Welcome to the 228 brilliant meatheads who joined our Books & Biceps crew this week. That’s triple digit newcomers FIVE weeks in a row. Love it and we’re pumped to have you!

THANK YOU to everyone who shares this with their friends.

A QUICK ASK: If you read this most weeks, please use your referral link at the bottom of this newsletter to share (and win cool stuff). Appreciate you!

BOOKS

The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and their Quest for Olympic Glory – by Julie Checkoway

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this week’s exclusive author interview. If you’ve been reading Books & Biceps for a while then you know I’m a lifelong swimmer and I have a soft spot for books on swimming, the ocean, surfing, lakes…anything that involves competing in water, really.

One of my favorite books (and books I recommend the most) is The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory by Julie Checkoway. The book is a New York Times bestseller and if the subtitle doesn’t grab you here’s the official summary:

“In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They were the Three-Year Swim Club. This is their story.”

I was fortunate enough to connect with the author, Julie Checkoway, on Twitter and she agreed to do this awesome interview about the book. The towering amount of research she did is impressive on its own, but the writing, characters, geography and social background that needed to be weaved together to make this work so well are why it’s such a special read.

Here is our Exclusive Books & Biceps Q&A:

There's a line in the subtitle of your book - "Sugar Ditch Kids" - that stuck with me from before I started reading all the way through to the end. When did you first hear that term and can you explain what first drew you to their story?

JULIE: I first encountered the term “Ditch Kids” when I was introduced back in maybe 2010 or 2011 to a fellow named Bill Brown. He was someone who had interest in developing a feature film about Sakamoto and the 3YSC. I never read his screenplay, but I do believe that this might have been the way that Brown referred to them in either his title or his pitch for the film. I then began to encounter the term from time to time in stories that sportswriters wrote during the late 1930s when they first encountered the team.

Frankly, I’ve never loved the term, because I think it’s reductive and even a little bit pejorative, but at the same time when I was trying to come up with a subtitle for my book, I found that “sugar ditch kids” was just about the only way I could concisely describe the children while at the same time getting in there that they were Olympians and national champs, etc. It’s already a really long subtitle. Perhaps, in the end, my use of it was to refer to the pejorative and then elevate them to who they really were: much more than children who swam in a ditch, but people who swam against the current of their circumstance and to a far greater and more noble destiny. And to a place of dignity.

As a lifelong swimmer, I've swum in pools, lakes, oceans and even water treadmills...but never in a filthy irrigation ditch - and I've certainly never trained in one.

What exactly were the conditions like and how did you go about researching what they were like in the 1930s and '40s.

I did a ton of research in this area, in large part because the ditches today, or at the time at which I was researching the book, ran very clean and quite differently than they did in the old days.

First, I read the definitive book on the ditches by Carol Wilcox, called “Sugar Water.” That book looked at the politics of the building of the ditches, the economics of that, as well, and very microscopically at the land through which they traveled and the machinery involved in controlling their current.

I also read Alexander and Baldwin company accounts of the maintenance of the ditches and the challenges involved with that. I looked at things like which pesticides were being used at the time, which were now considered poisoning, and which were likely washing downhill. I also looked at incidence of cancer related to those pesticides in folks who had lived on the plantations in those years. Then I talked to people about what it felt like to swim in the ditches.

Bill Smith remembered vividly. So did an original swimmer named Charlie Oda. Charlie was the one who said that on some days the ditch ran as thick as chocolate milk. Many people denied what Charlie and Bill said—most of them who were at the present-day Alexander and Baldwin, but I took their denial for what it was—a position on behalf of a company concerned with liability. There were also claims that the ditch right in front of the school, which is where the kids practiced, was the cleanest ditch of all, but based on Charlie’s story, that just wasn’t true.

In 2012, I went there myself to look at that very ditch. That was before the plantation finally shut down for good. Much of the same machinery was still in place. The water ran reasonably clear, and the ditch did have a concrete bottom, but in the end I had to go with Charlie and Bill’s story. I mean, they actually swam there.

Soichi Sakamoto is such a major character and presence in the book. Why do you think he was able to accomplish all that he did with his swimmers having so little to work with?

I think Sakamoto is what I called him in the book—a "glorious amateur”—and someone who had no compunction about being one. He was brilliant—he had both a scientific and a creative mind, and it was the combination of those qualities that made him what was - essentially the first modern coach in the history of swimming. He was also Nisei, the child of Issei immigrants, and he had a tremendously strong work ethic (despite the fact that as a kid he was a bit of a slacker and a dreamer), and he believed he could do anything he set his mind to.

He was stubborn of nature, and more, he had been afforded a view, as a middle class person, of what the world outside of Maui really looked like. He had been abroad—to Japan—when he was a young boy and traveled there as a Boy Scout. He saw the wider world and what was possible in it.

And he had lived in Honolulu, which was a very cosmopolitan place. He was also able to see Duke Kahanamoku and Buster Crabbe swim, and to his mind, even though he himself wasn’t a great swimmer, it occurred to him, that if he could figure out how to teach kids to swim swiftly—through scientific observation and practical advice—that they could become like Duke and Buster. More than anything, though, I think the news in 1932 that the Japanese swim team swept the US in the Olympics was the most motivating of all.

To become great swimmers became, in some part, a measure of ethnic pride, but also a badge that Sakamoto could bestow on the swimmers of American citizenship. Combining their athletic prowess and their desire for literal and figurative citizenship, belonging and acceptance, Sakamoto had the perfect recipe for success.

If you like sports, swimming, motivation, history, great storytelling, the Olympics and leadership, then you should read this book ASAP. Grab it here.

BICEPS

Dan Go is a buddy of mine on Twitter and he’s leading the modern breed of trailblazing fitness writers. A decade or two ago Dan might have been a great contributing writer to Men’s Health or Men’s Journal, but in 2023 he’s kicking ass building his own multimedia fitness brand with a massive reach. I love to see it. He’s got nearly a half-million followers on Twitter (494k) and a great newsletter with 80,000 subscribers (check it out here).

I personally like Dan’s stuff because he’s a meathead after my own heart, combining serious weight training with sports, swimming, surfing, recovery and lots of time outdoors.

He’s also a bit of a spine-saving guru. Every few weeks he posts a new routine anyone can do to correct crappy posture and all the pitfalls of sitting at a desk too long.

This is his latest routine that I’ve tried to do every day after work. Takes five minutes and it works:

Give Dan a follow and check out his newsletter.

Quick Flexes

How my dream interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger became a nightmare:

I’m old school. I read the Sunday paper in print. I even read the obituaries. And I recently wrote a piece about it that reached almost 500,000 people in just a few days.

Dads, this one’s for you:

🔥WANT TO READ MORE BOOKS?🔥

How about a book every 10 days with this awesome program:

Here’s how to get this guide for free:

All you have to do is SHARE THIS e-mail with whoever you think would like it using your unique referral link below. 24 people got it last week:

Strong Links

🏋️If you’ve seen pictures of the Flex Factory, AKA, my garage gym, you know I’m a fan of Titan Fitness equipment. It’s durable as hell. It lasts forever. And it looks cool. Amazingly, through the magic of Books & Biceps, I’ve been in touch with them and they’ve made me a partner. Incredible, right?

Right now they have the exact power rack I have in my garage gym on sale. You can check it out here.

If someone shared this issue of Books & Biceps with you, please subscribe here:

Thank you all for reading.

Have a great weekend! - Jon

‘s