Leaving Mellon

It was my seventh time doing the swim from Alcatraz, and the third that had a run afterwards. On any Alcatraz swim there is a point (usually about three minutes into the race) where the body goes numb. Perhaps the neurons grow indifferent to the danger and stop sending messages that “this cold water is a bad idea” to the brain so that the body can focus on stroking towards the shore. But what might also be the case is that after a few of these swims, my brain has been numbed to the point of thinking “Alcatraz isn’t really hard at all. It is only an hour swim.” Fear was a great motivator for training and to stop respecting the distance led to a little bit of slacking on my part. My twice a week master classes were reduced to just showing up occasionally to the pool. My series of progressive Aquatic park swims this year became just a single dip on a particular sunny morning. My crafted nutrition plan had been morphed to a couple of beers the night before.

I had no idea how strong my shoulders were, but I felt great going into the race.

The prerace portion of Alcatraz swims have the most nervous collections of athletes I have encountered. There is a constant anxious vibe about the day that causes chatter amongst the participants. Though the Alcatraz Challenge is my favorite of the swims that are held because it does not have the agro triathletes of the other events (something about having a bike brings out the worst of people), it still scares. I tried to my best with my prerace karma and offered a spare set of goggles to someone who had forgotten theirs, joked with a couple of Irishmen about the swim while waiting in line, and sat next to a man from Arkansas as he waved good bye to his indifferent children. The woman next to me on the ferry giggled hysterically

The captain announced that he would take the boat to the lee of the island and what we didn’t realize at the time was he meant that the water was too rough to position the boat normally. This fact became apparent as we hit the water in sets of three. We were push and rolled by the swells. It wasn’t the biggest ocean I have seen (that honor remains with the Maui Channel 2006), but it did feel like we were trying to swim on top of elephants.

I am more of a tug boat than a speed boat, and I did my best to trudge against the waves. This time around I found swimmers near me for most of the race which was unusual because often in the past a kayak would have to come to point me towards the expensive housing that is San Francisco. I don’t know whether this year I had better aim or there were few kayaks but I plodded alone through the waves as I learned how much I really need to respect the Alcatraz swim: one mouthful of water at a time.

Life isn’t sports.

Or if it is then it is the kind far away from Barry Bonds’ pursuit of fame. Sports are hobbies with a bit of health care thrown in. They are the distraction from the rest of our struggles whose score isn’t kept. There aren’t points given for being a good friend or responsible worker. Most of the time we toil anonymously without ever getting a medal for our efforts. But that morning swim wasn’t really about sports either even though I was quite proud of my catching a tattooed man during the run. What I will keep from my seventh crossing is an entirely different thought:

I never saw the body.

There was an ambulance at the finish line, but I assumed it was the usual precaution, the same modern notion that causes three release forms to do any activity, the one that wants not just air bags coming from the front but the sides as well. One of the reasons that we live longer now (other than we are washing ourselves more often) is that we are much more careful. It is easy to be cynical of our nerf like existence; the race t shirt itself mocked the danger with the words “swim or die.”

This was the first time the Alcatraz Challenge had someone in the second category. Sally Lowes of Houston never made it to the shore alive.

I was shocked when I discovered this after going home. Death isn’t what we expect on a Sunday morning. Granted I probably never saw Sally Lowes alive, but there was a part of me that felt it could of. How different was she from the guy who borrowed my goggles or the one from Arkansas with his kids still on the shore? There are the random people of our encounters – the extras in the cinema of our lives – that we catch briefly in a single moment perhaps tying a shoe or giggling loudly and we remember them briefly as the giggler until that moment too fades.

Looking at it now, I don’t just fell I should have respected the race more with both an awareness of the sea could do and the foresight to try to prepare, but I also feel that I should do that for life. It is easy to wander through things half numb to the world.

The race itself isn’t why I have decided to leave my job and spend 9 months trying to write. That decision was made a few weeks ago when the project I was on was canceled. But it does stem from a similar notion that I need to relearn passion again and find warmth as I get rolled by the waves. Because the one truth from yesterday is that there will be a time perhaps distant but perhaps too soon that we aren’t going to reach some shore.