Wild Swimming
On the same day that the US coronavirus death toll hit 100,000, I watched a mother duck with her ducklings and a group of swimmers in wetsuits share the early morning water at Emigrant Lake, five miles southeast of Ashland. The dis-ease that greets me each morning now gave way to the coo of mourning doves, the warm conversations of the swimmers, and the staggering sunlight.
I’d come to the lake at the invitation of a neighbor, a 73-year-old master swimmer who belongs to a community of athletes, Rogue Valley Masters, for whom the fitness and camaraderie of swimming means the world. When COVID closed the town pool, the group headed to the 1.2 square mile Emigrant Lake for their sunrise workouts, arriving before the boaters broke the calm.
Standing with me on the shore was a father who had driven his teenage daughter, a rising swimmer, 20 miles to join the morning ritual.
“Did you know that in lakes and oceans and rivers across the world, there are people wild swimming right now?” he asked me. I didn’t.
I had heard the term open water swimming, but wild swimming (the title of a recent book) seemed a better fit for my land-locked mind.
“You should go talk to them,” the man said. I did.
Motivators
“I always leave the lake with a smile on my face that lasts all day,” Meghan Hays, one of the swimmers I saw that morning, told me later.
She saluted the same duck parade I had seen, the solitude of the setting paired with the friendship of her swimming partners, the welcome exertion that comes with stroking and breathing her way across the water.
Still, it is the rigors of big swims—across ocean channels, lakes, rivers, and more—that entice her body and mind and those of her compatriots, many of whom have swum for as long as they can remember, through high school, college, and on the triathlon circuit.
Here on the west coast (and Hawaii), the opportunities for open water and long-distance swims abound. The one-and-a-half-mile swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco may be the best-known, attempted by thousands every year. Here, the challenge is the tumultuous tide, as the Pacific Ocean forces itself in and out of a gap a mile wide, under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the bay, churning sand and sediment and slashing visibility. “The bay is always different, every single day,” one veteran swimmer says. “You swim Alcatraz, it can be the best day of your life—or the worst.”
Lake Tahoe, straddling the border of California and Nevada at 6,225 feet, presents a pinnacle of alpine marathon swimming. Some swim the width, 12 miles, and call it a day. The intrepid swim the length: 21.3 miles of fresh water, stars, mountain air, sunset and sunrise. (The distance across the English Channel is a shy shorter at 21 miles.) They ease into the unforgivingly cold water in the middle of the night and emerge 10 to 20 hours later. “Train for the worst and hope for the best!” warns swimtahoe.com, with lake conditions ranging from flat and glassy to white caps and chop.
The Maui Channel Swim, a 10-mile timed relay race between Lanai and Maui, brings together six-member teams grouped by age and sex. At the start of the race, each swimmer swims half-hour legs until all team members have raced. Then each swimmer swims a 10-minute leg until they cross the finish line. The fastest teams finish in three to four hours, the slowest in eight (when the race is called). Jelly fish and sharks can complicate the swim.
It was in Maui that Meghan Hays fell in love with wild swimming.
Posture, pull, drive, and glide
The popular Outside magazine has a beginner’s guide to open-water swimming: build your endurance, perfect alternate breathing, vary your stroke, practice sighting (for landmarks to keep on course), and learn to relax (essential for cold water swimming).
Shannon Keegan, master swimmer and owner of the local Intrepid Waters (which also provides virtual swimming instruction around the world) has a different approach. Her starting point is efficiency, which begins with learning to float with minimum effort.
Then come her four pillars: posture, pull, drive, and glide. Shannon explains:
We want to work with the water. It starts with good posture, staying on top of the water instead of dragging our body through it. In the pull, our goal is to push the water behind, as much and as soon as we can. Drive (often referred to as rotation) means forcefully driving your hip forward. Glide is the sweet spot between finishing one stroke and starting the next.
Jocelyn Sanford, a local water polo enthusiast, adds this open-water swimming rule: “Know the people you are swimming with and the water you are swimming in.”
Where the mind goes
“I’ve been swimming for so long that it’s second nature,” Jocelyn says. She may start focusing on her stroke, move to a song on her mind, then catch a bird flying by over her shoulder as she turns her head.
Todd Lantry, who has been navigating open waters since 2003 and coaches swimming at the local high school, calls open water swimming a moving meditation.
I like to focus on the moment: where am I going, my navigation, what’s this stroke doing, what’s that stroke doing. Then I will breathe and see things on my side. Oh, there’s a blue heron, there’s an osprey. Some people start singing to themselves, others plan their breakfast. For me, it’s important to be there for the swim, to settle into the motions until the swim is over.
For Meghan, long distance swimming invokes mind over body.
If you’re not comfortable in the water or doing a long distance, you’ll experience pain in a lot of places. Or maybe you’re just having a bad day. You’ll cramp, your back and shoulders will get tired and hurt, you’ll feel faint from dehydration. But you work past it, reconnecting with your breathing and form as much as you can. It’s worth every stroke.
Swimming for Shakespeare
Recent studies of extreme-sports athletes debunk the idea that they are irresponsible or addicted to a quick hit of adrenaline. Instead, as Alex Honbold, the world’s most unflappable solo climber, explains: “I’m searching more for that feeling of having done something well and being deeply content. It’s personal.”
One of the swimmers I met at Emigrant Lake was Sarah Eismann, who, I learned, swam before she walked, trained as a triathlete, earned a graduate degree in theater, and fell in love with Shakespeare. Two years ago, she was hired by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and moved from New York City to Ashland, where she discovered the wonder and challenge of wild swimming.
On her 39th birthday, she decided to set her sights on a huge open water swim for her 40th. She launched a year-long campaign which she called “Swimming for Shakespeare,” hoping to raise awareness and money for groups that used Shakespeare to “make the world a better place.”
She swam the width of Lake Tahoe, then Alcatraz. A month later she swam the Maui Channel, solo. Always petrified of swimming where she can’t see the bottom, she kept her eyes closed for the entire 9.5 miles.
“It was a summer of personal reckoning,” Sarah remembers.
Nine months later, on her 40th birthday, she circumnavigated Bermuda—the third person in the world to do so.
It was 31 hours and 28 minutes of continuous swimming. The first hour was the worst mentally, my mind went everywhere and nowhere. I kept trying to bring myself back to my breathing.
Eventually, my mind slowed, like a mindful tuning out. I sang “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes” until I lost count. Mantras filled my head, encouraging me to be patient, to swim with the hardships rather than against them.
It was amazing and terrifying. Some of my favorite swims have been the ones that challenged me the most.
Blessings
One of the biggest pulls for these intrepid swimmers is not the solitude but the friendships.
Matt Miller, who grew up exploring creeks in rural Missouri, says that the relationships he has formed swimming lakes and oceans in the west have lasted as long as the distances he has swum.
“It’s hard to explain to non-water people,” Meghan Hays says. “There’s a camaraderie, a family feeling. We swim alone, but together. We cry together and laugh together. The love of water, the challenges, they make us one.”
Used to years of training against the clock and critiquing their performance, these competitive athletes also treasure the release from the pressures of measuring up—and the pleasures of surrendering to the moment.
“With open water, you can’t compare one swim to the next, even if the venue is the same,” Todd Lantry explains. “You might have wind, or the buoys are different, or your destination is different. It’s about this swim right now and not all the swims you did before or how you’re going to improve your time or how you’ll beat your opponents. Instead of thinking, ‘Okay, I have to do everything just right’ it’s, ‘Let’s go for a swim and see how it goes.’
Swimming with wildlife is another blessing. Here at Emigrant Lake, nestled in hills below the Siskiyou Mountains, osprey circle the sky, then plummet for fish. Majestic blue herons scan for prey and wade belly deep. A resident bald eagle sits in a Douglas Fir. Geese and ducks abound, along with swallows that fly low overhead, drinking or picking up bugs on the water’s surface.
One day Todd Landry spied a bear swimming across the lake. Two days ago, Meghan saw a bobcat chasing a fawn until the mama dear intervened and chased the bobcat up tree.
In the end, though, what these wild swimmers talk about most is the feeling of empowerment that come from doing something that seems unmanageable, if not unimaginable. They are not fearless—Sarah Eismann had panic attacks when she couldn’t see the bottom—but they are determined to wrest their fears.
“You realize that you can tackle anything if you just for break it down into digestible pieces,” Shannon Keegan says. “Next thing you know, you’ve done something remarkable… and you can carry that with you for the rest of your life. ‘I can do that!’ you say to yourself. It builds confidence.”
Shannon also talks about the authenticity she feels when swimming wild: There you are in just your swimsuit, stripped of makeup in every sense of the word. There’s no pretense, especially in marathon swimming, only essence. That realness means the world to me, it is important in everything I do.
Over Independence weekend, a handful of Rogue Valley Masters took advantage of a full moon for a dip and swim in Emigrant Lake. They watched Jupiter and Saturn rise, then the moon.
For a moment, the world seemed just right.
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