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I was runner that really started focusing on swimming at a very young age, and that's kind of how I got into acting. I was at a school for gifted athletes and gifted artists, and I got injured one year and started hanging out with all the actors and dancers and all those crazy people and started getting the bug.
Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.
St. Lucia was a place were we used to go on vacation - not every year, but we went there a couple of times. I remember the last time that I went there, I was really small, and the only memory that I have is that my dad was going swimming or fishing one day - and I really, really wanted to go - but I was too young.
Both the velodrome and the Commonwealth swimming pool are open to the public and are frequently used by local schools and the local community. Over the last six years young people have been inspired to take up swimming and cycling more seriously; some of them are now coming through as Olympic champions or hopefuls.
Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.
When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.
When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn't be taking any midnight dips - Madinat al-Salam no more.
My daughters are both funny and smart and lots of fun. They play lacrosse, soccer, musical instruments, like to cook with me, and are naturals in the swimming pool. Honestly, though, what I like doing most with them is eating. I've worked really hard to make sure they are willing to try all sorts of different foods.
Just getting in the pool for seven straight hours is unbearable to me.... It's grueling. There's nothing physically pleasurable about it. If you're doing a hard workout, you're throwing up in the gutter. At night you cling to your pillow and just hope that your body revives before you have to go back and do it again.
You've got to put a lot of hard work in and it's not just in the swimming pool. You've got to look after yourself, you've got to sleep well and you've got to recover between the sessions, whether that's resting or getting the right food inside you. I always try to get the best out of myself and strive for perfection.
My dad always taught me never to give up in my mind. You can never really beat me. It sounds ridiculous, but I will always come back for you. You can't beat someone who never gives up. I could lose 100 times to you, but I will always get you. I will die trying. This applies not only to swimming but to my life as well.
When I put something into motion, the creativity starts to make other people want to jump in, and then a lot of people get employed. I'm just like a shark, in that way. If I stop swimming, I'll die. But, it really is about that shared experience with people. I'm from theater, and that's really what theater feels like.
I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.
',Alive' stems from emotional growth and contentment. Before writing the song, I was swimming in a pool of hurt, guilt and spiritual discomfort. Instead of drowning, I decided to embrace these feelings and express gratitude for the lessons learned. With this new-found sense of life, I am stronger and happier than ever.
There's a great metaphor that one of my doctors uses: If a fish is swimming in a dirty tank and it gets sick, do you take it to the vet and amputate the fin? No, you clean the water. So, I cleaned up my system. By eating organic raw greens, nuts and healthy fats, I am flooding my body with enzymes, vitamins and oxygen.
That's part of the comedy, too, is we do have jokes throughout of hanging a lantern on the absurdity of the world. Like, when BoJack's flying over the neighborhood, you see some houses have swimming pools in the backyard, and what does that mean? Why would there be a swimming pool underwater? But we thought it was funny.
I can't control life for my grandchildren, so how could I control a story? Sometimes I try to force something, and after working and working on that chapter, I realise that I am swimming against the current. I will never get there. So I have to let go of whatever previous idea I had about it and let the characters decide.
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
I think marathon swimming makes you work more on your upper body, your abdomen, trapezius, and your arms. When you finish a race, your arms and abdomen are more tired than your legs. Your legs are tired because you've just sprinted for the line, but at the end of the race, when you start to relax, it's your arms that hurt.
I grew up down in Florida, and in the Keys, there's this place called Sea Camp which was not unlike Space Camp, except you explored the sea. And so that kind of whetted my appetite for that. But then I ended up swimming in a lagoon full of Cassiopeia jellyfish, and that quickly quashed that desire to be a marine biologist.
But to fly is just like swimming. You do not forget easily. I have been on the ground for more than ten years. If I close my eyes, however, I can again feel the stick in my right hand, the throttle in my left, the rudder bar beneath my feet. I can sense the freedom and the cleanliness and all the things which a pilot knows.
I think it is easier for thinner people to build on a frame once you get lean muscle. I get bored lifting weights at the gym, and it isn't enough as your body becomes stiff. So I train in different ways such as core training, cardio with weights, playing sports such as tennis, cycling, swimming and running 10 km once a week.
When I graduated college, I remember all I really wanted was to make enough money to have a swimming pool, because I love to swim, to grow my own fruit. I wanted to have a little plot where I could grow my own oranges and make enough money where I could to take two weeks off a year. I figured if I had that, it was game over.
Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.
At the end of October I started doing a bit more swimming and learning how to swim properly, because I hadn't really done it since I was at school. Then I really accelerated in December and for the whole of January's I've been doing at least one thing a day - normally a swim and a cycle, or a swim and a run, every single day.
My first event was in Nottingham, aged 11, and the prize was a bike. I thought, 'Wow.' I had no idea what to wear. I think I did it in swimming trunks, then just put on a T-shirt and shoes for the bike part. Triathlons felt exotic. There was a technical and tactical aspect to it as well as the endurance challenge. I was hooked.
I run, but boxing conditioning is different, so you have to get used to running in the ring. Boxing movements are very different. Swimming is one of the best because every single muscle is working. I swim a lot. I train very hard at things that mimic boxing. I have to do mostly sport-specific training, such as lots of sparring.
To be really in shape, it's dynamic. It's got to be a lot of different everything, always switching it up. So a good day for me would be hit the gym, do some sort of cross training in the gym and then go surfing and then maybe take a jiu-jitsu class at night or go swimming at night or go stand up paddle boarding in the evening.
Swimming is my passion and something that I love. Going out there in the water, it feels as if there's nothing wrong with me. I go out there and train as hard as anybody else. I have the same dreams, the same goals. It doesn't matter if you look different. You're still the same as everybody else because you have the same dream.
When my sister and I were kids, swimming down in Charleston, there was this pizza parlor that had this old Dixieland band play, and I just loved Louis Armstrong and the sound of his voice, and I got up there with the band and started singing Louis Armstrong songs when I was a kid. I have no idea why, but I did it and I loved it.
Anything I do, I do with 110 percent. Right now, my biggest goal is the 2016 Olympics. My main focus is that. But after the sport of swimming-when it's all said and done-I want to get involved in fashion. I want to design my own clothing line. I'm very into fashion. It's something I really want to focus on when swimming is over.
In swimming, especially training out in the ocean and open water, you got fogged-over goggles, you're stuck with your own thoughts - there's great benefits to that, deep thinking like that after many hours, but there's also tremendous loneliness. You burn out. You want to run, jump, ski, do anything. So at age 30, I was finished.
It's weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.
My eyesight had always been good but at school I went swimming one day and the chlorine affected me badly. I was almost blinded for two weeks and from there things deteriorated. Then at the World Championship in 2007 I realised I couldn't see the back of the pocket. It was one big blur. My first two seasons as a pro it was dreadful.
The ocean is the source of life. We all come from there. I think about these one-celled creatures, and I think about the planet. It is related to my obsession with biology, even if it's only a layperson's obsession. The way I visualise what's at the bottom of the ocean is very much to do with how I feel when I'm swimming in the sea.
Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.
Basically, I get paid to be crazy. I get paid to believe I'm someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it's real. And that's a little scary. And I do it to the best of my ability. But it's kind of like swimming out to sea. You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far.
In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
Once you just tell yourself, 'OK, I'm going to have a breakdown right now, and I'm going to cry for an hour, put my phone away. I'm going to go swimming, and then I'm gonna make my family dinner and lay on the couch and watch 'Ru Paul's Drag Race,' once you accept that it's not the day and you can just have a breakdown, you're over it.
Drag really isn't just about exaggerating and celebrating femininity. Some drag queens want to look like monsters, some drag queens want to look like hot dogs. Really what it is is just dipping your toes in all the swimming pools of identity and allowing yourself. Because society really tries to compartmentalize humans in a certain way.
Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"
One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasnt there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.
I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.
Women in the public eye and on TV are often scrutinized for how they look so I know how easy it would be to fall into the trap of taking on board this negativity. The healthiest way for me to deal with it is by being fit and healthy through activities like swimming, which helps me focus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like.
The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool.
I'm such an action movie junkie that as an action fan, because action scenes are so heightened, we could never really picture ourselves in that scene. So when you're watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium: you know you're out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there.
Also it'll be unbelievably cold in there and the thing I'm probably most worried about is my face. That sounds silly but it's very difficult, if you're in cold temperature water, to get your head under because it takes your breath away. And then your hands go numb so you try and wriggle your fingers while swimming to warm up. It's very tough.
When I was a swimmer and I would lose a heat in something I was doing whether it backstroke or breaststroke, were two of my most strongest strokes, I would look at how whoever it was that won and beat me and think, "What did they do? What were... What were the qualities that they had that I can incorporate into my swimming to make me better?"
Marriage...one of the most civilized institutions in the world...But...swimming is one of the most wonderful of sports, and yet there are always some people who cannot swim who insist on going into the water and getting drowned. Many people spoil marriage in a like manner. One should be sure she knows how to be married before rushing into it.
It's not that I want you to be a certain way--don't you want a boyfriend?" "Why bother with that? Let's find incubi." "Incubi?" "Demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we're much more likely to find them"--her voice dropped conspiratorially--"while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of.