About

Hallway Swimming is a video fad in which participants lay on the ground and push themselves back and forth across a freshly buffed floor to give the appearance of swimming from wall to wall.

Origin

The earliest hallway swimming video was created by a group of music students and posted to YouTube by Joe's Untitled Web Show on May 17th, 2009. As of April 2013, the video has more than 18,500 views.

Spread

On October 13th, 2009, another hallway swimming video was uploaded by Kailyn Jensen^[1], though it is unclear if Jensen had been inspired by the previous video. Between 2009 and 2013, a handful of additional swimming videos were uploaded to YouTube, but none of them garnered any significant level of attention. On April 2nd, 2013, Cole Pugsley uploaded a version (shown below) that was posted to Reddit^[2] later that day, where it gained more than 4,100 upvotes and 2,000 points overall within a week. Within the same time frame, Pugsley’s video was watched more than 2.9 million times.

The video was shared on the Huffington Post^[4] the next day, followed by Geekosystem^[5], Smosh^[6], The Daily What^[7] MSN Now^[8] and Fark^[9] throughout the week. On April 7th, a video of Soulja Boy hallway swimming was posted to World Star Hip Hop.^[10]

Notable Examples

As of April 2013, there are more than 25,000 search results for "hallway swimming" on YouTube.^[3]

Search Interest

External References