Building Chapter Two: The Book of Water (Backstroke)

When I sat down to work on the second chapter of The Swimming Book of the Five Rings, I knew it had to be backstroke. In Musashi’s original text, the “Book of Water” represents adaptability and flow, and in my mind, if there’s one stroke that embodies those qualities, it’s backstroke.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to capture that. Freestyle (the “Ground Book”) was straightforward, foundations, discipline, stability. But backstroke? It’s the stroke that flips you upside down. You’re disoriented, relatively speaking, staring at the ceiling instead of the black line, and yet somehow, you’ve got to find rhythm and speed. That inversion became the key to the chapter: backstroke is trust, adaptability, and flow.

I started writing about that sensation of disorientation, and how great backstrokers turn it into awareness. Instead of fighting the upside-down feeling, they let it sharpen their sensitivity to the water. That’s when the chapter took shape. The rhythm, the core-driven rotation, the balance between floating and pressing into the water, I felt that all of it fit perfectly with Musashi’s lessons about water: formless, adaptable, always moving forward.

Once I had the theme, the writing flowed. I leaned into the musical side of backstroke, its rhythm and constant motion, and into the paradox of the stroke: stillness in the head, flow in the body; simplicity in technique, yet endless complexity in execution. I pulled in voices of the masters too—David Marsh’s insistence on balance and efficiency, Eddie Reese’s clarity through Aaron Peirsol’s mastery. That gave the philosophy a grounded, real-world dimension.

Finally, I finished with the “maxims” section. This part is fun for me, it’s like chiseling down all the big ideas into sharp little lessons you could carry onto the pool deck. Things like “Flow is strength; hesitation is weakness” or “To swim backstroke is to trust flow over force.” That’s the spirit I wanted to capture something a swimmer could read, nod along with, and then apply in the water the same day.

So, Chapter Two became The Book of Water (Backstroke) a stroke of inversion and flow, of trusting the rhythm when the eyes can’t see. For me, writing it was about taking Musashi’s words “Water adopts the shape of its container” and translating that into swimming terms: backstroke is the water made visible.

This chapter stretched me more than the first, but in the best way. It taught me that even in writing, just like in backstroke, you don’t always get to see where you’re going. You have to trust the process, roll with the rhythm, and let the water (or the words) carry you forward. The next few chapters will be a similar discovery process. Finding the common thread between Musashi’s words and the reality of swimming, our bodies movement through water, and our relationship with it.

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