The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
This man finds peace of mind in the water
Miles Hayden has “a passion for the water.” From the moment he wakes up, at about 4 a.m. in his Branford apartment, he looks forward to getting over to Branford Point and plunging into Long Island Sound.
One swim a day is not enough, especially when the weather turns warmer. In the summertime, Hayden enjoys four or five daily dips.
Last Monday, May 1, he embarked on the fifth year of his streak, which last year reached a personal best of 185 consecutive days.
“I try to improve it every year,” he told me when we met last Wednesday afternoon. “This year, I’m going for 186 days, which will be Nov. 2. My ultimate goal is 200 days.”
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stop him.
“I like to inspire people,” Hayden said. “I tell them swimming is such great exercise, putting yourself out there in the fresh air and sunshine. And it’s free!”
He added, “I have a passion for the water. I feel better now at 63 than I did at 30.”
At that time of his life, he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. “I smoked from age 11 to 36. Now I don’t smoke and I don’t drink.”
But he does drink water, lots of it.
“I don’t even drink soda,” he said. “All I drink is water.”
Hayden handed me an endorsement of swimming he had copied off a calendar: “Swimming is a great exercise for everyone. It recruits all the major muscle groups, including the shoulders, back, abdominals, legs and hips. And because water affords 12 times the resistance as air, it really helps to build strength, so you get both cardiovascular and strengthening workouts at the same time.”
Besides the physical benefits, Hayden said he has found swimming to be therapeutic, a way to replace bad habits with a good habit. “It helps with your mental health, your emotional health. It’s so good for your all-around being.”
And he noted, “We came from water.”
On that fateful day in July five years ago when this all got started, he discovered something about the water of Long Island Sound. He was trying to work out a physical problem.
“I used to do belly crunchers, 350 of them, every day. That’s when you lock your hands behind your back and squat. But I hurt my back. I was wondering how I could heal it and I thought of the salt water. So I floated in the water for a halfhour. My back felt great! I got out of the water and the pain was gone.”
Even though he had been living so close to the beach, “I hadn’t gone swimming since I was a teenager. So, at first, all I could do was 11 strokes. I was gasping for air. But I kept going back. After a while I said, ‘Wow, I swam every day for a month.’ That first year I swam 50 days in a row. The second year I did
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