Third best use of a dollar

Liam's snowshoes, still ready to go after all these years.

Got a dollar? Buy a 10-foot section of Schedule 40 PVC pipe.

The best toy you could ever buy.

Here's the catch, though: You need a campstove, a big ol' beat up stewpot and playground sand, which you heat to 450 degrees precisely.

The heated sand funneled into the PVC pipe softens the plastic and allows you to bend the pipe into your own giant crazy straw — and probably release dangerous toxins into your body, but that's such a small sacrifice for a giant straw.

That's how we turned PVC pipe into the framework for snowshoes waaaaay back when my son was in Webelos, which is the older bunch of Cub Scouts right before they quit Scouting entirely or get a second wind and join Boy Scouts.

(I'm not a fan of Cub Scouting, now that I look back. More than anything, it seems less a program for boys' development than an added revenue source for Boy Scouts of America. It relies too heavily on adults to entertain kids, at a time when kids should largely be left alone to learn how to entertain themselves.

But heavily guided free time for kids is still in vogue, given our collective fears of what might happen to our children if left alone. My wife and I turned out to be highly susceptible, and our son seemed to go along with it.

Better for boys to enjoy their young unscheduled childhood, and then when they start realizing the world doesn't revolve around them, Boy Scouts is available for them to learn responsibility and leadership. And they'd be ready to make things like these snowshoes.)

As it was, these snowshoes were predominantly adult made, a combination of our desperate efforts as adult leaders to ramp up the wow factor for the kids — and consideration for the kids' youth.

Terry, the other adult leader of our Webelos Den back then, and I concluded that most of the literature aimed at the development of Cub Scouts was stuck somewhere before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The jokes that couldn't have been funny even then, the birdhouses to make, the objectification of Native Americans as noble savages — the whole program seemed stale, and the boys bored.

Snowshoes! I declared. We'll have the students build snowshoes and everything will be solved! The Scouts will gain new energy, take pride in their accomplishments, and we'll be the coolest Webelos leaders ever.

Battle scars have added texture to the
stars and bars motif Liam painted.

I sent away for plans from a Boy Scout Troop in Colorado, one of whose leaders was an engineer who devised them.

Repairing boat engines at the time, Terry made his living in an industrial park surrounded by tradespeople who had most of the supplies on hand. Generous business owners gave Terry bright red boat-seat upholstery (for the snowshoe decking), the inner tubes from big truck tires (cut and folded just so as the ingenious boot strap), nuts and bolts and metal rods (cleats and struts). I bought the PVC pipe enough for 10 pairs of shoes, and parachute cord from an Army-Navy supply store (to lash the decking to the pipe frame).

Cost for each pair came to about $11. They'll hold a 100-pound kid, maybe heavier. The plans also included a larger size.

Donner Memorial State Park was advertising a ranger-guided snowshoe hike near the lakeshore up in the Sierra near Lake Tahoe, and we timed snowshoe construction for that event.

The owner of an outdoor sports shop where I was looking for parachute cord said the snowshoes would never work. The cold would soon shatter the shoes around the Scouts' feet, said the owner, an Eagle Scout. Good luck, he said.

The project took about a month, with one cold Saturday in Terry's shop spent heating the pipe with the sand and bending them into the jig Terry had built. Terry's a man's man, knows how to use the power tools. The jig is still in the Scout shed somewhere, I'm sure. It should be displayed as a work of art, two thick pieces of plywood — a base, carefully angled board seamlessly joined to it, and then a precisely jigsawed outline of the snowshoe frame glued on top.

Once we heated the pipe with sand, then quickly let the sand run out, we had to drape the limp pipe into the jig and gently hold it in place until the plastic hardened again. Even with thick oven mitts, the hot PVC hurt our fingers.

The pipe was still too long for the jig, so Terry decided at the last moment to bend the ends of the pipe up slightly just to get them out of the way. The pipe hardened that way.

The Webelos ceremoniously donned oven mitts, then stood in the vicinity of the pipe heating process and sort of pantomimed the laying of the pipe into the jig, without actually touching anything. Out of worry for their safety, we wouldn't let the Webelos do the one thing they probably most wanted to do.

Before that day was out, we let the Scouts decorate their frames by lightly sanding them (to accept the paint), then spray painting them. Our son made stars out of masking tape as masks, then painted his frames patriotic red and blue to match the red decking.

Back at our meeting room at the Catholic school, we helped the Webelos lace the parachute cord and assemble the parts. A long bolt through the upturned tail completed the shoe and held everything in place.

I brought in a finished pair to the Eagle Scout sports shop owner. "I'll be darned," the guy said. "Maybe they will work."

The ranger up at Donner said we had built them perfectly for deep snow by keeping the tail of the shoes long and bending them upward. Just our dumb luck.

Off we went into the deep snow about 20 yards from the lake, through the campground unrecognizable for the thick blanket of white. The Webelos, in various imitations of Michelin men, wobbled in single file, up and over little hills and across meadows. The adults had rented snowshoes.

Scouts fell over and over again. Of course they did! It was a new adventure, but for most of the trek they stayed afloat above the snow, held aloft in their homemade shoes, in the dazzling white and piercing quiet of a perfect winter Saturday, doing something almost every other kid their age wasn't.

Ice ringed the lakeshore. Icy cold filled our lungs. Terry and I were satisfied, having reached nirvana as Webelos Den leaders. We had created the nearly perfect project and the perfect outing for it.

We counted on a quiet ride back down the mountain, cars full of quiet happy Webelos. After an awkward few moments unstrapping the snowshoes, I heard one Webelos declare:

"I'm never doing that again!"

And another conclude:

"Yeah!"

Liam's snowshoes still hang in the garage, on a bungee cord with pairs of store-bought snowshoes we rarely use, unfortunately. Maybe someday he'll take his pair with him on his journey as a man. For now they hang in the semi-dark, symbols: Don't stop plugging, don't stop trying to make a dent in the world, but expect the outcome to dent you back once in a while.  

Year of maniacal thinking

Where to now?

In 2012 I was to have swum from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge — or vice versa, tide depending — and completed a 10k open-water race.

I didn't.

I did:

• swim the length of my home water, Lake Natoma, finishing the 4.8 miles 30 minutes faster than my first attempt, the Independence Day before;

• cross Donner Lake for the second time, though many minutes slower than the year before;

• swim the Folsom Lake Open Water 2.4 mile for the second time, in about the same amount of time;
• use the full moon for light in a midsummer swim with friends at Folsom Lake;
  
• compete in several swims, including a three-mile race, at an alpine Oregon lake during a wonderful festival devoted to the sport;

• swim at least four times a week in Lake Natoma, through change of season and quality of light, through the slow rise and gradually painful fall in temperature, in fluctuating current, in mirror flatness, in heavy wind-churned chop, in summer clarity and winter murk, in heavy downpour and fog-white loneliness and the congestion of swimmers and darting devil-may-care paddle craft. I swam it with friends on the last day of 2012, and the first of 2013.

I hold the last most dear.

Take away all the rest, in fact, and I'd manage. Deny me my regular swims in Lake Natoma, though, and I'd mourn.

Every swim there is just the same, yet so different. From the south end of the lake, our swims hug the south shore, around a tiny island named (supposedly and as yet inexplicably) for Edgar Rice Burroughs, a distance that creeps up in my mind to 1.5 miles (it's probably just 1.3). From the north end on Saturdays, we swim across the narrow lake and then "upstream" around the trestles of a bridge and back in a big rectangle, about 1.7 miles.

With each swim I struggle and triumph, at different stages, to different degrees, for different reasons and periods — temperature, technique, hazards, work left to do at the office, going through my head constantly. Each high and low follows a cycle, its onset and duration a surprise. I learn little from each, except to know that they will return, sometime, in some way.

Long weeks will pass, for example, in which endurance suddenly escapes me. I'll go along fine for a half mile, a mile, and then one day just 100 yards will be hard. I end up counting strokes then, resolving to go 50, then 70, then 100, and on and on, for days, until I can resume my old stamina.

Sometimes the cycles are external. The stalwarts with whom I have swum the last year, for example, like to get in and swim as soon as we reach the water's edge; fast swimmers, they're soon way ahead. The swimmer I teamed with before (and if he's reading now, he needs to get his wetsuited fanny back out to the lake!) likes to get used to the water before starting out, kind of wade for a bit, let the cold take hold, which is more my style.

Lately a disturbing cycle has rooted, of slight dread. Not of the swim itself — once I'm in, then the struggles and triumphs, the sting of cold water on my forearms, the accidental swallow of green water, are so familiar. It's the going to and getting in that I resist lately. I overthink it and hyperventilate; I dawdle with the preparations (heat the water for the Thermos®© and for the hot drink on the drive over, pack dry clothes in one bag for the car trunk, and swim gear in another bag in the car seat so burglars won't be tempted to break in), so rather than getting in early before the fast swimmers arrive, I barely give myself time to start with them.

I know that sometime — who knows when? — this too shall pass and I'll be eager to jump in again. Maybe in three weeks or so, when the water will be its coldest.

Yet another cycle has waned (they often overlap): Call it acceptance, or resignation, or satisfaction of my Lake Natoma swim. It's been more than enough for me. And yet …

I'm curious again.

Last year began with big plans. Swim big, go farther, faster. I even attended a Bay Area workshop about swimming 10k races. Then I swam 10,000 yards in a pool just to see if I could finish within the time limit. I couldn't. I tried again; long before I could finish, an aquacize class had set up and moved my lane lines to one side of the pool while I was still swimming. The 10k race came and went without me, as did most of the other races I tried the year before.

I stuck to "destination" swims, mostly, so Donner's end-to-end course and mountainous beauty fit. So did the Oregon festival, even though the course was set by buoys, which somehow violate my notion of an open-water swim.

Something about the Oregon swims, maybe the high altitude, wore me down, making me tired for the Donner swim, and by that time all the fire I had stoked for big swims had died out.

I settled into the unsettled comfort of Lake Natoma, where I've been since. Out of the water, I read facebook accounts from swimmers around the world, their big plans for the new year. Ten miles here, 20 there, an English Channel crossing, a Catalina crossing, colder and colder water, much colder than ours. Amazing wild seascapes. More and bigger.

Now I'm thinking outside the pond. A 10k race doesn't appeal, but those iconic bridges still beckon. As does Alcatraz; I'd like to swim it again. To get a leaner, to get stronger. To think less and use what swim buddy Doug calls my "reptile brain." To swim outside my comfort zone.

Where to now?

Swim swam swum

Random unsubstantiated observations (to accompany randomly placed art):

• The end of the end: The thought hit my wife and me simultaneously Saturday, as we left the rest area below Donner Lake, where I had just finished a swimming race (or vice versa): Our vacation was officially over.

• Too good to be true: Bend, Oregon, is the city Disney™®© would have designed, could it find a way to package the place for 21st century mass consumption. All it lacks are admissions gates, which the Mickey Mouse media oligarchy could probably manage without trouble since drivers so dutifully drop their speed as they enter the city of 80,000 and change.

This small city straddling the great high desert and the edge of the Cascade Range has reclaimed itself. Once a timber town, anchored by lumber mills, now it exudes and exhorts tourism —  especially for the young and vigorous. Developers rescued two massive sawmills, keeping three soaring smokestacks and the shells of buildings, and turning them all into high-end shops and restaurants, and adding an amphitheater named for tire king Les Schwab (Bend homie) all under the name Old Mill District. Suck eggs, Sacramento, trying and failing so far to do the same with its railyards.

Bend has 15 craft breweries, three more around the region, and more to come. Look out, Portland.

Families float down the lazy Deschutes River in inner tubes and brand new chaise lounge rafty apparatuses right past the Old Mill District and into an immaculate old storybook neighborhood of lumber barons' manors.

Clean and cool logo!

We had to retrieve enough forgotten camping items in Bend to evolve from thoroughly annoyed to partially pleased at the myriad carefully landscaped and sculptured roundabouts in the western, mostly frivolous side of Bend. I wonder at the planning involved in building so many of them (a local called them keyholes); I mean, you can't have a business at any of the corners, because drivers wouldn't be able to turn out in time to reach it. Either a lot of corner properties had to be condemned and ripped out to make way for the roundabouts, or the roundabouts came first and the useless part of the city was build around it.

The utilitarian part of Bend (you know, with grocery shops, gas stations, drug stores) is beset with many lethargic traffic lights, mostly to temper any enthusiasm drivers might retain for the never-say-stop roundabouts.

The place smelled sharply like sweat when I was a kid — a permeating blend of incinerator smoke and pine and sawdust and plywood glue. Now it smells like money. 

• I came, I swam, I was conquered: The excuse for vacation was a swim festival west of Bend at tidy little Elk Lake in the Deschutes National Forest, the South Sister mountain towering above. A friendly coalition of U.S. Masters swimming groups (Central Oregon Masters Aquatics, or COMA) sponsors three days of races, and they make out-of-town swimmers welcome. We just had to be part of it, even if — especially if — we didn't know what we were getting into.

At each lakeside campground on the northbound trip, I managed a swim and quickly huffed and puffed each time, barely able to finish what is relatively easy for me back home. The altitude was robbing me of strength and air, or I was just mired in one of those struggly periods I get into.

No sooner had we finally settled into a campsite at Elk Lake than I joined the 3,000-meter race on a Friday evening. Altitude and anxiety and wind and chop and a misguided attempt to talk myself out of giving up had me give up before I reached the first buoy, out of breath. The race director told me to try again in the next races and take it slow, since I come from 121 feet in altitude, and Elk Lake is 4,893 feet.

Skipping the 500-meter race the next day, I finished the 1,500 meters and felt OK, then Sunday slogged through the 5,000-meter race (about three miles) and labored through the end of the 1,000- meter race to end the festival.

Stopping frequently in the 5,000, I looked back on the course to discover the course had disappeared. With a quick glance to my left, I saw why: The rescue boat was already pulling the marker buoys, a rather blunt message that I was the last one on the course.

I stumbled through the finish line, the beneficiary of the swim festival tradition — loudly cheering on the last swimmer.

• Iron Eyes Cody, we need you! The candy bar wrappers and sunburned cans of Oly tossed on the side of road of my generation have given way to flattened empty packets of Gu™®© along Century Avenue, the 100-mile mountain highway loop leading out of Bend. This is a place for serious bikers (the swimming event we went to encouraged volunteers to bicycle the 32 miles and 1,000 foot climb from Bend rather than fatten their carbon footprint).

• Lost a part and found an inspiration: An elderly man joined me on the Elk Lake beach one morning in my search for the tiny cap that holds the air in my goofy looking inflatable orange swimmer's safety device. He isn't just any elderly man, and he's far, far from elderly. He's David Radcliff, 78, a retired high school teacher and administrator from Southern California, and now a master's swimmer living near Portland. What he didn't say — what I found out from others — is that he swam the 1,500 meter freestyle race in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. After taking 38 years off from swimming, he resumed in 1995 and now owns a multitude of world records for his age group.

At the swim festival at Elk Lake, Dave Radcliff swam the 1,500-meter race in 25 minutes and 11 seconds, 36th among all swimmers. In 1956, finishing fourth in his heat and unable to advance to the finals, he swam it in 19:09.6. I swam the 1,500 at Elk Lake in 32 minutes and 49 seconds, 104th overall.

(I need to discard the delusion that I'll improve by attrition, more likely to place in my age group the older I get: The 1,500 winner, at 20 minutes and 35 seconds, is 60 years old.)

Friendly and encouraging, Dave often asked how I was faring at the festival and reminded me to take the races slow and easy to account for the altitude. I took his advice too well.

• Must-not-see TV: Vacation meant mercifully missing some of the Olympics. I have turned the games off in frustration, refusing NBC's manipulation. I won't stay up late nights while NBC reconstitutes the games into some sort of jingoistic, athletic American Idol, holding the show stopper until past 11 p.m. The network pads the show with the usual sob stories and rehashes of Olympics long past; here's an idea — just show the Olympics, just event after event in short-attention span rotation? Instead I watch at random and create my own visual smorgasbord — a little water polo, a bit of table tennis, a racing canoe heat — and don't worry about what I may be missing. I'll read about it if I have to.

• Must-not-see TV II: San Francisco became the Bizarro Giants in our absence, falling apart in an L.A. Dodgers sweep and allowing the Dodgers to crawl back to the top of the division. The New York Mets stomped the Giants for two games out of three. The one who has usually bumbled, starter Tim Lincecum, became the lone bright spot in that horrid streak, beating the Mets.

Beating up on the lowly Colorado Rockies for some three-game sweep salve once we got back home, the Giants visit the Cardinals this week. The Cards gave the Giants rude welcome in the first game, beating San Francisco 8-2.

• A conversation I'll never have: (Overheard): "Mr. Race Director, I'm not sure you got my time in that race. I think I got third for my age group."

• Them that has, gets: Tell me again why professional basketball players should be participating in the Olympics. Or professional tennis players. Or professional anything. Medals must feel like a lifetime achievement award for them, or paperweights for their piles of money and accolades.

And why is beach volleyball in the Olympics? OK, I've complained enough.

• Red highways: I can't remember if I can't remember, but a part of me recognizes the unique red cinder highways around Bend, built from the lava rock abundant in this land of ancient volcanoes. The color of dried blood, the roads still exist on the trailhead spurs and side roads off Century Avenue in the Cascades, but on the main highway itself, the red highway merely peeks out at the edges under at least two layers of plain old gray gravelly blacktop. After crews obliterated the red roads with black glop, a highway department spokesman said the red highways held no historic value. Okay …

• People of the Klamath, hear me: Do you use Klamath Lake for anything other than drinking and irrigating? It was a dead sea when we drove around it: not a single boat, not a creature stirring. Convinced the maps had to be wrong, we blew out half a day driving around the entire lake in search of camping: A few half-hearted tiny private campgrounds from a bygone century, advertising the standard $5 boat launch fee. One public campground carved out of marshy reeds, ideal for dumping bodies or making meth, but not for camping. That's it? Seriously?

• It does a body good: Determined not to quit the 5,000-meter race, I nonethless had to stop a lot in order to keep this promise to myself. The course was a 2,000-meter diamond for the first loop, then two 1,500-meter triangles to finish. I had gone about 2,300 meters when I took a long rest and looked behind me. The leaders of the pack were about to lap me. Think of it: In the time it took me to swim 2,300 meters, this bunch of churning swimmers had swum 3,700 meters and were on their last loop. The three who would eventually finish one-two-three — nearly an hour ahead of me — were drafting one another, a tight body length behind the other, their strokes matching exactly. They were wearing wetsuits in 67-degree water, but I didn't give them a hard time about it; I was too busy marveling at what well-developed human bodies and strong minds could accomplish.

Head down, trying not to think too much, I plodded on.

The year in liquid form

My my my, it's a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free — or a woman, if you are one
I like swimming in the sea
— Colin Hay, "Beautiful World"

Flag buoy, Aquatic Park, San Francisco, Dec. 26, 2011. (Note Santa hat
where flag usually is.) Water temperature 49.7º F. Bring it!

What an enabler, my wife! With a cheery heart, a smiling voice and, I'll wager, more prayer than I'm aware of, she causes worlds to open up, and bids me explore.

With trepidation, for example, she resigned to the idea it was OK this year for me to stop looking for a job in the closed and collapsing teaching profession, and to spend my energy rebuilding my illustration business. It's a tenuous — OK, often stupid — choice requiring faith and calm.

So, too, with another new world this year, swimming open water.

At first, Nancy accompanied me for this strange and new pastime, and still serves as ground support for races and big events. Since then, she has accepted the low odds of my getting chomped in two by a shark — or, in fresh water, by whatever aquatic pet some kid released into the lake to become a monster fattened on swimmers' flesh — and does her own thing while I swim.

And swim and swim and swim, five or six days a week, usually in Lake Natoma, where I plan to stay through the new year.

As I might have mentioned before, I never really thought it would be this way. Sure, I set sights on Alcatraz long ago, but never truly believed, not entirely anyway, that I'd do more than see the island through pay binoculars and wonder what might have been.

Still, moving toward that goal I joined a Sacramento-area swim group through meetup.com, which got me to an introductory clinic on swimming San Francisco Bay last November. Suzie Dods, a legendary member of the South End Rowing Club near Fisherman's Wharf, led Myron Dong (our meetup.com group's chief cheerleader and organizer) and me on a short swim around buoys in the water. I decided at the last moment to swim without a wetsuit, and felt great.

Then began the discombobulation.

Not all parties have weighed in, but I'm guessing this is the logo
we crazies will adopt for ensuing adventures …

The meetup group started swimming February weekends in Lake Natoma, in horribly chilly, thought-numbing water. I floundered in frustration, making the mistake of believing all those laps in the pool would steel me for open water. Cold trumps all. Now I warn new open-water swimmers against similar hubris.

I started in a wetsuit because I thought that's the only way a human being could swim winter water.

Two events changed that:

1. I look like a manatee in a wetsuit, except less dainty and curvaceous, and with a DayGlo® dome. Not usually vain, I draw the line at wetsuits, and swim without mostly because I'm stupid and stubborn. Plus I hate the constraint of a neoprene straitjacket on my arms and shoulders.

Wetsuits welcome, of course. We skin
swimmers just like to poke fun.

2. Wearing just a cap, goggles and jammers A guy named Brad Schindler sliced through our wetsuited group and disappeared into the winter mists, returning less than a half-hour later, having swum around an island I had yet to see but have circumnavigated dozens of times since. Before summer ended, Brad became one of only a couple of dozen people to swim the 22-mile length of Lake Tahoe without a wetsuit. Until Brad hit the water that February morning, it never occurred to me that I might be able to swim without a wetsuit. For the next month, for increasing periods after every swim, I splashed about without my wetsuit. After that month, and ever since, I've gone without.

On one of these so-called polar bear swims, I had forgotten my goggles, and was ready to drive home and call it a morning. I solve problems with expeditious caprice, and have to talk myself into taking a moment to think of better alternatives. This time my wife thought of it for me.

"Just go ask someone," she said, through gritted teeth. When I finally did, a guy named Jim Morrill lent me a pair, and I was able to swim.

In quick time I found Jim my opposite in people skills, joining in any and every conversation, meeting new people without a whit of hesitation. Without any evidence that I could swim more than 100 yards, he was excitedly inviting me on swims months and miles from that date. I was willing, but not sure how able.

This is a distant second … first off, we don't confine our
lunacy to Nimbus Flat at the south end of the lake.

On our first rough-water swim of the season in March, I got a third of the way out into a Folsom Lake cove before a wave, and then another, and then another slapped me in the face. I stalled, unable to breathe, then puked water and decided immediately that open water swimming wasn't for me. I had tried, dammit, but it was time to sidestroke back to shore and go home. Then Jim swam back to where I was, asked if I was OK, and said, "Let's just swim 30 strokes, take your time, and see how you feel." I did, and felt better, in control.

"Let's go another 30 strokes," he said, and off we went again. "See?" he said. "No problem, you're doing great." Thirty strokes by 30 strokes, I finished the mile swim. Maybe I'll be back after all, I thought.

I think of that every time I swim, now often by myself in 50-degree water: Here I am, piercing the green, cold peaceful waters, the forests quiet on either side of me, the water a vast sheet of glass, gulls and buzzards lofting overhead, and someone made sure I didn't miss out on this by not letting me quit.

Now Jim is the one with whom I swim most often, when we get the chance. We've swum Aquatic Park, Treasure Island and Keller Beach in the San Francisco Bay.

I swim almost as often with another new partner in lunacy, Stacy Purcell, who's a scientist by heart and profession. Curious what the cold water is doing to us, he has us taking air, water and body temperatures to track trends as the temperatures fall.

I like this, but acknowledge its weirdness. I embrace its weirdness.

This new watery world has brought a lot of new friends. In short time, for example, I'm sure to see, somewhere in the middle of a swim, a body coming toward me at high speed. That'll be Kathy Morlan, one of the fastest open-water swimmers in northern California. She's taking a winter break, having donated a kidney to her son over the Christmas weekend. On top of all her swimming medals, she wins Mom of the Year.

With friends and alone, I have swum from Alcatraz, the nearly three miles of Donner Lake, the nearly five miles of Lake Natoma and long portions thereof, and have swum just for swimming's sake an average of five days a week. We have swum in broiling sun and in sideways rain and in opaque fog. We've swum before dawn and long after the evening sky has reddened and purpled. We have endured rowing crews who can't see us, and ski boats who refuse to. I regret to say I have only gone out beyond the white breakers once, with a group out of Avila Beach. But I plan to change that, and soon. The open water has only made me want more.

Honestly, I enjoy coming out of the water on a December morning and someone on the shore asking, "How can you do that?! How cold is the water, really?"

Next year, I'd like to swim from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, about six miles with the tide. A couple of events have added 10k swims, and I'd like to be able to complete those. I'll swim Alcatraz again, at least once, and the length of Lake Natoma again. Crossing from Catalina Island to the mainland no longer seems impossible. Not next year, but who knows? Someday.
 

Feelin' groovy …

Just not today. I'm home from a 7 a.m. swim in which the surface temperature was 50 degrees F. The swim is never really so bad; it's the uncomfortable shivering after that I can do without. After another cup of hot water and a shower, I'll retrieve my bravado. My goal of swimming Lake Natoma year 'round remains the foremost challenge.

"I want to get stung by a jellyfish," I told Jim, meaning that if I did get stung, it'd be because I'd been swimming in the ocean long enough for the law of averages eventually to attack me. People, learning I'd been stung, would say, "Well, it figures, considering how often you swim in the ocean."

"Trust me," said Jim, a surfer since childhood, "you don't want to get stung by a jellyfish." But he takes my point.

Happy 2012. Find your adventure.

Don't look so sad, I know it's over

Third place in age group! Guess how many other pre-midlife
crisis men competed in the same age group!
It looks like the swimmer is fighting against the spin cycle
in an industrial washing machine here — not too
different from the chop off Point Richmond.

But life goes on, and this ol' world will keep on turning … *

The open-water swimming season in this north stretch of the state ended Sunday with the Second Annual Swim for Kids' Sake at Keller Beach off Point Richmond in the East Bay.

Don't cry for me, though it's nearly as sad as the hapless San Francisco Giants (not just hapless, but in serious hap hock when the next season begins) collapsing our collective dreams of a repeat world championship.

I'll keep swimming Lake Natoma — just because I choose to be crazy with some swim friends, and to improve gradually. But the races are over for the year. The Pacific Masters Swimming group, which sanctions the races, says that was it.

For the finale, the gray sky over San Francisco Bay billowed and puffed like a great parachute, hiding and revealing the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, Mount Tamalpais and beyond. The jade water frothed and smoothed, frothed and smoothed, settling into a steady chop by the time the races began. 

I didn't want to swim. That's my usual approach to these events: I'll drive there but I won't swim; I'll tell my wife soon enough to thank her for coming out with me and try to reclaim the wasted day by going somewhere nearby to sightsee and relax. Then I decide to swim at least some of the race, and maybe see how it goes. In the end, as always, I take three deep breaths and swim the entire thing.

The organizers sent the two-milers off first. I'm smack dab in the center of the
picture, taking my own damn time getting started.

I felt strong in this event, compared to last month's Donner Lake race in which — because of high altitude or high ineptitude — I never felt right. When I finally finished Sunday, I glanced at the race clock: 56 minutes and 26 seconds for two miles. Phenomenal! That's less than a half-hour per mile — nearly 15 minutes faster than I hoped I could swim. Somehow the Underachiever's rhythmic stroke chant ("Do not drown, be not last, do not drown …") must have helped me.

A race volunteer politely beckoned me off the finish line and over to a portable shower, which spat warm water, down the beach.

"How fast did you go?" My wife asked. I looked back at the clock. It still posted 56 minutes, 26 seconds. For a moment, I thought the race officials had memorialized my unexpected finish.

"Oh, that clock's been broken for a while," my wife said.

Officially, I came in 1 hour, 4 minutes and 51 seconds and change, about five minutes faster than I figured — and that's with the leisurely refreshment break after an hour (the video for which is available but embarrassing).

But …

I finished third among men 45-49 without wetsuits!

Of course, my wife just hadda go ask the timekeeper THE question: "How many men 45-49 swam without wetsuits in the two mile?"

Of course, you know the answer:

I could have floundered and come in just under the two-hour limit, aggravating all the young lifeguards floating on paddleboards along the route, who probably had homework overdue on this blustery blue-gray morning on the coldish water. I could have walked onto the beach after the first mile, played a game of Frisbee, rolled around in the sand, enjoyed a second banana among the array of food and drink set aside specifically for the two-milers to keep them out of the path of the half-milers that would finish their race about the time we made our first lap. I could have done all that, and as long as I finished within the two-hour limit, still come in third among men 45-49 swimming the two-mile race in nothing by my black jammers.

Fast Dan (right) took second in his age group (and placed in his group
overall for the Pacific Masters Swimming open-water season), but
liked the third-place ribbon better and got it instead.
Even faster Kathy took second overall in the two-mile behind
a world-record long-distance swimmer.

(I'll spare you video of my swim stroke; it's textbook Total Immersion, but it … is … so … slow. Though it looks like I'm la-dee-dah'ing it all the way to the finish, in reality I was giving it all I had.)

It was a fitting and funny end to the season, which began with me hoping against hope for one or two open-water swims, and continues with me swimming almost every day in open water.

Along the way I've swum the lengths of Lake Natoma and Donner Lake, swum from Alcatraz, and more, and met many new friends who are less likely than land lubbers to die of boredom listening to me  ponder the open water.

I keep pretty fast company too: Kathy Morlan and Dan Winterrowd, with whom I swim at least twice a week in Natoma, each placed in the top three of their age group for the open-water season. You get a certain amount of points for every top finish for a certain number of sanctioned races; I don't know exactly how it works, because it's not a problem I expect to have. Kathy may likely place among the top overall women finishers.

Not bad.

Non-breaking news: Diana Nyad could not finish her second attempt swimming from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida. Two separate run-ins with Portuguese Man-of-War, (which look like jellyfish but turn out to be separate organisms working together that just look like jellyfish), ended Nyad's swim after swimming 92 of a planned 103 miles (just 11 miles left!) on Sunday. It was about the same time we had finished our Keller Beach race.

(Now her website says she was stung by a box jellyfish, supposedly the most venomous, capable to causing death — to humans? — in two to three minutes.)

Even having failed twice to make her goal, Nyad has twice done something amazing. She is a worthy inspiration for anyone, though she advocates specifically for older people (she is 62) to seek their adventure and not turn inward. By every measure and angle (perseverance, courage, commitment, strength, organization, planning, human spirit) it is a phenomenal feat. I get all of that; it's wonderful.

But Nyad undermines it all with a nauseating torrent of self-promotion and ham-handed public relations. Since her previous attempt, I have received a steady flow of watch-my-documentary-with-your-friends, watch-me-talk-to-you-about-my-thoughts-on-the-swim-a-week-after, etc. So much me-me-me has come from Nyad's fan page, that I shut my brain to it; which made it a startling surprise that she had begun another attempt.

She (or someone in her camp) at one point during the weekend wanted facebook followers to change their profile pictures to her Website logo as a show of support for her effort. Come again?

The silliest, sadly, was the facebook notice announcing the end of her swim, which is, as verbatim:

After more than 40 hours of swimming and two Portuguese Man-of-War stings, Diana Nyad decided to end her swim today at 11 a.m. From the water, she called out to her flotilla of four escort boats and addressed each of them in a strong voice. “The medical team said I should not go another two nights in the water and risk additional likely Man-of-War stings which could have a long term cumulative effect on my body. But for each of us, isn't life about determining your own finish line? This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is, and that dream continues.” Nyad swam more than 67 nautical miles. Steve Munatones, the independent observer for the International Swim Federation who is accompanying the expedition, noted that Portuguese Man-of-War stings have doomed many a marathon swimmer.

Nyad is a talker  — more like a jabberer — but did she really say all that, in corporate-speak, like it came off a clumsy news release? What was this, sermon on the surface? Did she address of the escort boats individually with the same strong-voiced soliloquy in succession, or gather the boats for one unlikely address?

I'm a fine one to talk, though, given you've gotten all the way down here in a blog about me, me, me … thanks for sticking with me!

* "For the Good Times," Kris Kristofferson

Best seat in the house

Though I can’t shake the image of this swimmer knifing past me
at unbelievable speed, the swimmer found me easy to shake.

Imagine sitting right behind second base and watching a double play unfold in front of you. You’re so close, the players’ cleats kick red clay across your shins. So close, you can see the subtle, lightning exchange of ball and hand and glove that enable the second baseman and shortstop to nail down this out and still throw ahead of the runner churning toward first.

So close, you can see the players’ eyes shift from moment to miniscule moment, hear the snorts of their staccato breaths, feel the thunder of the play.

You do not hinder the action one jot. You're witness to what few others can see, where few can see it, but you're virtually invisible.

Open-water swim races are like that for me. I’m simultaneously participant and spectator, smack in the playing environment with the elite athletes of the sport, yet harmless to their goals. I’m privy to details of the swim that most shoreline spectators miss — the churn of bodies, the choking spray and chop, the warp of sensory deprivation, the fishy gasoline taste of lake water — but I’m not in the way, however close.

I’m an obstacle easily overcome; those elite swimmers need only swim past me. Most are way ahead of me before I even start most races, but in the latest race, the Hot August Chill 1-mile at Donner Lake last month, a group of young swimmers started five minutes after the adults, and most soon overtook me.

That group included this swimmer above, who must have been an older teenage boy, a young man, mostly chest and shoulders. He knifed past me well before the first buoy in the triangular course.

Breathing on my left side, I was able to watch the brief moment he boiled past me. In that moment, he moved fully in view; in the next he was gone. Somehow he propelled himself almost two of his body lengths with each stroke. The only reason I told friends on shore that he jetted just one body length per stroke is that I didn’t think anybody would believe the truth. I’ve felt compelled to draw that moment when I saw the swimmer in full, before he disappeared from view, and I’m trying to figure out how that was even possible.

More young swimmers soon followed, breezing past me like I was leaf litter on the water. They were part of USA Swimming, which as far as I can tell (the Web site is not crystal clear on this) is the sanctioning body for child and teen swimmers.

Breaking news! I interrupt this riveting post to tell you my swim friend,
Brad Schindler, on Aug. 29 completed a solo crossing of Tahoe: 22.5 miles in 11 hours, 26 minutes, two miles an hour. (For perspective, a strong backpacker traversing over level terrain can expect to move about two miles an hour.) It is a phenomenal feat capped by the fact that Brad popped out of the water and ran onto to the beach as if he had swum just a mile, not a mile plus 21 and change. He began at 12:28 from Camp Richardson on the south shore, and made a beeline to the Hyatt Beach pier at Incline Village on north shore.

Brad is only the 18th or 19th swimmer to cross (clear information is hard to get), and may be only the fifth or sixth to have crossed without a wetsuit. Though not the fastest, he was easily among the fastest finishers in a tradition that began in 1955 with sporadic challenges ever since.

Brad crossed at what is now considered the longest possible axis of the lake.

He inspired me to swim without a wetsuit, when I saw him swim 1.5 miles in the bone-chilling waters of Lake Natoma in February. As shaken as he was by the cold afterward, he looked like he was having fun, so I ditched the wetsuit and swam in the waters for longer periods until I got used to it, and haven't put the wetsuit on since. Brad also inspires me and many other swimmers to just keep swimming!

Adults have U.S. Masters Swimming, which sanctions most of these open-water swims and requires membership in order to participate. The name intimidates, even though I am a member and now realize it can’t be too masterful if it lets someone like me be a member, I’m still wary. Minimum requirement: Swim the length of a 25-yard pool.

As an outsider to the Masters (I’m “unattached” to any Masters swim club, mostly because clubs swim at pools which require fees which I don’t wanna pay), I can’t help but see it as a largely competitive organization. Sure, plodding swimmers like me are let in, but the races are to the swiftest — and the swift overrun the plodders.

My swim friends who are Masters would quickly reject that notion and insist that it’s a welcoming, nurturing organization; hell, I’m sure I’d become a faster swimmer by taking advantage of Masters coaches, but that gets back to my allergy to fees.

I accept that so many are going to swim so much faster than me. What else can I do? Some try to console me by saying that I’ve only been swimming in open water for a year, and success takes time. I agree with my new swim friend George, who says he revels in the fact that few people his age could swim the 2.7-mile length of Donner Lake, as we realized with both did earlier in the month. Swimming is about the journey more than the destination, he says.

But I can tell from the sheer power of these swimmers that time alone will not make me faster.

Three races took place at Hot August Chill. In addition to the 1-mile race I swam in, the event hosted a half-mile and 500-yard race. The latter is billed as a good way to introduce newcomers to open water, but it’s really a flat-out sprint.

Opting out of the other races gave me a chance to watch their finishes, and they were each the same. The top two finishers, men of renown in the open-water circuit around these parts, finished one-two within seconds of each other, well ahead of the next swimmers. My swim friend Kathy, extremely fast, came in early in the next knot of swimmers, each time competing against her long-time “nemesis.”

All of these, even the elite champions, swim purely for the participation, the satisfaction, the glory, maybe even acclaim from peers in a niche sport. It’s not for money, certainly, or even the occasional prize, which often comprises wetsuits, which most of these swimmers wouldn't want, anyway.

I can’t fathom swimming such distances, stroke for stroke over the entire course with someone fast as your equal, mere seconds apart; nor can I imagine having a nemesis against whom I’ve swum year after year, with whom I have traded victories over time.

But right in the wake of these champions, I get to witness it.

Far away and so close

I can actually see the finish gate! This is going to be a breeze …

The first I'd been to Donner Lake, the storied Sierra lake near where the Donner-Reed Party camped, was when I swam its length, 2.7 miles, Saturday.

It was the 31st Annual Donner Lake Open Water Swim. I met a swimmer there who had competed in 26 of them. This was one down for me, more to go, I hope.

Neither the distance nor the water temperature (warm, for me) scared me — not even the more-than-a-mile-high altitude (strangely), because I held to the Underachievers' Code of Adequacy, to wit:

1. Be thou not last.

2. Be thou not one of the swimmers that the police boat will pluck out of the water if you're still in the race after two hours and 30 minutes, or if you haven't reached halfway down the lake in an hour and 15 minutes.

Though I achieved both tenets, they gave me much to think about along the long swim, such as:

How can I keep from being last? I imagine the last swimmer gets more attention for that fact than he/she really wants. More than I'd want, certainly. I don't want to be last. How can I keep from being last?

What is half of the length of the lake? How will I know I'm there, short of a police boat lifting me out of the water?

Can I really swim this before two hours and 30 minutes pass? What if I'm a coupla hundred yards from the finish; will the police boat really pull me out of the water and shuttle me to shore? That would really ramp up the unwanted attention factor — hundreds of people on the shoreline, many of them having finished the swim, watching as the police boat putt-putts you from within shouting distance to dry land. It'd be like a Monty Python sketch.

Race officials denied moving the finish gate farther back
during the race …

Eventually, I finished in one hour, 36 minutes and 24 seconds. I keep changing in the standings, according to the online posted results, between 199th and 200th overall, out of 230 swimmers. I was 13th in my 45-49 age group (out of 13; that number keeps changing as I revisit the results; the oldest swimmer, 71, finished more than 20 minutes faster than me). I swam at a pace of 35 minutes, 42 seconds per mile, which is the first I've seen that statistic provided in a race.

(The fastest swam this in 54 minutes — faster than it took my wife to walk from start to finish; I hope the last swimmer didn't notice that race officials had already dismantled and packed away the race clock before she reached shore.)

In the end, I swam as fast as I expected; I had swum a 2.4 mile race earlier in the summer in about the same time (maybe I improved my time, but I also ran back onto shore during that race after the first 1.2 mile lap to fetch a different pair of goggles because my brand-new ones flopped uselessly on my face, and ran back in to finish).

But it was long enough in the water to think thoughts. In addition to the above, I wondered:

Why didn't a T-shirt come with the entry fee? It's a really nice shirt, designed by a swimmer/artist/cellist named Deborah Brudvig, but I had to pass, saving the pennies here and there. I had plenty of time to estimate the fees generated by the race, and what they might pay for.

Where is everybody? I stopped a couple of times (halfway?) to see one swimmer waaaaaaay over to my left, another waaaaaay to the right. Why were they so far to the side of me? I saw a few dark shapes in the shimmering water behind me, the remnants of the few (about 30) slower swimmers. I was not last, at least not to that point.

Why is the water so dark green here? Lake Natoma is more of a kelly green. San Francisco Bay in June was a translucent jade. I was color swatching as I swam. The sun at my back cast my shadow deep into the water before me; hundreds of sunlight shafts danced around my shape like an aura.

Where is the damn finish line? I saw it so clearly in the mountain air, 2.7 miles away, before the swim began. Then I hit the water and the more I swam, the farther away the finish line drifted, as did the peak I used as a landmark to guide me. At one point, the bright orange finish gate disappeared. My friend Jim Morrill predicted as much: "The swim's gonna feel like forever, like you're never going to finish."

How can anyone swim farther than this? Jim Morrill, who talked me into this swim long ago and proposed way back then of us swimming from the finish to the start early in the morning, and then joining the race back to the finish, 5.4 miles total. (The Facts of Life got in the way and he couldn't make it to the swim at all, much less swimming a round trip; I'm sure he was chewing through his goggles when he realized he couldn't go.) I swam 4.8 miles from far behind him in Natoma, but as I swam Saturday, I couldn't process swimming any farther than I was going.

Another swim friend, Brad Schindler, later this month will attempt a solo crossing of Lake Tahoe, 22 miles, to be begun at midnight. As I write, 61-year-old Diana Nyad is two days into a 103-mile swim from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Fla. It would be the longest continuous swim by a human.

(I just learned this morning Nyad made it nearly halfway through her swim before calling it off because of hazardous conditions. But still, nearly 50 miles of open ocean  …)

Just so hard to imagine swimming so far.

The constant question — the yang (more of a yammer, really) to my almost constant yin of mindful swimming — was, why am I so slow, really?

I'm following faithfully the technique I've learned over the last three years, or at least I think I am, and I'm continually adjusting and reassessing, when I'm not thinking other thoughts.

Theoretically, I'm not swimming any differently than Sun Yang, the Chinese swimmer who at the end of July set a new world record in the 1,500 meter freestyle at the world championships, breaking a 10-year mark. Terry Laughlin, developer of the Total Immersion technique I practice, hails Sun's performance as the new measure for swimming efficiency. For the first 1,250 meters, Sun used only 27 strokes per length (the jaws of experienced pool swimmers are supposed to drop here, because that is a phenomenally efficient stroke), 28 strokes per length for the next 200 meters, and 32 for the sprint in the final 50 meters. The highly efficient Grant Hackett, an Australian who held the record for 10 years, swam an average of 31 strokes over his record-setting race.

Laughlin says though he can't presume that Sun is using Total Immersion, his swim was a textbook demonstration of the technique he promotes.

I'm a tin Sun Yang; I'm swimming mindfully, methodically, trying to make sure each stroke is patient, catching as much water as possible, all the way to a quick flip of my wrist at the end. I'm making sure my hands enter the water as quietly as possible with each stroke, that my hips are high, and that my kick (which most people who've seen it regard as violent) is instead just enough to turn my hips over.

I'm doing all that, but I very quickly watch the pack of swimmers disappear ahead of me, and open the gap with aggression on the glassy water, which quickly turns to chop by the time I enter their weakening wake. It's a scene I'm getting used to. I don't blame anybody. My friend Kathy Morlan steamed the water to a personal best of 1:04 and change, and I think she should bottle and sell her secret.

I can do two things about this: Be content with swimming, realizing that very few people swim long distance, and I can do so and still be upright at the end, walking and talking without pain, with the pleasant memory of having slipped through wild water, over unknown depths. My wife prefers I think that way; she likes that I can do this at all.

For the most part, that's how I feel. As with the Fire Cracker swim, I felt I could go no faster, and if I tried, I would have floundered in the middle of the lake, out of whack and out of breath and energy. So I spent my time thinking thoughts and talking to myself about how I was doing.

Or I can figure out how to swim faster without loss of technique and sanity.

Leslie Thomas, who runs a wonderful coaching and expedition swim enterprise called swim-art.com out of San Francisco, happened to participate in the Donner Lake (and finished in 1:14 and change) and said her swim was rough until she finally settled into a groove. I found myself slipping in and out of at least eight different grooves, trying to hold onto one.

But comparison is impossible to avoid — it's literally staring me in the face, as I watch the mass of backsides receded to the finish line in front of me — and numbers are mesmerizing, if not intoxicating.

I should be able to swim faster, but maintain my technique. Maybe I can wring more out of my stroke, by turning over faster over the length of the swim.  I should be swimming sprints in the pool to build up my anaerobic tolerance; from what sprints I have swum before, I'm not anxious to continue: They hurt. Maybe I should leave it all in the water, and emerge at the end crawling up to shore, exhausted.

I don't know.

I was a lot more tired than I had expected, because when I swam with friends the next day at Lake Tahoe, I gasped for breath just swimming out to the buoy line to begin our practice. But I slowed, took a few deep breaths, and continued, getting one syrupy mile out of the morning before I swam back in.

I'll be back for Donner Lake's 32nd run, and I'll plan to swim it faster.

How?