Off the Deep End - 9781565125643

Every kid dreams of defying all odds to become the next Bruce Jenner or Mary Lou Retton or Eric Heiden. And then on to the Wheaties box. Hodding Carter dreamed of being the next Mark Spitz.
Though he'd failed to qualify for the Olympics year after year after year after year, he never stopped believing he could get there. And as with most men, upon reaching middle age, he had trouble accepting that his body - not to mention his hairline - was changing, and that he could no longer pass for a college kid. So Carter did what any moderately insane person would do. He set out to pursue once again his childhood dream of being a champion. Only now, it meant being the oldest swimmer to qualify for the Olympics.
So he began training in earnest for the 2008 games as a sprint swimmer. From his first race - which he now refers to as his Swim of Shame (when his arms "began to quake like rubbery Gumby limbs") - Carter battled the odds and his own body to try to get to the gold.
He trained like the best of the best: swimming three to four miles each day, six days a week, often carrying weights or hauling a parachute behind him. He attended swim camp, training under the ten-time Olympic medalist Gary Hall Jr. He swam his way through life: swimtrekking in the Caribbean while overcoming his fear of sharks; enduring hypothermia to swim around Manhattan; returning to college to train with his former coach; and even taking a job at the local YMCA as the assistant aquatics director.
Was he crazy? Maybe. But by December 2007, eight months away from the Olympics, he'd become the fastest swimmer in the country for his age group.
This outrageous and courageous chronicle of a man chasing the gold is an exuberant celebration of determination in the face of time and of achieving your goals at any age.