Why the Long Distance

When people find out what I am up to with my swimming, the first question they always ask is: Why? I have asked this question to myself many times. “Why am I doing this?” I first met my coach in 2005 months after she swam the English Channel. The first words out of my mouth were “what were you thinking?” She began to answer that question with: “I know, people always ask me that questions…the whole thing sounds crazy right, and I am crazy for doing such a swim,” and I stopped her. She misunderstood my question. So I restated, “No. I mean what was going through your mind those 13 hours you were swimming in darkness, with 4 foot swells and a broken shoulder that popped the first hour into your swim?” That was the first time I thought to myself, ‘some day I want to do that. I want to swim far and long to see what it feels like.’ Could I do it? That is a question I ask myself every time I get into the open water. I do my long swims because I feel, in my heart, in my mind, that I can and I want to see just how far I can go. Not for awards (there are much faster swimmers than I), not for recognition (because even the best hardly get recognize outside of this sport for their amazing accomplishments), but for the need and because I am pretty good at it. The need to push myself, the need for my kids to know mommy did other things in life, the need to go as far as I can and take the experiences I have learned from those journeys with me in life. Each time I conquer a swim (or am defeated by Mother Nature), it changes me. It makes me think a bit differently about life: how lucky we are, how small we are in such a beautiful, big, changing world and how sometimes the big things on my list of priorities really may not be so big after all. I feel incredibly lucky to get in the open water and be able to swim. There is a feeling that you are closer with the sea life, closer with the ocean…I can’t explain it exactly. I could say you feel like a mermaid, but it’s not that exactly, and I’d rather people not think I am completely crazy so I won’t say that. So I’ll go back to my first comment – on the surface – I do it to see what it feels like, to see how far I can go. I very very experienced open water marathon swimmer once told me that not all waters are meant to be swum by all people. Find what you are good swimming in and stick with it. You can try other things but you may not succeed that that is ok. I will say that if I cannot swim in something with just my suit, cap and goggles then I do not want to swim in it. Catalina is calling me. I am not sure why but I feel I have to try it…no conquer it. I am doing everything I can to anticipate everything that could possibly happen to me during my swim but sometimes that just may not be enough…I won’t know until I am there and swimming. There is only one absolute that you can count on in open water swimming and that is that there is no absolute–there is no controlling the water, the creatures that live in it or the variables that can change it in an instant. Isn’t that what makes it fun?