Sea swimming is the great leveller; we're all the same in a pair of togs. No one minds who you are or what you've done; the question is `are you getting in?' Popular for centuries, sea swimming has had a recent surge in interest, with a growing community now taking the plunge. Brendan Mac Evilly and Michael O'Reilly, enthusiastic members of this bathing fraternity, chart their adventures in forty-three of Ireland's most enticing places to swim. Along the way, they meet artists who come to the sea for inspiration and distance swimmers undertaking marathon sea swims. Their conversations with local dippers touch on the history and lore of these stunning locations and confirm Ireland's vibrant sea-swimming culture. Part guidebook, part travelogue, part analysis of our relationship with the sea, At Swim explores the thrills, fears and joys of sea swimming.

Immersion is about the extreme sport of marathon swimming. Drawing on extensive (auto)ethnographic data, Immersion explores the embodied and social processes of becoming a marathon swimmer and investigates how social belonging is produced and policed. Using marathon swimming as a lens, this foundation provides the basis for an exploration of what constitutes the 'good' body in contemporary neoliberal society across a range of sites including charitable swimming, fatness, gender and health. The book argues that the self-representations of marathon swimming are at odds with its lived realities, and that this reflects the entrenched and limited discursive resources available for thinking about the sporting body in the wider social and cultural context. The book is aimed primarily at readers at undergraduate level and upwards with an interest in sociology, the sociology of the body, the sociology of sport, gender and the sociology of health and illness. -- .