line) during the stroke. It is to this book that I owe my purchase of the best paddles for swimming (

This site - online training diary for swimmers and all swimmers.

Here you can record your workouts, swim distances and subsequently view (and analyze!) your evolution on the statistics page.

The site is completely free and is developed on a voluntary basis))

You can connect as one of the temporary users (click on the button and open a demo session) or register and start using the site.

Catch the wave, gentlemen!

Open demo session

Register

Why keep a swimming diary?

Reason one: Aren't you interested in looking back and seeing how much better you've become as a swimmer? Maybe you're swimming 100 crawls 1 to 2 seconds faster than last year, or you're just swimming 500 meters more in a session than before. Yes, and butterfly more and more often appears in your workouts. Swimming is a sport where you need to go for months or even years to get results. Progress is not always visible immediately. Sometimes it seems to you that everything is useless, but as soon as you remember your results a year ago, the motivation returns again.

Reason two: Today in the pool you were the star, and your butt could be proudly compared to a dolphin. Maybe you just slept well today, or maybe it's because yesterday the coach made you work out a couple of exercises. Remember this for two days - when the butterfly suddenly limps again (and it will definitely limp, especially if you are a beginner), repeat that workout, and the dolphin's flight will return again.

What's new in the training diary?

FINA Points Calculator : 2016 Short Course data added to base time table.

Coastal sailing diary

Oleg Kuvaev

Coastal sailing diary

It seems to be like in a movie, a telegram came: “Fly out, we are waiting for an appointment,” and with cinematic ease I abandoned everything: the Moscow post office with queues of people without a settled place at the windows, worries about a Moscow apartment, and even the city of Voronezh, where I, in fact, stuck around all the time because she lived there. But the telegram came in the midst of that year's sweltering Moscow summer, when the asphalt was melting, gasoline fumes went into the stratosphere, and overweight people bled water like snow maidens.

It was the end of May, and the marching trumpet, in its true marching essence, sang only symbolically, since at the end of July it is ridiculous to talk about an expedition. But I really wanted to, and that's why even on the plane there was a plan for the remaining stub of summer. There were many reasons for this plan, and science, to be honest, did not occupy the first place in it.

The institution that sent the telegram had only recently organized itself, the corridors smelled of fresh paint, there was no full staff of employees, and those who were, had scattered on expeditions since the spring, and therefore the corridors were quiet, cool and empty. The supreme power was exercised by the Deputy Director of Science, an extremely sharp mind, a man who divided time between this supreme power and the wilds of the absolute age of the Earth. Nothing else seemed to interest him. Of the entire staff of the expedition planned on the plane, there was only myself. The head of the personnel department, he died now, a man of good memory, but even if he had not died, it would still be impossible to remember him badly, and this head of the personnel department, unlike his colleagues, delved into the situation and said:

I will find one for you. A certified technician will arrange?

Still would! - I said with passion, because it is always a sin to refuse a technician, especially a certified one.

Everything went well this summer. The deputy director for scientific affairs also delved into and, having for a time renounced the absolute age of the earth's rocks, personally drew the task on two pages of typewritten text, personally spoke with the chief accountant in order to raise funds - behind the charming female appearance of that chief accountant, a financial Cerberus was hiding - and personally called the basement floor to the rogue supply manager, so that he could take out scarce equipment from the stash, among which there were even two real downy sleeping bags.

So, thanks to the absence of inertia, routine and bureaucracy in this newly organized institution, a week after the telegram arrived in Moscow, there was a staff of two people, equipment and money. The task was formulated quite clearly: "Study of anomalies of the Earth's gravitational field on the anticlinal ledges of the Paleozoic deposits of Chukotka." It was not a topic, but a particle of a major topic that was being planned, a test stone in a large garden. But more could not be planned this summer.

The main accessible Paleozoic ledge in Chukotka was the Kuul uplift in the north of its central part. And although many of the luminaries of Chukchi geology do not consider it to be Paleozoic, we attributed this to the absurd nature of the luminaries and firmly decided to put the work there. To do this, it was necessary to cross it by a gravimetric route at least once, and precisely along the seashore, so as not to attract topography here. The equipment - three brand new gravimeters of domestic production - was available in the warehouse. The rest was left to our discretion. The freedom of choice for us was to do the job with the necessary degree of reliability with minimal means, because gravimeters that measure the earth's thrust are capricious, like sick babies. Under normal conditions, when, for example, firms financed by rich oil departments work, everything is done using powerful transport equipment. With that technique, a carefully tested reference network of observations is first created, and then the work goes on, so that each section of the work the gravimeter starts dancing from the stove and ends it also on the stove. His capricious temper simply does not have time to play out, squeezed in the grip of authenticity. We couldn’t work normally, and therefore we decided to take all three devices with us so that they could spy on each other, and to carry out reference measurements later, in those places where they would be needed, and to do this on a cheap An-2 aircraft in the spring, in the bounties of the coming financial year. We just turned the usual way of working upside down and thus saved time and money.

It only remains to add that gravimetric information is necessary for the titans of geological thought, and our newly created institution just intended to become a center where these titans will gather from all over the northeast? countries, and ahead loomed times rich in scientific results and appropriations. Of course, I'm not talking about the entire institution, since titans were already sitting within its walls, giving out theories, results and conclusions, but with capricious gravimetric science, which allows you to look deeper into the earth's crust, while none of them was connected. The Kuul anticlinorium runs into the coast of the Arctic Ocean between the Chaun Bay and Cape Billings. The large river Pegtymel flows along it, and names flash on the coast: Cape Kibera, Nolde Bay, Cape Shalaurova Izba.

The coast between Lena and Kolyma makes a heavy impression even on an experienced person. The Primorskaya and Nizhne-Kolyma lowlands, swampy tundra plains from hummocks and lake water go to the ocean here. Having reached the sea, the lowlands do not want to give up for a long time and go to the north with dirty shallow water, along which in summer the deer leave the coast for a kilometer or two in order to drink salty water that is good for deer health. Getting stuck on these shallows is very dangerous. A furious shallow wave may not blow it to pieces, but it will rock the keel until dead silt clogs the holds, sucks the ship along the deck.

It is possible to get ashore here, but this does not mean to be saved. There is no habitation on the dead, unsuitable for navigation shores, and the footprint of a person across the tundra resembles an indecisive drunken dotted line, bypassing channels, lakes, oxbow lakes and wet swamps. To the east of the Kolyma, the coast becomes more cheerful. The rocks of Cape Baranov Kamen, the washed-out pebbles of the shore, and so on to the Chaun Bay, which is guarded from the west by the sandy flat island of Aion, and from the east by Cape Shelagsky, all this frightened sailors.

The dull shores from Lena to Cape Shelagsky were described and mapped by a merchant from Veliky Ustyug, Nikita Shalaurov. He also discovered the Chaun Bay, Aion Island, and was one of the first to see and spot Lyakhovsky Island from the group of the New Siberian Islands.

He died in 1764 in another desperate attempt to open a route from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific. His name can only be found on very detailed maps. An insignificant place in the lower reaches of the Kolyma called Zimovka Shalaurova, a tiny island of Shalaurova in the East Siberian Sea and Cape Shalaurova Izba, not far from the famous cape named after the idler Captain Billings.

For many years now I have been asking myself the question - when will the long-awaited book finally appear, which will reflect the epoch-making events of the late 20th century that affected the souls and lives of people on one sixth of our planet, when there was a grand demolition of the usual realities, worldviews, moral guidelines. This collapse ultimately affected the entire political, economic and moral climate of many states involved in the strategy of general globalization. Against the backdrop of great historical changes, human destinies broke down, and by their example one could see and feel with what suspicious ease seemingly unshakable truths were overthrown, how new interpretations of events, new beliefs and new goals took their place.

It cannot be said that in almost a quarter of a century that has passed since the day of that memorable crash, there have been no attempts to write something burning and relevant on this topic. But it is unlikely that anyone has managed to create a coherent and broad picture of the transition of a huge country and millions of its citizens to a different quality, to a different, parallel reality. I would like to believe that a great novel, if not "War and Peace", but a work, at least approaching in its social significance to "Fathers and Sons" or "Quiet Don", is still waiting for us ahead.

In this book, at least, an attempt has been made to reflect and somewhere to generalize the reality that has not yet had time to cool down in time and which shook us all, as they say, in full, without even giving us a chance to really think about what happened. Here, in a very personal form, in a private, so to speak, order, following the predestined path along which the ship with the pagan name "Tog" moved, it tells about the life and life of a small crew, knocked out of the usual channel of Soviet reality and thrown to self-survival in a harsh environment. capitalist market. Here you can clearly trace the dramatic plot twists in the colorful biographies of ordinary sailors, and some changes in the psychological pattern of the role that each of us plays on the stage of life. Not the last place is occupied in the book by views - types of seascapes, descriptions of ports, and coastal cities of Southern Europe, North Africa.

"Diary of a Voyage"- this is a diary written almost in the documentary genre. There is no plot, intrigue, development storyline, denouement and everything else that is required in a story, story or novel. In his preface, the author himself says that "... the reader is absolutely free to choose a starting point for reading and can randomly or according to his intuition choose any point in the story for himself." But this does not in the least detract from the artistic merits of the text, written in beautiful, stylistically accurate language, flavored with a significant amount of humor, self-irony, with great attention to detail, at first glance, insignificant, but sometimes decisive. As for philosophical generalizations, they are scattered throughout the text like pearls of the seabed.

“Sometimes it seems that the pinnacle of human daring is the first step into space, the flight to the moon… But these are all visible goals, to some extent, known. Christopher Columbus and his companions took a more daring and desperate step - they stepped into the unknown, only supposed. Into the Unknown, into the Nowhere, into the Abyss. The only thing that led them was Faith. Perhaps, and even for sure, the thirst for glory and profit was mixed here - the engines of the notorious human progress.

"Diary of a Voyage"- the third book of the author, related to the theme of the sea and travel. First "On the other side of the world" was dedicated to the 21st Antarctic Expedition and was published in 2005. In 2010, a book of marine prose appeared "Force Majeure" - a collection of sea stories and true stories, which was shortlisted for the Bunin Prize for 2012. And finally, 2015 - "Diary".

But let's go back to 1993, when even highly qualified specialists were “squeezed out” of the Riga Shipping Company from work on the basis of the language principle. Surely this also applied to other companies and departments. As a result, the author, unexpectedly for himself, found himself on the steamship Thor, sailing under the flag of Antigua and Barbuda. Thus was born "Diary of one voyage which you are now holding in your hands.

During a three-month sea voyage, the narrator (according to his position - a ship's electrician, and by his nature - a philosopher-contemplator) observes everything on the sea and on land that falls into his field of vision. The narrative unfolds slowly and goes, as it were, in a foamy wake, being displayed and manifested on it with words, chapters and the rustling of the pages of a future book. Sometimes, if there is such an opportunity, the author changes the means of transportation, changing to an old, battered, Soviet bicycle. This helps him to penetrate into the thick of things, becoming one of the main characters in the kaleidoscope of successive plots.

What is visible in living reality evokes a whole associative array, makes you analyze and compare, prompts lyrical digressions, thoughts related to yesterday, prompts you to transfer to paper eyewitness accounts of our recent common history that are invaluable for posterity. Page after page, the reader is faced with individual reflections that pop up as if from beyond the horizon, as they sail, mentally empathizing, arguing or agreeing with the narrator's assumptions and statements, answering his questions and asking his own. And if in the process of this “interactive” conversation the interlocutor, that is, the reader, suddenly feels like a like-minded author, then harmony and harmony reign in his soul from the consonance of words and thoughts. Actually, this is one of the tasks of the artist - to lure the reader to his side, to convey to him his vision of the world.

And here is how the writer himself speaks about the tasks of the artist:

“It was obvious that I, on my green, shabby bicycle from the times of the once existing USSR, in a sweaty washed T-shirt, and shorts cut out of old worn out jeans, looked like a tramp and a renegade here. To some extent, I was a reflection of the post-Soviet era. But it didn't bother me at all. I felt like a free artist in a moment of insight. And then it doesn't matter, a fashionable suede camisole or worn canvas pants on your mortal body. The main thing is that living pictures do not go into a series of irrevocably disappearing times.

Talking about what he saw, sharing his thoughts with the reader, analyzing facts and events, giving an assessment of what is happening, doubting generally accepted postulates, the author does not get tired of admiring the beauty of our fragile world. And in this he always remains an artist in the broadest sense of the word. The pictures of nature he painted verbally leave the impression of being absolutely visible, bright and convex, they convey the aromas of the sea breeze, the smells of flowers, the cries of seagulls, the rustle of the surf and the rustle of palm trees are heard in them.

“... it was good to drive along a flat asphalt path along the surf-boiling Atlantic Ocean, enjoy a fast ride and open views that follow each other, like in a children's diascope. In nature, these views turn into visions, and it is difficult to realize and even believe how beautiful and fragrant our Earth is in its miraculous manifestations. It was not for nothing that the Spirit of God hovered over the water in darkness in order to finally create light, and then the firmament of heaven and earth (and it was so). “And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas: and God saw that This good" (Genesis 1; 10). And a landscape emerged that has no equal, because it manifested comprehension and joy. And there is nothing more beautiful than this border at the junction of the ocean and the firmament.

Sometimes, watching the changes that have taken place in our lives over the past 25 years, you begin to understand how blurred the line between good and evil, freedom and licentiousness, divine and demonic has become. It would seem that a huge distance separates these mutually exclusive concepts. But no! As from love to hate - one step, so plus and minus, as the poles of one magnet, perhaps, differ in just one nuance.

“Somehow, in the Irish port of Cork, I happened to go to the local temple. In the course of the service, the pastor in the right places turned to the words of Christ himself. At the same time, he proclaimed: “Jesus said…” (Jesus said…). There is a big catch in this "said". If Jesus doesn't tell you now, but said some time ago, 2000 years ago, he can be perceived simply as a person. The Savior must speak here and now, and always, and forever and ever. And He does. But we don't always hear it. This nuance is almost imperceptible to the layman, but it significantly affects the future attitude and worldview of the flock and its attitude to existence. And in general, oddly enough, the world is built on nuances. They get stuck in the subconscious and create unpredictable constructions and models of the human community. Pay attention to the nuances. They often contain the hidden meaning of the future, the energy of what is happening lives in them.

Surely, "The Diary of a Voyage" will open up a rich and ambiguous world for the reader. The inner world of an original and creatively thinking person.

Angela Gasparyan, member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR and Latvia,

The inevitable preface

I dug out this diary from my archives, sorting through which I settled on it due to the fact that the records contained not only the facts of our movement around the world, but also individual generalizations, reflections and associations, some kind of artistic aberration, and sometimes grotesque. In the end, I decided to publish them, because, in fact, they represent a private, but historical document.

Nothing reflects reality like the hand of an artist, in which a brush or pen is invested. I had a pen, but I didn't have any art school. Even plain paper was missing. By chance, two packs of blank forms for ship radiograms turned up under my arm. Who prompted me to fill them with texts emerging from the depths of the present remains a mystery to me to this day. All I had to do was outline the barely developed contours of letters, words and sentences, give them sharpness and clarity, sometimes think about the content, reread and occasionally add my comments. Only a great desire not to miss the opportunity to show our world in the colors that my eye saw, prevailed over the scarcity of my handy means.

As a result, I burned those yellow forms, written by me with texts that seemed to come from nowhere. I wanted to test the well-known claim that manuscripts don't burn. The paper did not succumb to fire for a long time, but, finally, it took up and, obviously reluctantly, slowly and gradually, turned into the charred skeleton of my diary, where in some places in the form of ink dust the lines once drawn with a ballpoint pen appeared like ghosts. But they soon fell off along with the pages on which they were held. And all my work turned to ashes.

And yet the diary remained. I managed to transfer it to electronic media, thereby deceiving the nature of fire and partly confirming the thesis about the incombustibility of manuscripts. The only thing I can't do is present physical evidence of the authenticity of the texts below (since the original itself has already been blown over the world by the wind). It remains only to rely on the trust of the reader himself.

How it all began

Memories of different times are actually conveyed only by different pictures of knowledge.

A. Schopenhauer

1993 was not the best year in the history of our country. If not the worst. While living in Latvia, we, the "Russian-speakers", lost our jobs on the basis of language and nationality. We were squeezed out of all spheres of activity. With the establishment of independence and the acquisition of statehood, for which we stood up together with the Latvians, latent nationalists crawled into the light of day and started a “witch hunt”. All this was prepared gradually and was well felt by indirect signs almost throughout the 80s. And when the half-drunk Yeltsin uttered the historical phrase, which was both a trigger mechanism and a guide to action: “Take as much sovereignty as you can carry,” the Union crawled at the seams. And everyone "carried" as much as they wanted.

In our small shipping company, which recently bought new Romanian steamships with Moscow money, they began to conduct certification for knowledge of the Latvian language. That is, yesterday we all communicated in Russian, but today it was necessary to urgently switch to Latvian, otherwise you turned out to be unsuitable for professional purposes. Not without reason in those years there was a saying that is relevant to this day: “The best specialty in this state is a Latvian.”

Former deputy. head of the personnel department, replacing his Russian boss at once and getting rid of the now hated party card, he created a language commission that was supposed to weed out and separate Russians from Latvians. I remember the name of this chief very well - Dundurs. Translated into Russian - Gadfly. Corresponding to his surname, he stung tirelessly and with obvious pleasure. It was hard to sting me. At forty plus years old, I had already grown enough thick skin to survive in the environment of all sorts of unfavorable circumstances. After passing through the language commission, where Dundurs sat with his hands over his ears so as not to hear my exclusively Russian speech about the absurdity of this procedure, I went to the chairman of our still functioning trade union and expressed the following thought to him. I started with a question:

- Do you know that they want to fire me for not knowing the Latvian language?

The chairman, who had gorged himself on trade union grubs, was silent and looked blankly at me. Then I continued:

- I can tell you that the Swedish embassy has recently opened on Lachplesa Street and that I am going there with a statement about the violation of human rights, since in no country there is a right to expel someone from work for not knowing the language.

Here I, of course, was cunning. I knew almost nothing about laws and rights in other states. And the Swedes, in particular, did not care about my problems. But, I think, the former Soviet trade unionist also "floated" in this matter. I still had a hope that the chairman, as a Russian person, would understand another Russian person and approach this issue with understanding. But completely different winds were blowing in the trade union sails, and our captain of the trade union ship somehow internally changed, made a significant, but unkind face, and, having told me that this was a serious statement, hurried as if to the toilet.

After waiting for decency about five minutes, I decided to leave his office, and at the same time drop in on Dundurs to inform him that I would leave the shipping company with only one wording: for not knowing a second language, which suddenly became the state language and which no one taught us.

Our chairman of the trade union was already sitting in the office of the head of the OK, and with a conspiratorial look, he squinted his eyes to the side.

“I wasn’t taught your second language either,” Dundurs retorted, “but I know it. Now it's your turn to learn our Latvian. The time has come.

- For one day? I asked. And he added for clarification: - If you did not know Russian, you would not become the head of the personnel department. But if I learn Latvian, it is unlikely that I will ever take your place. In short, the trade union, apparently, reported everything to you, I need material evidence - an entry in the work book about the dismissal and his true motives. Because I don't want to quit on my own. Are you encouraging me to do this?

Dundurs, realizing that my threat might come true (and I had nothing to lose), asked me a proactive question:

- And what do you suggest?

- I'm not suggesting anything. As usual, after the holidays I return to my ship.

- Your seat is taken.

“Temporarily,” I explained. – From time immemorial, there has been a maritime ethic. A specialist who has accepted a new ship has the advantage of staying on it if he does not have penalties and violations in his work. But there, in my place, probably already a specialist of the indigenous nation. Ethics doesn't work for you. Or rather, it works, but with a national bias.

Dundurs was silent and playfully played with his jaws.

- Well, - he said suddenly, - I can offer you a place on the Engure.

The Engure was an old, and not even old, but a decrepit steamer. He departed his deadline in the Latvian Shipping Company, was scrapped, but at the last moment it was bought by the Riga River Shipping Company, which, at its own peril and risk, began to operate it mainly in the Baltic basin. Even during the period of delivery of this ship to the Maritime Register, I rejected it according to several parameters and wrote a corresponding report about the impossibility of further operation of the ship. Apparently, Dundurs knew these details and offered a variant obviously not acceptable to me. In any case, it was a small victory: if I agreed to this offer, then for some time I could work on this collapsing steamer and provide for myself and my family. But the principles were more valuable. I knew there would be no other options.

- Thank you for the flattering offer, - I quipped, - "Engure" floating scrap metal. You know this as well as I do. And I'm not suicidal. You have achieved your goal. I'm resigning.

So I left the shipping company with the wording "fired of my own free will." And not only me. The head of this shipping company, as well as many specialists with Russian surnames, also left. Power was changing in the country, priorities, money, institutions, economy, politics, relations between people were changing. Lost confidence in the future.

From the old Soviet times, only a monument remained to the Red Latvian Riflemen, who in July 1918 supported Lenin in suppressing the rebellion of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. In practice, they saved the then Soviet power. And the last descendant of one of these shooters shot himself when this power was betrayed and trampled on by the heirs of the unfinished counter-revolutionaries who were in power in the 80s and buried it in 1991. In Latvia, someone wrote a poem about this:

And suddenly I dream of not a beautiful lady,
Which Blok took and invented,
And I dream of a drama, a terrible drama,
In it, Pugo is the last Latvian shooter.

I was left without a job and a livelihood, because I had no gold reserves. In the Soviet Union, we used to live paycheck to paycheck and, as a rule, did not need anything, since our needs never exceeded our capabilities. And the thought of losing or not finding a job did not arise for the simple reason that at each enterprise there were boards with the inscription “Wanted” and a list of professions required by the enterprise. We must pay tribute to the Russian people - he is always sensitive to change. This was taught to him by history and life itself. Our ingenuity, with its sense of time, always found a way out of the created situations, unless, of course, it blindly crushed bloody revolutions with a skating rink. But even during the period of political storms, people managed to survive, maneuvering in the bends of disastrous unrest. From the stories of my father I know that my grandfather, depending on the food situation between 1917 and 1930, moved with his family from village to city, then from city to village. This is how they survived.

It was not easy for me to go to the village, although this option was also considered. Pretty soon, I got a call from the captain, with whom in the last perestroika times we shared the ship “Riga” received in Oltenitsa (a Romanian city on the Danube), and who was fired on the same principle, although his last name did not have quite a Russian ending.

- I need an electrician, - he said without unnecessary ceremonies, - we are going to Nizhny Novgorod to accept new ships.

- Didn't you pass the language exam too? I asked for decency.

“The point here is not even in language, but in national identity,” he explained a thing that was already clear to everyone.

There was no choice. Most importantly, they paid. The ships turned out to be 30-35 years old. Limit wear. All have been scrapped. Even local crews hesitated to set foot on their decks for fear of falling through the rust-thinned sheets of metal. The bulk of this still floating scrap was concentrated in the large backwater of the ancient city of Gorodets, according to legend, founded by Yuri Dolgoruky himself. From Nizhny only about fifty kilometers. The ships were linked by the sides and, oddly enough, kept afloat. They belonged to the VI Five Year Plan series.

Where is their "news"? - I asked him at an opportunity, referring to the captain's promises about the acceptance of new ships.

“Their ‘news’ is that we are seeing them for the first time. Have you been on these boats?

- On such I haven’t had to…” I admitted.

- Here! And our task, - the captain explained, - is to put them in order, start the main engines, revive the dynamos, steering, and forward with songs up the Volga. Further along the channels to Ladoga, Leningrad, parking, welcome to the passage by sea and - to Riga. It was one of the scams of the new marginal business elite: to buy cheaply decommissioned river steamships made from pioneer scrap metal in the mid-fifties, rejuvenate them by 10–15 years by forging Register documents, drive them to the Baltic States, make cosmetic upgrades to class "river-sea" and release it into the open spaces of the sea, having previously insured it well. Having learned about our plans, the local crews were perplexed: “What are you, a kamikaze? We crossed the reservoir on them with life jackets at the ready. On the river, it is easier: if it leaks, then it taxied to the shore and ran aground. And in the sea such shoals are unlikely to be found.

This a book is the simplest, most effective and, perhaps, the most accessible way not only to learn to swim, but also to constantly improve your once acquired skill. So, if in principle there can be a universal swimming tutorial, then it is in front of you.

The textbook gives a detailed description of the swimming technique and methods of technical improvement of swimmers, discusses the basics and different stages of selection and orientation, as well as building the process of their preparation. The modern theory and methodology for the development of motor qualities are presented, out-of-training and out-of-competition factors influencing the effectiveness of swimmers' training, etc. are characterized. For students and university teachers physical education and sports, coaches and athletes and scientists.

Do you want to learn how to swim? Do you dream of diving into rivers, seas and oceans without fear? It's more than real. Can a book replace a coach? Yes, if it's a coach book. This edition is unique: about 1000 photographs and realistic 3D models show in detail all the intricacies of various swimming techniques. The book is suitable for both those who are just learning to swim, and experienced swimmers who want to achieve high results. It covers all styles of swimming, features of training to increase speed and endurance, exercises for strength and stretching outside the pool. You will also learn about the history of the development of swimming as a sport and the greatest champions of the past and present.

“Like a fish in water” - now it's about you. People who have mastered the Terry Laughlin Total Immersion technique are able to swim tirelessly for hours, enjoying every movement they make. In this book you will find explanations and exercises that will lead you step by step to good technique, on which, according to the author, 70 percent of the result in swimming depends. This book is a must for anyone who wants to learn how to swim freely and correctly, and especially for those who are preparing for competitions for long and extra long distances.