Michaela Werner is free diver, who in 2023, set a new world record, becoming the first woman to swim 101 underwater laps of a 25-metre pool in an hour. Born in Slovakia, she moved to Australia at age 19 where she fell in love with freediving. Michaela can swim 200m underwater, can hold her breath for six minutes and is a qualified free-diving instructor and coach.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Let Me Breathe (Wardub) - Rhekluse
• Breathe - INOSSI
• Breathe - LiQWYD
• hold your breath - ikkunn
• Free Dive - Cymatish
• Sapphire - Tobu

Photo from Michaela on instagram

Anthony Blazevich is a Professor of Biomechanics in the School of Medical and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University. He is also the head of the Centre for Exercise and Sports Science Research, so is a fabulous person to talk to about biomechanics, body types and how our physiology affects our ability to move through water. Listen in to hear how you could tweak your stroke for quicker times, and why we still may see many more world records in the pool (and ocean). He has also conducted extremely interesting research on the benefits (or not) of stretching.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Biomechanics - Bit Funk & Jason Gaffner
• Biomechanics - I.D.L.E
• Biomechanics - Greyscale Music
• Sapphire - Tobu

Photo created by me using Bing AI Image Creator

Rebecca Olive is an ocean swimmer whose academic research explores the role of sport and leisure in human and environmental health. In particular, her work explores the practices and cultures of ocean swimming and surfing to understand how human and environmental well-being interact, as well as our relationships to all things blue-space, such as sharks, animals, plastics, pollution and health. Her Moving Oceans website examines how participation in ocean sports shapes our behaviours towards taking care of the oceans. She has also published some fantastic reads in The Conversation - we talk about these two in the podcast:

• When we swim in the ocean, we enter another animal’s home. Here’s how to keep us all safe.
• Olympic swimming in the Seine highlights efforts to clean up city rivers worldwide.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• off-set flippers x - bowdeeni fish x
• Crocodile Teeth Freestyle - Lajan Slim
• Olive - evildirk
• Olive - Słejzi Wysocki
• Olive Spring @ Imperss Music 2022
• Sapphire - Tobu

Image from Moving Oceans

Michelle O’Shea is a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University whose research interests dive into the areas of sport, culture and society, particularly with regard to swimming. She has looked into issues such as why swimming lessons for kids are important, as well as the role of the swimming pool in society. Her research particularly examines issues relevant to gender and diversity, and how the pool and the beach, despite the great Australian egalitarian myth, can be quite exclusionary places.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• The Magic of Diversity - The Egotwisters
• Inclusion - Tenshou Kikiko
• Diversity - Africk
• Culture Vulture - Vincent Remember
• Sapphire - Tobu

Image from wikicommons

Primrose Freestone, Associate Professor in Clinical Microbiology at the University of Leicester and science communicator, is an infectious diseases expert, and has dived into the debate of whether swimming in a pool or in the natural environment is the safer option. She also takes us through the cleanliness of hot-tubs (hint, they're gross.)

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Bugs - GNAAR
• Bugs - Phillip Barker
• Bug's Land - Vadim Krakhmal
• Little bugs - i m p a u s e a b l e
• Sapphire - Tobu

Photo from wikimedia

Seena Mathew is Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. As a neurobiologist, she studies the effects of swimming on the brain, which are many! You can read her article in The Conversation (Swimming gives your brain a boost – but scientists don’t know yet why it’s better than other aerobic activities) or tune in here!

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• The brain cells strike back - Lofi Factory
• Stuck in my brain - Atch
• Planetary alignment - Dr Brain
• Sapphire - Tobu

Photo from StockSnap

Episode 50! Swimmer's ear (acute otitis externa) is an outer ear infection that many swimmers will have had at some point in their lives. However, it turns out that you don't have to go swimming to get swimmer's ear. Thomas Schrepfer is assistant professor of head and neck surgery in the University of Florida Department of Otolayrngology, and a keen diver and swimmer.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• A short earache - Mooge
• Ear infection - Mad Wax
• In my ear - Bbbyugy
• Right ear - Aphickey
• Sapphire - Tobu

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash.

Rolf Hut is a hydrological scientist from Delft University of Technology. Or perhaps he's better described as MacGyver scientist, attacking problems from different and interesting angles. One such problem was the infamous 1962 escape from Alcatraz, in which inmates Clarence Anglin, John Anglin, and Frank Morris escaped from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, by tucking papier-mâché versions of their heads into their beds, escaping their cells through the ventilation ducts, climbing through an unused utility corridor, across roofs and over fences, before leaving the island on an improvised inflatable raft made of rain jackets. Rolf helped build perhaps the most sophisticated model of the currents in the bay area on the night of escape to look at the question of whether the inmates could possibly have survived the journey, and then tested the research in his own Mythbusters-esque escape from Alcatraz.

Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License:

• Form Flow - Rolf
• Oca - John Hut
• Chicken Hut Bluegrass - Silverman Sound Studios
• Sapphire - Tobu

Image from Rolf's page at Delft