Pull. Breathe. Kick. Glide. Three decades after her last swimming lesson, Emma John found herself in a lecture theatre chanting these words with a few dozen strangers, all of them trying not to take anyone's eye out while matching the actions. It was, she admits, a pretty euphoric communal experience - and you don't need to be near water to marvel at a swimming feat, especially one that's more than 150 years old.
Comedian Adam Riches, who previously turned Jimmy Connors' 1991 US Open run into a one-man show full of leaping, smashing, and two-handed backhands, now brings us The Captain (running through August). This one evokes a less explosive kind of sporting endurance. It's named for Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the Channel unaided, though we never meet the hero himself. Instead, Riches narrates the story as Fred Beckwith, the promoter who trained Webb at Lambeth Baths.
Pull. Breathe. Kick. Glide. Today, breaststroke is probably the least flashy of competitive swimming disciplines. It's hard to imagine Victorians packing music halls for live demonstrations, but then, for the previous millennium, there hadn't been much of a European swimming tradition at all. Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century notebooks mused on "how it is that all other animals which have feet with toes, know by nature how to swim, excepting man" and "in what way man ought to learn to swim" - among his thoughts on flying machines, gunpowder, and steam-powered cannon. Priorities, Leo.
Riches' Beckwith says that "swimming, pre-Captain Webb, wasn't an act in itself - it was merely a counterpoint to drowning." Not entirely true: in 1810, Lord Byron channelled his Main Character Energy into crossing the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles in Turkey) to prove a point. The mad, bad aristocrat managed the dangerous four-mile strait in just over an hour - with a club foot, no less - and immediately wrote a poem about it. Within a couple of decades, informal lake races were being formalised by the National Swimming Society, and artificial pools were opening in London.
Still, Webb's heroics popularised the pastime, not least because his aquatic adventure went almost fatally wrong. What should have been a 21-mile distance turned into nearly 39 miles as tides and weather threw him off course. His actions inspired others, including Agnes Beckwith, Fred's daughter, who set her own long-distance records, swimming 20 miles of the Thames from Westminster to Richmond and back to Mortlake.
Olympic swimming owes Webb a debt: the first modern Games in 1896 held races in the Mediterranean Sea, where athletes contended with frigid temperatures and 13ft waves. After winning gold in the 1200m, 18-year-old Alfréd Hajós stated that "my will to live completely overcame my desire to win." The Channel has shared Webb's glory, too - for decades, that treacherous, traffic-lined stretch became the ultimate marker of endurance swimming.
Gertrude Ederle's 1926 crossing - the fastest in its day and the first by a woman - became as well known as Webb's. It inspired Lynne Cox, who went on to become the first woman to cross the Cook Strait between New Zealand's North and South islands, then the first human to traverse the Bering Strait between the US and the Soviet Union - a cold war effort in waters that literally froze around her.
For John, it's impossible to contemplate Webb without following an imaginary current to a more recent breaststroke legend: Adam Ramsay-Peaty. He doesn't have to swim further than 100m at a time, and it usually takes him under a minute, as opposed to Webb's 21 hours and 45 minutes between Dover and Calais. Yet there's something in the obstinate ambition of each man that echoes down the centuries, calling across the 30 miles between their Shropshire and Staffordshire birthplaces. Ramsay-Peaty has been the greatest breaststroke swimmer that ever breathed, kicked, glided - and he's learning that even the lushest of laurel wreaths don't stay green forever.
Webb's own tale was tragically cautionary: he died at 35, chasing fame and fortune that never lasted long enough. We're equally minded, in this content-driven age, to consume sport as fleeting entertainment. Perhaps that's how it should be - it was, after all, conceived under new 19th-century codes as a byproduct of the burgeoning middle classes' appetite for leisure.
But there's something in sport - its sense of physical science, a way of measuring human progress - that speaks to us deeper. Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha breaking the two-hour barrier at the London Marathon. Josh Kerr running the fastest ever mile. Katie Ledecky becoming the greatest distance swimmer in history. And Captain Matthew Webb - whose ghost John Betjeman would later write a poem about - doing a thing everyone but him believed humanly impossible.