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.

I'm No. 11! I'm No. 11!

You read right: Out of 80 male swimmers ages 45-49 without wetsuits, I finished 11th in total points for the 2011 Northern California open water race season.

(This was going to be a mercifully brief update on my obsession over open water swimming, but now it's become a whole big thing. As with most matters involving me, it is awash in controversy.*)

As a matter of fact, my feet do look like
Don Martin drew them …

Eleventh place, all to myself! I didn't have to share it like so many others. Five people have to share 27th place, for example. Nope, I stand alone.

My wife says I shouldn't even tell people that the first place swimmer in my age group earned 118 points to my 32 points, and that the next three swimmers earned 88, 88 and 80 points respectively before the points total drops precipitously into the 30s. So I won't mention it.

The Pacific Masters Swimming organization, which sanctions these open-water races (making sure they're run right, with paramedics and lifeguards and regulation distances, etc.) just posted the season's results online.

But right away, I'm confused. So, there are two at second place in points, but no one is listed in third place. The next guy is fourth, instead, and two guys after him are fifth in points. No one gets sixth place. The one after that is listed as seventh, then three in eighth before the list gets to me at eleventh. Huh, no ninth or tenth place?

If we're sharing rank by points, I should be seventh, shouldn't I? I guess the three dudes at eighth area really eighth, ninth and tenth, and by happenstance of heritage or fate, sub-ranking goes to whoever's last name comes first in the alphabet. Pacific Masters directs me to the email of someone to contact in case of disputes.

Eh, forget it. I never thought I'd be on any such list at the end of the season, let alone be that high on it.

Now I know a few things that'll help me next year. One is that I don't have to find the race results after every event, don't have to politely fight a crowd joined in reading tiny type in long columns as the results are stapled on a wall or tacked to a bulletin board; usually, the data alongside my name usually disappoints me anyway ("How could I swim that slow? How did that guy swim so fast?")

Now I can be disappointed all at once in the privacy of my office, because the Pacific Masters breaks it all down for you! I can tell at a glance that I swam four of the 14 sanctioned events this season (that comprises multiple races at eight different venues; some places allowed you to swim a half-mile, mile and two-mile race consecutively, if you are lunatic enough). I swam a few other unsanctioned races as well during the summer.

* I can also establish the benchmarks on which to improve my times, and use strength exercises, drills, running, maybe even learn the backstroke to strengthen my upper body. But here's where the  numbers cause me real problems:

All told, according to the season's results, I swam 6.7 miles (can't dispute that) for an average of 24 minutes and 37 seconds per mile. Impressive (for me anyway: At least I'm faster than seven-year-old Elsa Woodhead, the Marin County girl who last month was the youngest to swim the 1.5-mile Golden Gate span; neener neener!), but troubling:

I never swam faster than 27 minutes and change per mile in any of the four races, so how could I have averaged faster than that for all the races combined? Even my math-benumbed mind could sense a discrepancy. What's going on?

Careful sleuthing that could otherwise have been productive worktime finally revealed the hard truth: Results from the last race of the season indicate I swam two miles of Keller Cove at Point Richmond in four minutes, 51 and five-tenths seconds. I think that would have made international news and put me under intense scrutiny about performance-enhancing drugs, cleverly disguised jet propulsion or mysterious mastery of time travel. Since it didn't, and I wasn't, I have to conclude the results lopped an hour off my total time. Which is what happened.

Over the season, I really averaged a bit over 33 minutes per mile. Which is slower than the Elsa Woodhead, who swam the storied Tiburon Mile — actually a nautical mile, longer than a landlubber mile — in 30 minutes. My apologies for any needless aspersions I may have cast her way.

But now what do I do? This is junior high all over again, when I told the PE teacher my fitness test results did not earn me the coveted red gym shorts, contrary to his interpretation of the data. Must I revisit that trauma, and alert the Masters Swimming organization to this discrepancy? My PE teacher berated me. Will Pacific Masters Swimming discredit me, make me admit my slothful shame and obsessiveness over my race times? After I sent out all the invitations to my Eleventh Place Extravaganza: Take That, Haters! party?

This asterisk is going to hang around my neck for a long time. I hope it floats.

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