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September gets its revenge

I suppose it would be greedy of me to expect every race this month to go off perfectly. This morning was my third race in four weeks, the Treasure Island to YMCA swim in the SF Bay. I did the inaugural version of this race two years ago and now I remember why I didn't repeat it last year. It pretty much sucked.

That's not totally fair to the folks who worked very hard to put on this race. They did everything just right. Really, only the tides sucked. And my experience was bad for a couple of reasons.

It was a gorgeous day. The chop on the water was minimal. The water wasn't even too cold, especially compared to my two recent swims down in Santa Cruz. But only a few minutes into the swim, which I thought I was navigating perfectly, a police boat pulled alongside me and a few other swimmers and told us we were separated from the group and had to veer way left. We had gotten pulled too far to the right by a channel of ebbing tide. Ah, crap. Wasted effort.

Then, as I was sighting, I touched something or someone in the water. It was not another swimmer. Every time I swim in the Bay, there's an underlying... not exactly fear... but knowledge that there are many creatures in the water that are sometimes curious about human swimmers. We even saw a couple of sea lions frolicking in the water right before the swim as we boarded the ferry boat that took us to the start.

I have no idea what I hit, but it was solid (the jab from my hand did not push it away) and a little squishy-feeling and warm (as in warm-blooded). My imagination may be going wild, but it actually felt like I jammed my hand right into some animal's mouth. (Or if you've read Lynne Cox's Swimming to Antarctica, this made me think about her Nile swim... ew.) I didn't see it because my head was above water at that very second. (Even if my face had been down, the visibility in that water is less than the length of my arm.) There were no other swimmers around me. I did not panic exactly, but my heart rate soared as I quickly withdrew my hand and swam sideways to get around whatever was between me and the finish line.

My swim went precipitously downhill from there. My spiked heart rate quickly led to what felt like an asthma attack, which led to wheezing and coughing, and I felt like I had fluid in my lungs. Bad news all around. I wanted to get the hell out of the water, but I also did not want to arrive on shore in a rescue boat.

But the harder I swam, the longer I felt like I was going nowhere. The Bay currents are tricky and it's easy to get caught in a narrow band of a fast-moving current and basically swim standing still. I was making progress; it was just very slow. That damn balloon arch at the finish just would not get closer.

And then, suddenly, I was freed of the current and actually got caught in an eddy that carried me right to the finish. We were supposed to be able to swim onto some concrete steps, but the tide was so low it was below the lowest step, so I heaved myself onto the carpet-covered concrete like a whale beaching itself.

I found my friends and was relieved to hear that everyone had had a rough swim, not just me. I was disappointed with my time and my placing, given how well I've ranked in triathlon swims this year. But overall I guess I did fine. I was not among the swimmers who got so far off course that the rescue boats "relocated" them to a better spot out of the current. I guess that's worth something.

Now, looking at the results, I can see that I didn't do as badly as I thought when I got out of the water -- at the time it felt like I was nearly last. I was 84th out of 162 in the wetsuit division, 11th out of 21 in my age group. Pretty solidly in the middle.

A very nice thing about this race is that it finishes across the street from my home Y, where hot showers and a sauna awaited us, so we padded over there barefoot, a parade of wetsuited swimmers with algae-smeared faces holding up Embarcadero traffic. I've always said there's nothing like the shower that follows a hard workout, but this one was especially delicious.

September 30, 2007 10:31 PM