Life Aquatic

My eldest son, Edward, said his first swear word yesterday. He was, of course, mimicking his father who in a moment of frustration over a spilt mocha on a changing table launched the explicative. In my defense, during the week I take care of the kids during the 6’s of a.m. and p.m. - the twilight between sleep and exhaustion. The mocha is my fuel, my milk drink as opposed to his.

To my son, who has so few words, perhaps the swear could have meant the same thing as “boom” or “uh-oh”. Life with two small children is a series of liquids and spills and there is the never ending clean up of wipes and towels. It has become part of our routine enough that Edward will sometimes grab a towel if he spills something. His favorite person for a while was the trash man.

We have a life aquatic with our heads out of the water barely enough. Parenting is the process of riding the tides of toddler attentions - the fast shifts of the currents of desires.

Edward for the most part has been living well. He has a collection of aunts and grandparents whom I refer to as the mutual admiration society. He has gotten used to having a younger brother in the same sort of way of getting used to eating using a spoon. It isn’t always, and when it doesn’t work out it gets a little messy. But the intention is there.

To get him out of the house away from the newly steam cleaned carpets and couches, he goes to a bevy of activities. He has soccer tots on Mondays, where he insists on stacking cones as opposed to running around them. He goes to Jameroo and Music Together, which are meant to cultivate his artistic side, but wind up being places where he runs around the peace circle screaming. Someday he will do exercise in sports classes and art in art classes, but for right now he explores things impulsively.

On Thursday mornings he goes to swim classes at the JCC. We got our first report card a couple of weeks ago - never too early to start measuring kids in San Francisco. He had top marks in enthusiasm and confidence, but did not fare so well when it came to the section of skills. It looks like it will be a career of venture capitalism.

Not all of the kids in the class are unafraid of the water. Some luckier parents have children with a better sense of danger. There was one girl, Olivia, who would cry the entire class. I would get the updates on Thursday dinners about how everyone was doing. In my mind Olivia was of Russian descent with large eyebrows, and a power set of lungs. She is, in fact, Chinese and didn’t scream as loudly as my imagination. More of a whimper.

I kept asking about swim class over dinners. Did we think the instructor named “Blaze” lived in the Haight or were the rents to high there? Was Edward kicking on his back? Did he put his head underwater? Does Blaze have good earplugs?

The updates kept coming, and one day I got the major news. Olivia had stopped crying during class. Edward had held her hand and made her feel safe in the water. I like to think that with his hand held he could not splash as much either, and that the two of them could start to learn about the aquatic life with a sense of calm.

I then learned that at the next class they had started to kiss. We spent a few weeks of Thursday dinners speculating about the two. About how he would think of his summer romance with his few words of “up” and “down”. Would he grow up to be an olympic swimmer, because he had found true love in a sea of chlorine.

And then yesterday it was broken to me softly. Olivia had spent the entire class with Sebastian who was both blonder and younger than my son. Edward was very troubled that she would not hold his hand anymore and could not understand why she would kiss Sebastian instead of him.

When he came home from class, he took a longer than usual nap. That evening he didn’t pick on his brother except for a few times of pulling his hair.

I was, of course, devastated by the news. How could she I wondered. Was my son just a stepping stone for the shallow end of the pool? You have such little time to give your children the advice they need to handle the world. You won’t be there for all of the heartbreaks. I can only hope that Edward reached down into his small list of words, and after going past things like “apple” and “blue” would come to say what his father told him. 

Shit.

The Waves

My son went to the Pacific for the first time near Stinson Beach. He can’t really walk without support, but grasping my fingers he charged right into the sea. He has no notion of swimming or for that matter basic safety. He wanted to dart into the waves, to go into the unknown.

I am job hunting again, a process similar to speed dating but without the intimacy. There is a habit of some shops to try to stump the candidate. They ask about a technical api or some arcane part of language that can be answered, usually, in four minutes in a web search and it is as if their main hiring requirement is to make sure that their programmers will work when the internet goes down. The truth is that when the network goes away everybody goes out for coffee, so the fear is a little misguided.

You can always find something that somebody doesn’t know, and as such that isn’t the mark of a good interviewer. What is more impressive is trying to find out what it is like when someone is over their heads, when they rushed their ocean and the waves were bigger than they were - how do we handle struggle.

I flail most of the time. I want to pretend that I could be calm, that I would handle the crisis with an even demeanor, but the truth is that when things get hard, there is mostly panic. I want to pretend that there isn’t fear, but that is as silly as pretending that the ocean doesn’t exist.

I can sometimes ground myself in my memory - that I have some sense as I tumble about which way is up. I remind myself that I have survived other job hunts and other bad jobs. I remember to breathe.

This time is different. Someone else’s tiny hand holds mine. These days I don’t need a life preserver for myself as much as a raft for my family.

My son has a giggly laugh when he gets excited. He has my mouth and my wife’s eyes which crinkle with joy. He loves the ocean. He loves bananas, blueberries, yogurt and chicken. He loves his grandmothers though he has no idea what the word “grandmother” means. He loves chewing on a plastic bath toy. He loves chewing on paper.

We will go back to the ocean soon. We will take lessons on how to swim. I will try to teach him not to put sand in his mouth. He will teach me to giggle at the waves.

Maui Channel 2011

There is the race report that I prefer to write, the one that talks about the strength of the six relay swimmers, that goes into someone’s first ocean swim, the difficulties of raising a Justin Beiber fan or working at Qantas, the first time being four months pregnant, or the nervous father who wondered if sea sickness is similar to morning. Thankfully no one had either. But this isn’t how I will remember the 2011 race. Our little antics didn’t compare to what happened in the water.

Granted we did fine. We had a native captain and first mate who had not just an intuitive sense of the waters but also knew how to harvest them with a spear gun or chisel. Joining with them was a girl from Danville and we tried to figure out which one she was dating: the captain or the first mate. She was more scenic than nautical, and this eased the time under the boat’s tarp as we rocked in the waves towards Lanai.

The race started dangerously. The waves were the largest I have seen at the start and this was combined with the greatest number of boats. The three jet ski patrol did their best to corral the boats, but there is the hard logistics of so many in such a space. Part of the problem that now haunts the race is that it is known as the best open water swim in the world and is starting to be enrolled as such. The race has been filled with as many boats as it can find.

Right before the race one boat lost its engine. The waves pushed it towards a coral reef and its swimmers abandoned it. Shortly after the race had started and the rest of swimmers had made their way through the diesel scented flotilla another boat sank. We think we saw a bit of the boat popping up from the waves as we past it.

In a normal race two downed boats would be enough. But the radio that was turned to channel 71 crackled that a twelve foot tiger shark had been spotted just behind their swimmer.  The girl from Danville clapped in joy that she might see a shark and then took another puff from her cigarette. She seemed oblivious of any danger whether it be from smoking or dating native Hawaiians.

The shark team pulled their swimmer and asked over the radio to the race director, Coco, if they could move laterally to stay in the race. I do completely support the wisdom of the first action but have to wonder about the second. A twelve foot tiger is twice the size of me and for that matter would have measured up fairly well against the boat. One of the jet skis rushed over to monitor the shark which submerged as he approached. I have no idea of what kind of swimmer goes back into the water after a shark sighting, but the rumor was Australian.

For that matter I wonder about the people who solo this swim. Granted I have met a few on land and they are the nicest of folk, but their shoulders are different than mine and their technique is more graceful. I am, at best, a grinder, the slow guy in a master class. One of the beauties of this race is that it allows folks like me in a relay to experience the chop that they take on all by themselves. There is a shade of blue in that channel that is beautiful even as it pounds with the wind and current flowing in opposite directions. It is a struggle to time the breathing so that you make it at he top of the wave and when you do you get a small glimpse of the split of the West Maui Mountains or the L from the local high school on the hill. You readjust and then hope in a few strokes that you will time it again.

Most of these elite swimmers finish ahead of our relay team, and one, John Caughlin, was a good half hour in front. New to this year was a safety zone at the finish where the boats were not allowed to go past. Coco kept barking into the radio for ships to leave and threatened to disqualify people from the race. I have no idea if one boat in particular had its radio turned off or was just ignoring it.

What happened next bothered me in the same way that the second plane hitting a tower a decade ago did. To watch (or in our case over the radio hear) a tragedy of that magnitude changes someone.

The first call on the radio was that the boat was getting too closed to a swimmer. This was followed by a progressive series of “no,” with the last one being primal. The boat ran over Caughlin. His arm was shredded by the propellor. We heard the rushing of the ski boats and the urgent request for the ambulance on shore. He is in critical care and I hope for his survival.

I don’t know where to go from here; I have rewritten this five times moving words like “probably” and “hope” around. My wife wasn’t thrilled about me doing open water swims to begin with and tried to get me to promise never to do them again when she heard about the race. I know I need the sea. 

There is always the talk of balance and that doesn’t mean between swimming and running or between quadriceps and lats. The balance is trying to figure out the trade off between adventure and responsibility, between how much you want to chuck yourself into an epic versus those that wait at home.

The truth is that a spouse is far more important than a race. I don’t know if John has a wife or a family, but certainly there must be many who know him that are in shock right now. What happened to him was unthinkable and by no means do I blame someone for being at such a wrong place at wrong time. He is 42 and from the Bay Area and both statistics are a little to close to me. I know how hurt my wife would be and my heart goes out to all of his friends and family as well.

 I think the race needs to go through a level of introspection as much as its swimmers. Perhaps there should be a qualifier. All of the boat captains should be required to attend the pre race meeting and at the very least make the pick up and drop off for the first and final swimmer 1k off shore. If it means that people like me can’t do the race then that is a small sacrifice. I know from over the years about Coco and Ian and they are the nicest and thoughtful of race directors. They, too, must be in shock. 

I didn’t say to my wife that I would never do the channel again, but I know that my own logistics of one day (god willing) of having a kid or for that matter trips to Paris or Prague will have to come first, and both will be treasured far more than a sixth shirt from Maui. 

There are events that don’t come close to shipwrecks or wounded in good places like Tomales Bay or Santa Cruz. There is still much ocean left. Yet even with those I know that my best days are not the ones with the medals or sun burns, but the ones I can come home and share a glass of wine or laugh with my wife. There will still be day dreams about the deep blue channel sea but these will shift to realizing of how lucky I am to go home to Louise.

Burning Man

Watch the video

If you travel to the northern hemisphere in early September you will find the mating season of spotted eagle rays in the waters Maui. The high cartilage fish glide in packs off of Black Rock and seem to glance sideways with bulging eyes as they flap beneath unsuspecting tourists. Far away in the dessert of Nevada a humans performed their own mating ritual called Burning Man which had perhaps less spots but more spinning, glo sticks, and hallucinogens. And while the chemicals of Nevada are mostly synthetic, the drugs of the deep blue waters of Maui are the hormones of adrenaline and testosterone.

It takes this kind of blend to venture across the channel from Lanai to Maui, for the first weekend in September is also the Maui Channel Swim, a nine mile race braved by either big shoulder soloists or six person relays. Our team from Tamarama, the Mai Tides, was intimidated by the crowd at the orientation meeting the night before. Someone whispered about a person sharing our table "wasn't she in the Olympics?" Somebody else was impressed with the speedos of some men showering after having just come in from the ocean, and in the end it looked like the entire group could have been underwear models if they weren't swimming thousands of meters a day.

We woke early on race day and met our catamaran and crew in front of the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel where the race finishes. The winds kept increasing as we voyaged across to the start on Lanai and soon the breeze was knocking off the top of the waves leaving patches of white foam to bob up and down in the ever larger swells. It was going to be a long day.

Our boat was a little slow in crossing the conditions but our lead swimmer was quite thrilled to hitch a ride in with one of the jet ski patrol men. Safety men are appreciated everywhere even if their uniform is a life preserve instead of a fire suit. The rest waited on the ship as we watched her join hands with the entire starting line participants as a small prayer was given to the sea the way the Greeks gave offerings to Poseidon. The horn then blasted and the race began.

Each of us on the boat looked anxiously to see if we could spot her among the flotilla of watercraft. Every team has its own vessel and there didn't seem to be any ships left in Maui to charter even if someone would want to go out on such a blistering day. Swimmer by swimmer past the catamaran until at last we found ourselves in the place that we would spend the day: towards the back.

It is true that some of our stronger swimmers made progress against a blue roofed boat and also a pair of Canadian solo swimmers, but these gains would be difficult to maintain.

There is a Kafkaesque property of distance swimming in which all of the splashing and pulling seems to lead nowhere. Late in the race one of our best swimmers was grinding his fastest against the current in his ten minute relay leg only to make scant progress towards an anchored boat. Our captain muttered that he had to put the catamaran in reverse to pace with him. The day was spent trying to find the right gear.

Sometime after the first leg of our rotation (a thirty minute session as opposed to the ten minute ones that would follow), a person came up with a notion that if we weren't going to establish physical supremacy against the ocean we could at least go for a more artistic approach. The phrase "third leg naked" was gossiped around the boat. Could you do something like that during the race? Would we turn off the video camera? Does water make things look bigger or smaller? How would we flap on the ladder after we were done? These questions ricocheted around as we rocked ever so slowly towards Maui.

When the third leg arrived, the bravest of us shed everything in perhaps the hope that sea nymphs would make him faster. None arrived, but as the third bare swimmer was cheered by the boat a water safety jet skier came over to examine the noise only to laugh before disappearing back to the more areodymanic swimmers.

It was in the end an artistic statement, though in retrospect it would have made a bit more sense if we had applied sunscreen before wandering in. Common sense and planning weren't our strong suits and a few of us suffered from too little zinc, water, or dramamine. The race took on the shape of a cousin's wedding which while quite wonderful at first need a desperate sense of ending by its seventh hour. We were drained.

Eventually we made it to the red buoy we needed to keep on our right shoulder before hitting the beach. Three of us swam in and rushed up the finish line. The others helped packed up the boat first forgetting the large blue Tamarama flag and then later the victory party tickets.

Our own victory was smaller than the lengthly banquet speeches (though the winning team gave us a thanks since the second place swimmer had initially thought our catamaran was his). Our prize was having spent a great day in best of waters with the kindest of company as sun drenched and satisfied as the spotted eagle rays whose waters we borrowed.

An unexpected pause

My only complaint of the day was that my wet suit was too tight. I like to think that in the years since I started doing distance swims that perhaps it was the suit that might have shrunk, but I know that is I who have grown. The suit stays dry for most of the year except for a few summer races. It is in remarkably good shape - the Team in Training logo on the front is still bright and shows little signs of weather, which makes it dissimilar from the person who wears it.

A decade has passed since I went to my first information session to learn about Team in Training, a program that prepares novice athletes for endurance events while getting them to raise funds for cancer research. I have gone to Alaska and Hawaii with them. On good days I have ridden my bike or glided on my skis. On a particular bad one I flew out in a helicopter. I have returned every year since 1999 to participate and lately to coach what seems to be perpetually younger people. But that is the same illusion as the wet suit one. The team of marathon runners, humbled by physics of aging knees, is always filled with mostly late twenties and early thirties folk. I am the one drifting away from that mark.

When I arrived at the parking lot of Sports Basement, a new team was beginning to prepare for the Honolulu marathon, the same race I did in 1999. I went over to say hello to a few of the coaches I knew before turning towards the Roper Invitational swim registration. A crowd of much older swimmers (the average age seemed to be in the late forties while most of the race staff was older than that) hung around to be body marked and informed of the tides underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. While not as young, the crowd was definitely strong. On the ferry out in to the Pacific ocean I learned about tales of ironman triathlons and death ride centuries.

I did chat with a nice couple from England and before I started give them too many tips on how to swim towards Marin I found out that they had each swam the 20 some miles from Catalina to California the week before. The week prior to that the gentleman had swum the English Channel and was being hosted by a woman who swam that straight nine years ago. I am fairly certain that ten years ago I was not expecting such company.

We each went to our separate ends of the boat to do a mass jump when the horn sounded. There was an unexpected pause, a brief timeout before the realization that the race had actually started. We then jumped into the Pacific.

I did my best to work on the rhythm of distance. The pack of swimmers was mostly in front of me and I drafted while I could. I flipped on my back to sight against the underbelly of the Golden Gate bridge and then returned back to the long strokes.

A few hundred yards later, at the middle of the race I came across the same nice British couple and their American host. They were taking photographs of each other.

I had a decade of swim times, t-shirts, and towels and the decision whether I wanted to race or linger in the bay which three swimmers and laugh a little was remarkably easy. I asked them if they wanted a photograph of themselves and they kindly returned the favor.

The result was better than I expected. Water droplets blur parts of the shot, but you can see the ferry that we jumped from and the path of our journey. The bridge hoovers above and I have a goofy smile from being at peace in the middle of a choppy sea.

After ten years maybe you earn a bit of a break. Maybe it was time for an unexpected pause, a great way to celebrate a decade and reflect back toward the distances traveled if only by memory instead of photographs. It was nice to share the drift , because some of the nice parts of exercise are the people you meet along the way.

But this can last only so long because eventually the cold of the water catches up with you and the tides must be obeyed.

I took in another look and then I wanted to thank the English couple. They, like many of the great aquatic wonders I have seen in my time in the sea, were speeding away in gorgeous effortless strokes as if they possessed a deep sense of porpoise.

A Mermaid and Turtles

There are fast things in the sea, and I tried to date one once in a relationship that in the end felt no longer than an ocean wave hurling through space until it reached the first obstacle then crashed in on itself. I met her a year ago on the flight to the Maui Channel Swim, and guessed correctly that she was also a swimmer. Having done the race before that (this is my third time) I explained to her about the sea between Maui and Lanai, how the boats cluster at the start while the first group of swimmers huddle on the beach for a swim prayer, how to site off of the second peak of the west Maui mountains at the start and then eventually aim for a series of hotels just north of Lahaina, and how my band of six swimmers had a pleasant day in the sea. I told her not to worry, that she looked like a pretty strong swimmer, and if she had any concerns or wanted to chat she could contact me, the proud champion of the slow lane at the local ymca masters class.

She waited through all of this with only the occasional sigh and did her best to be polite as I explained (incorrectly again) how to do the halfway to Hawaii game on the airplane flight. She looked over at her friend who had another seat and then rolled her eyes as she came back to me. She wanted to be as gentle as possible and she quietly said that she had soloed the 9.5 mile swim the year before. That was even modest: she had actually won as the first female swimmer with a time faster than our group of six swimmers combined and had earlier that year swum the 28 miles around Manhattan. She was an ex pro triathlete and probably didn't need advice from a guy who still has problems with flip turns.

Sometimes I think that the reason that backstroke is my relative strongest is that I have spent a lifetime practicing backing out of conversational holes.

There are fast things in the sea, and I kicked one the day before the race. Along the Sheraton side of Black Rock I saw a medium size turtle weave through the crowds of parents and their small children, and a high school football team that was spending its preseason getting tanned. Normally the turtles never go to that side (they stay about a third of the way in on the other side of the rock) and I worried that they have run out of food near their home, that the new time share complex had pushed it away, the same way it squeezed the locals off the beach so that they have to do their lulas elsewhere.

I watched this turtle swooped past me with the elegant grace and the occasional paddle. It was meant for the sea and spent its time chewing on things near the reef. I followed the turtle for a while (keeping what I thought was good distance) when all of sudden what felt like a battle cruiser passed by, More of a mythological beast with barnacles attached on its shell and near its eye. the head turtle was bigger than a four person dinner table, and the water rushed around his flapping as if he could almost control the currents. As I turned to get out of the monsters way I gave a quick kick behind me accidentally on the top of the other smaller turtle’s shell. I felt my race karma draining and wasn't sure if the proper penance was once again swimming backstroke to the shore.

To go back to a race that you have done before is a bit like visiting an ex girlfriend. There are the moments of familiar joy followed by the reasons it fell apart. The 2007 Maui Channel swim felt like an unstirred mai tai with the first 2/3 of the race in the gentlest sweet water in the world followed by an undiluted shot of reality. The organizer kindly waited until the last of the 73 boats had made its way to Lanai then waved the green shirt for the minute warning followed by the horn to start the race.

Our first swimmer had a long cadence, and the rest of of the male portion of our team was quite pleased that he had decided to swim next to an all women's team boat. The participants during the race are spaced out far enough that you can't get the voyeuristic glimpse you get from sessions in swim lanes, but instead start to think of the personalities of the other teams based upon the shapes of their boats. There are the fishermen, the pirates, the pluggers, the catamarans, and the smaller dinghy (used to support the solo swimmers). The other boats serve as benchmarks, because out in the middle of the channel you can’t see the progress compared to the distant islands but can grasp how you have gained or lost relative to the USS Minnow.

The women’s team dropped us during the second leg, and we would spend most of our day battling a boat we dubbed the pirates.

Though sea was smooth for the first two rotations, one of the swimmer’s stomach decided to make its own choppiness. She rallied in her times in the water then lay fully drained of fluids in the cabin as the rest of us battled the sea.

For most of the way the water was gentle, and it rocked us with the slight touch that a mother cradles her child to sleep. Our biggest disaster (tiny compared to the year before when our first boat’s engine broke) was that we had left the beer back in the house. The other veteran on the team and I joked that it we would be an hour faster, but the truth was with the much kinder sea we improved by two.

The chop came when we made it past the lee of Molokai, and the slapping did its best to disrupt our rhythm. We had to go back to breathing on the right side, because to use bilateral technique was to taste salt.

We made it back to Ka'anapali, but not before our nemesis pirate ship separated themselves from our competition. To make it easier for our captains return we swam with food and extra clothes in white plastic bags towards the beach and pushed our goods like castaways onto a desert isle. Some of the people on the beach saw us arrive, and after all that sun and sea I didn’t quite have the wit to tell them that we were shooting a scene for “Lost.”

There are faster things than me in the sea, and I saw her again a couple of days later at the local 2.4 mile swim. It was just before the prayer, and she didn’t realize that she was standing next to me. I said hello, and asked her how her team swim did.

“Well,” she replied. “You know, it is the Maui Channel.” We then drifted apart to head towards the starting line. I know I won’t return for her, that we are from two separate worlds and only in a few months in one particular autumn did the ocean hold us together. But I will come back to the channel perhaps to see the whales as they migrate or to apologize to a turtle. There are things faster than me, and I must come back to appreciate the struggle of swimming in their world, that the days spent under starry skies and with good friends are some of my best of the year.

sroking

The morning started badly; the catamaran that we booked for our race wasn't at the pickup point. Our group of six swimmers for the Maui Channel Swim Relay waited at dawn on Kaanpali beach as our leader frantically dialed to find out about the boat.

"Dude," the catamaran captain began in a sun bleached tone on the phone, "I am so sorry. The fuel line popped. The boat won't be able to make it."

Sorry wasn't really the word we wanted to hear after marking our calendars, spending the money to fly, renting the cars to travel, and waking far too early. Sorry wasn't going to stay next to us as we alternated swimmers into the water for the several miles of open water between the islands of Lanai and Maui. Sorry wasn't going carry our food and sun tanning lotion. Sorry wasn't going to get us to the swim start. At least he was kind enough to soften the blow with a "Dude."

The first great skill you need for endurance sports is a solid aerobic base. This is the glue that you acquire from months of consistent training. But only second to this base is the ability to rally. Our team leader earned his keep when he said "I have a possible backup boat." Now I am huge believer of bringing back up gear to a race - a few extra hammer gels are always a good idea, and second set of goggles is pretty handy. But a back up boat is pretty huge.

Another team on the beach lent us their zodiac to travel a mile out towards the drifting catamaran, which let us fetch our food and what was apparently an overnight visiting blond. Our sea captain had mentioned to us about how great his ships stereo system was and about how he loved learning about humpback whales in his time spent at some capacity at Sea World. As much as that worked for getting us to book a day trip with him, it was even better at the Rusty Harpoon bar. When the zodiac returned from the catamaran, she jumped on shore and rushed to the parking lot mumbling "I have to catch my flight." Our ex-captain was going to miss our fees, but his weekend wasn't entirely unlucky.

Our leader found a cell number given out at the night before race meeting and woke up our possible new skipper. Like the maritime version of the Wolf from Pulp Fiction the new captain said he would be at the dock in twenty minutes. He was a sailor's sailor - his scraggly white beard puffed out in splotches from his sun burnt face. He was only an "arrgh" away from being an actual pirate. I am sure he shits seaweed.

We rushed down to Lahaina to see our new craft that was, in a word, cozy. But since our new requirements for a boat had been reduced to "operating" we took it.

"The boat only holds six people" our skipper barked. The girlfriend of one of the swimmers wasn't going to be able to go, and we debated whether or not a case of beer counted as passenger. This turned out a rather optimistic sense of the day.

A couple of us had done the race the year before and we felt we were experts the same way that sophomores think that they are better than freshmen because they have figured out their acne medicine. Last year we finished the race at 4:18 roughly two hours after the first beer was poured. This year we approached the race with the same casual attitude spending more time thinking our team name "Keep Stroking Sweetie" then actually spellchecking our flag. We forgot the "T" in "stroking" to make the new word "sroking." If we had done this race for a charity, then we should have picked literacy.

After loading the beer and way behind schedule we rushed out of the harbor towards Lanai. We hit our first bit of chop almost immediately, and as we headed towards the starting line the waves steadily increased to the point the boat would surf down their fronts and then make a quick turn to avoid the bow dipping into the sea. We would have to swim back against this water.

The first person puked just after the boat reached the starting line. The third swimmer lost most of the Bad Ass coffee she drank that morning off of the stern while our queasy second swimmer hung out near the bow. We talked about changing the order of our racers, but decided that it would be the best if they got into the water as soon as possible.

The gun went off and our team of bad spellers started against the ex-Olympians, assorted Australians, and whoever else was foolish enough to go out in this weather. As the pack of swimmers made there way through the boats that would parallel them for the race, we realized that our best swimmer was towards the back. We were only going to drop further as the race continued.

Our first swimmer returned to the boat and moaned a simple "ugh". The second swimmer did indeed do better in the water than the boat, but the third swimmer puked both halfway through her first leg and then shortly after returning and hustling up to bow. I was the fifth leg and I quickly realized the issue of swimming in waves bigger than our boat.

This was going to be more like boxing than swimming.

During the 30 minutes of my first leg and in between those moments where I foolishly tried to breath on the left side only to receive a mouthful of water I was able to breakdown the sea into two classifications: the swells and the chop.

The swells were the determined but steady ushers of the ocean. The secret was to let these mountains of water decide when to look out in front to figure out at where to aim at West Maui. They weren't gentle anymore than say riding an elephant would be, but they weren't overly mean.

The chop was when you swore. They slapped, pushed, and at one time knocked my goggles off. The chop was nasty.

We each finished our thirty minute legs and then started to do 10 minute rotations. Of all of the bravery I have seen during any race, the deepest rally I have ever witnessed was our third swimmer who vomited after each of her legs and still returned to the water. Next year I think we should get a sponsorship from Dramamine.

I think it was my second leg, but who knows it could have been my fourth, when I got my first sea hallucination. Later on shore my fellow swimmers all said that they too saw things in the water which were most likely patches of foam off of white caps, shadows from waves, or specks on goggles. Still there couldn't help be an uneasy feeling for those who forgot to do TV parental block for the Discovery Channel's shark week. The race has a little bit of a reputation for hungry spectators.

We did our best through the rotations. We dropped off a swimmer shortly before the end of each turn who would wait until the swimmer finishing the rotation would tag them. The exhausted finishing swimmer would somehow limp back to boat which always seemed to be twice as far as the distance covered in the rotation.

We passed the five hour mark and still were enough far away that we could not see the small craft advisory warnings that flapped along the coast of Maui. We went to six hours, and then to seven.

There is an abbreviation that to describe races days like these, those hard days of bad weather when the temperature is over 100 during a triathlon or that is snowing for a 50k ski race: GFU, generally fucked up. They are a part of any endurance career. The trick is to realize early that it is going to be a longer day and slow down. There are races you rush for time, but on days of GFU you go just to say you finished. (And when diving into nasty water helps to say "you can finish" just to get you to go.)

With tired shoulders and empty stomachs we rallied.

Somehow we finished and barely had time to shower before heading to the quiet victory banquet. We weren't the only ones battered, but we were in awe of the 17 swimmers who soloed the entire channel. The first female swimmer napped during the awards. No one was moving fast.

After a victory mai tai we, too, went to sleep and waited the next day to go to our catamaran captain and return the cooler that we grabbed at dawn with our unused beer. He paddled from his catamaran in his dingy. This time he had a brunette. She stumbled out of the boat, rushed bowlegged to her jeep, and burnt rubber away from him. Without losing a beat he asked how our race went.

Some of our teammates filled him in on the trip. They talked about the waves and the sea sickness. They talked about the sun and the long looks at the horizon. They talked how the ground kept feeling like it bobbed during meals and ultimately the pleasure of being able to wear the race t-shirt.

"Dude," he replied. "I totally had some ginseng that would have helped."

I don't know if our race over time will wander into a legend, whether is room for another shanty at the Rusty Harpoon. A veteran of 22 channel races said this was the toughest he has done so it has the outside possibility. But what I would like to wish for is that there is an evening in a small seaside bar when a sailor mentions the time he met a few swimmers who braved the roughest of seas. I hope there is a small little pause as he wonders what it would have been like to been out there before he looks up at a daiquiri saturated redhead and tells her how great is to listen to sounds of humpback whales over a brand new stereo system.

Maui Channel 2005

We arrived at the Mala boat ramp sufficiently after sunrise that the sky had been bleached to a faded jean color, that half of other vessels had already started to load the bundles of food, sunscreen, and beer while the gentle waves pushed the ships up and down, and that the others still waiting for their turn huddled in tight packs of matching t-shirts, laughed nervously, and glanced quickly away to guess the conditions further out to sea. We were organized by a long chain of email that tried to anticipate what could go wrong and what we would need – the car rental, the place to stay, the air flights, the team name, the boat – that all started from a single thread, the note that was sent to twenty people that asked if anyone was interested in forming a six person relay team to swim the Maui Channel. The lucky ones replied.

John Donne said that, "No man is an island," but I believe that nothing is more human that to swim between them. It is our need for epic journey, to continue that travel that started across the grasslands of Africa and sent us into space - to reach sometimes further than we believe is possible. (In the case of swimming after the reach you are supposed to pull as you rotate.)

Our group was not only veteran swimmers, but each also had other superpowers. If we were comic characters we would be labeled like the Coach, the Captain, the Bartender, the House, the Driver, and the Mistress of Tunes. Our team name written on the make shift dolphin towel turned flag that we hung from the top of our boat was "Where the @#$% is the Kaanpali beach hotel," the finish line of the race and the location of the victory buffet.

Our name was also our mantra and a more reassuring phrase than what we heard when coming in from the airport. In the ample camaraderie that would define the weekend, a leathery fellow swimmer gave a ride to a couple of us from the airport. He had soloed the Maui channel the year before. Deeply impressed I asked him if he had ever gone further and he said that he had done the English Channel this year but that was nowhere near as hard as the Maui Channel. Nowhere near

This, the all time pre-race psych-out comment, scared me deeply as we motored over to race start on the island of Lanai. As we reached a tiny cove the Driver, a swimmer turned triathlete, jumped off the boat, headed to the beach to join the other teams' best swimmers, and tried not to be intimidated when the conversations on the starting line were about the Olympic trials. Doubly Irish her snowy skin was drenched in the most potent sunscreen manufactured on earth. Wearing a pink cap so we could easily see her among the heavy shoulder masses, she launched when the red starting flag was dropped. We saw her as she went through small flotilla that came for the race.

Next up was the Mistress of Tunes, the one who could not only navigate the deep waters but also equally important Ipod playlists. She was half Dominican and shrieked with joy when she saw a solo crossing by a fellow Dominican - the best part of trip because despite some assistance with medication she still had a hard time with seasickness. In fact the largest difficulty of the day wasn't the feared tiger sharks or jellyfish, but how to keep a stomach happy in a rolling sea. The chop was easier to deal while swimming in the waves than hanging on the rail of the boat, and she would often plunge in to give her digestive system a rest. With long powerful strokes she cruised through her half hour leg.

I, the least experienced swimmer, was next. The second thought that came to me (just after "I can't believe I am this far off shore") was how blue this sea was. That might sound cliché, but one of the things that I have learned from traveling for swims is how varied the palette of the ocean is. The San Francisco Bay always seems like a murky green while Cape Cod is a medium blue, and the Caribbean is almost azure. This sea had a darker blue, the kind of shade that football teams pick to increase their toughness, but with an endless clarity that only most pricey of gemstones have. The water temperature was a delightful warm just a couple of notches down from too hot but in that range where you could be comfortable either resting or cruising. With the exception of the waters around Capri, this might have been the most perfect place to swim that I have been, and I was lucky to get the leg that had least amount of chop.

After me was the Coach. She has the physique that only comes after multiple ironmans and was the only one to have done the race before. Some of her old teammates from her first race were back on a different, faster team. Fifteen-year veterans they had booked a luxurious catamaran, the Shangri-La, as their guide boat, but they still overcompensated the southern swells by going too far to the right. Those of us in the first few legs could site our swim direction off of the mast of the Shangri-La. It was the perfect metaphor that we would spend the day chasing paradise just further up the horizon.

Our team captain who had done a great job of organizing was the first one to ignore the Shangri-la and aimed off course up to Kapalula. He is a pilot by profession, and I would imagine quite used to planning his own route through life. The gang on the boat waved to him, and he corrected his course toward the two white matching hotels on the Kaanapali shore.

Our final swimmer was strong enough in the water that the Corona that she had before going into the water hardly fazed her. She has an infectious disposition, an aquatic Falstaff, that, well, would make the Jolly Rogers, jolly. She clicked with our boat captain who at one point of time must have been a great swimmer, but whose lifestyle on the island with poi, surf and rum, can kindly be said, has made him now a much better floater. He had the perfect name, Marco, for someone just coming out of the water disoriented, stocked the boat with tasty sashimi and mountain dew, and cut a pineapple so that it looked like a boat.

By two thirds of the way through the waves most of us were nursing our first corona and for the next round of ten-minute legs we thought this must be the easiest Maui channel crossing ever done. Distance swimming, like all endurance sports, has long stretches of loneliness. Sometimes in order to go far you must go alone.

But the brilliance of a relay team is that you can get a group together for a weekend and enjoy such wonders like watching shooting stars with a bottle chardonnay on a tennis court or seeing turtles bob up and down in a sunset soaked surf, that even as one person must be struggling against a sea it still left five in the boat to relax, and that there will be a group that you can always reminisce about the time you decided to swim between tropical volcanic islands.

Almost halfway through the third rotation, we realized that the Mistress of Tunes was the one who was going to reach shore on her leg. As soon as she got past the final swim buoys, we hopped in the water to join her for the last stretch that was protected by the black rock snorkeling area. We stroked and breathed the last hundred yards together and knew that we could be heroes, just for one day.

Almost There

You can find yourself in deep, cold waters. Your face and hands are long ago numb, and your arms feel heavy. The tide pulls you sideways, and shore seems far away.

When the waves bounce you, you can sometimes see your home. Not your house. Your city. From the grey Embarcadero buildings to the red television tower you see the sourdough city melt into pointillist dots. There are splotches of green for parks, and you can make out the mission style roof of Fort Point. It is early morning, and the stillness of San Francisco contrasts against the Bay's anger.

Somewhere ahead is the ferry that had brought you to next to Alcatraz. Earlier, you walked barefoot with the rest of your pack of swimmers over cobblestones along Fisherman’s Wharf to get to the Blue and Gold pier. Two homeless guys, perhaps sober but still hungry, looked at this parade of neoprene as it wandered by Hooters. The girls there don’t wear anything as anatomically revealing as your wetsuit and still get much better tips. You tried your best not to look at your fellow well toned competition, but are left with the small hope that you will float far better than they will.

You boarded the boat and took a seat next to a grey haired husband and wife team from Seattle with shoulders the size of Mount Rainer. They casually mention how they swim in the much colder Washington waters. At the table across the aisle, a daughter with her swim cap already on twitched next to her father who stared out the window. There was a snack bar towards the stern, but no one bought anything. Finally the ship stopped, the doors opened, and the crowd started chanting “Go, go, go …” Pair by pair the swimmers launched out into bay and dipped well below the wake of the ferry. That was a half hour ago.

Your head is underwater again. You blow bubbles out your mouth even though your Russian swim instructor had barked at you to breath through your nose. You don’t understand most of what he says anyway, but he is at the YMCA every morning at 5:45 with a crew cut and red lifeguard shirt to shout at whomever paid the twenty-dollar masters fee “grab beach ball.” His daughter is sometimes there in the faster lane. You hope she can translate, but she is already starting her second set of pulling for one hundred yards. Beach balls will remain a mystery.

The Russian lets you wear fins so that you can keep up with the rest of the class. You are a genius with a kickboard for no particular reason. Everyone should get one athletic gift in life – like the tall, thin kid with bad acne and Motley Crue t-shirt from summer camp who was a master at foosball. He owned the machine in the Rec Center and only stopped to munch on the microwave bake bean burritos. You hope that for the Beijing Olympics they will have foosball as an exhibition sport and you will see him still thin but with better skin taking on the best from Australia. Everybody you knew growing up was going to be famous. You haven’t heard from most of them since.

You take a breath on the other side.

Swimming is repetition. Three strokes for each breath. Eighteen strokes for a length. Two lengths for a lap. Thirty-two laps for a mile. After a while you lose count. Perhaps it is lack of the oxygen or maybe you have your stroke number confused with your lap count, but you find yourself in a mathematical uncertainty, an aquatic déjà vu of thinking that you have already done this lap. It feels like the one you just did and the one you know you will do, but it lacks the formality of a name. Am I on twenty-one or twenty-two? You can check your watch to for the amount of time you have been swimming and estimate how many laps you should have done. But this requires math and you don't have enough oxygen for that.

This numeric uncertainty follows you. You used to laugh off still writing checks with the prior year in February, but there are times now when you forget your own age. You get used to using phrases like mid thirties. You have migrated from a specific to a demographic – a slightly less influential range but with more disposable income. Singers now wear things that you would not dare to try and everyone on American Idol looks too young. You realize that if you were on Survivor that you have crossed over from the young person camp to the "tag along" tribe and that your only hope for them to keep you around is your superior fishing skills because you learned how to swim from the crew cut Russian.

You have friends now who are been divorced and others have been to cardiologists. That belief that somehow you weren't going to make the same mistakes as your parents, that your love was different in way that they could never understand, that there wasn't going to be those compromises of keeping a job to make a mortgage - these things all have slowly faded like the soccer intramural runner up shirt that you won in college and you realize that your parents must have thrown out their own mementos from that time long ago.

Years blur. What happened in 1998? Did we know about Monica then? Had you started working at a start up or had you left one with a mound of empty options? Who got married that year? Did you have a summer vacation? Did you listen to Hansen? Are they now too old for American Idol?

You don't smell the ocean as much as you taste it. The salt water drains around your teeth and pushes against your tongue. It is a siren's kiss - sloppy and urgent. The restorative mocha after the swim will taste exceptionally sweet, and you hope that it will come soon.

In the fall there is a race called Swim of the Centurions that is run by a smallish leathery Chilean man named Pedro. He is of the sea, having been one of the first to do this swim a hundred times. Sometimes he goes out and back from the shore and every Thursday he holds a swim clinic. Swimming is repetition.

But it is also about diving in. You must take risks. Little gambles check to see if you are alive. You buy a lottery ticket when you get a bus pass in the hopes that there a few magic numbers that could change everything. You sometimes dare to get the mocha without non-fat milk. Life sometimes needs the cream.

When asked for advice about entering the chilly bay for the first time, Pedro will tell you in a slight accent "Just go for it." While it might just be a variation on a shoe company logo, you need to hear it. You can't always just wade into the water and hope that somehow it going to turn pleasant and warm. The water stings the blood vessels in your feet for five minutes and then you will feel nothing.

Forget about blowing bubbles. Forget about insurance companies. Forget about the sharks. Forget about worrying if you were invited to the right birthday party. Forget about the runoff of the dirt of the city into the bay. Forget about a writing assignment that isn't really working. Forget about the people from Seattle, the crew cut Russian, and Pedro.

Just go for it.

The shore is getting closer. One of the guides in a kayak comes over to you and suggests that you aim a little to the right. You see patches of splashes ahead. Small groups of swimmers are drafting off of each other and the opening into your landing harbor, Aquatic Park, is visible up ahead.

Swimming from Alcatraz is the easiest hard thing you can do. Marathons are much harder. Relationships are harder. Figuring out what your boss actually wants you to do is harder. But you will get a t-shirt if you finish Alcatraz and maybe that can replace the one from college.

It is hard enough that your friends will think you are nuts except for the ones who also do triathlons. Your family will wonder why you can't take up something a little safer like bowling. Tourists will come up to you afterwards and ask questions like "Isn't it really cold?"

“Yes,” you will tell them. “It is.”

You think you are close enough that you can stand and you drop your legs into the nothingness. You can see the race clock ahead and hear the announcer slowly call off the contestants as they stride onto the sand. You are past the last section of moored boats and the buoys that mark the swim area. You are almost there.

Tomales Bay

The town of Inverness has been around for some time, and while the trans-bay swim does not have the 98-year history of the Fourth of July road races after 28 years it has its own traditions. There is a pancake committee that creates post swim hotcakes, and the kayak escort will give you a swig of tea during the swim.

Everyone seems to know each other's first name. My mom, who invited me, was invited by her friend Nancy Jo. It was in general an earthy crowd.
Inverness did not have the traditional immigrant waves like the rest of the country, but was settled by Czechs, hippies, bikers, and John Carpenter - horror movie director. The fashion was less from Paris more of an Advance Studies in Pottery Class mode. The group looked like it could be quite happy bird watching.

There was a range of swimmers from nouveau dog paddlers to a guy who qualified for the Hawaiian Ironman. Having far more swimming gear than actual technique, I put on a full wet suit, body glide, and swim cap. I began to think that I might be over dressed for the 70-degree water, and looking around I notice a few who had a different view of their bodies.

Freedom, baby, freedom.

Apparently there was another tradition besides the pancake breakfast. A woman a few feet over from me completely shed her clothes while remarking, "I guess I forgot my suit." By the looks of things she was more Woodstock than Burning Man. A couple others joined her by going topless. Maybe it really was closer to Paris after all.

I do have to say on that list of things for which I am truly grateful, somewhere near the apartment with a hot tub and that I still have all of my teeth, is the fact that my mom and her good friends decided to wear their suits. There is only so much family history I want to know. Even now I shudder.

The nudists did go to the front of the group picture - important to keep a memento for the yearbook.

The shots were taken and we headed out across the bay. The dangers are more legendary than real - the bay is on top of the San Andreas Fault line and great white sharks breed at the northern most part, but the difficulties are more with mud and sea grass. The distance lies the vague small town scale where the fish that got away was always a yard long - the route was claimed to be a mile and a quarter but was most likely less than a mile round trip. The day had flat water, sunny skies, and the swim was soon over.

No one has ever asked me to be a godfather (I think my friends expect me to give no more guidance than "pull my finger"); I have not had a close seat at a baptism in a while. And while the event did not have a religious slant, there is something more than just exercise when a town goes down to the sea. Places have their traditions whether they are pagan or brought to you by greeting card companies. Perhaps it is that realization that when you are swimming across tectonic plates it is better to do it in the company of neighbors than to struggle at it alone.

Alcatraz

I think I need to hang out with larger people. Spending time with the 5% body fat tri-athletes makes it tough to feel fit. I don't consider myself large. I am more like my nine-year-old Nissan Altima - a bit round the middle, low maintenance, surprising oomph, and with a few dings from misjudging distances. It just looks a little out of place in a marina parking lot full of Audis.

The journey from Alcatraz isn't as much of swimsuit contest as a wetsuit one. The sun hadn't yet risen by the time we had donned our O'Neil armor and headed over to the ferries. We must have looked like a pack of seals as we trotted over the same ground that tourists and mimes would wander later that day. The stores of fisherman's wharf sell the usual drek of personalize license plate key chains, and t-shirts that say "I escaped from the Rock." It is, however, far better to earn one.

We boarded the ship and headed across the sea. There was a Viking mystic to the voyage except our vessel had a snack bar. Little groups of friends huddled around the small tables, and talked nervously as the boat rocked in the waves.

A woman's blurred over the load speaker. "With the tides going out you are going to want to aim 200 yards to the left of the white Aquatic Park building." Nice to know that the ocean is taking you to China.

We rushed to the side of the ferry, and I came to the conclusion that pretty much all of the buildings along the shore looked white clustered around patches of park. We when close enough we were to mark according the three tall masts of a ship. Plan B was to follow the swimmer in front of me - navigation lemming style.

The doors of the ferry opened and the crowd started chanting "Go, go, go ..." Pair by pair the swimmers launched out into bay and dipped well below the wake of the ferry. I took one last look around and realized that I was the best-insulated one of the group. It was time to jump, and I flung myself out the door. The water wasn't that cold or at least not that unexpected in the way that the showers are at summer camp.

I paddled towards the starting line marked by kayaks. The horn blew and the pack splashed towards the city of hippies, sour dough bread, and ex dot comers.

There is a soothing rhythm to swimming and the waves did their best to interrupt me like techno music during a yoga class. At 40 minutes out, I wasn't that close to shore and began to wonder about that "misjudging distance" thing.

Eventually I pulled myself out of the sea, landed on the time pad at Aquatic Park, and handed my ankle bracelet to the next person in our relay team. Time for a well earned mocha.

Heavily caffeinated, I made it to the second transition area to cheer my relay bike and run partners. A few women I knew from team and training were hanging out near the finish line. They were doing their best at a separate event - the 30-yard oogle.

"It something about guys doing triathalons."

"I can't believe he is going to do the run with his shirt off."

"He kind of looks like Jesus in a Speedo." I had to comment that the trip from Alcatraz would be a great deal easier if you were allowed to run on top of the water. But that was lost in the testosterone appreciation.

I spent most of the time hanging out with the boyfriend of the running relay partner. He is a nice guy, and has sort of a John Corbet from "Sex in the City" quality. His girl friend had the tough sand ladder part, which I was very happy to out source. She had a great run certainly compared to my badly aimed swim and the gear problems that happened during the bike up Baker Beach hill.

Eventually our team finished and the girls wandered off to meet up with Jesus in a Speedo. There is no way I can compete with that any more that I run with someone who is a sub 3 hour marathon time. I need the larger Americans found at fast food restaurants and amusement parks. Ask me where I am going next. I say I am headed to Disneyland.