The big swim

A month or two back a few friends and I decided to do an oceanswim – partly as a challenge that we all agreed to and were therefore more likely to follow through on, partly as a “let’s pick somewhere nice to go for a swim” thing. None of us are competitive, it’s just swimming up and down a pool gets a bit boring but we’re also a bit chicken about swimming far in the ocean unless it’s well manned by lifesavers – so an organized event like an ocean swim is pretty much the only way to go (if you don’t live near the beach), and it raises money for the local SLSC at the same time.

So we picked the Coogee Wedding Cake island challenge. The swim was either 2.4km or 1km – the latter is too short, so I settled on the 2.4 km swim and proceeded to not think about it too much so I wouldn’t woos* out.

So Sunday morning rolls around…
- By 8:30am: 2 friends have pulled out (one sick but still offering to drive me there and mind my bag, the other opting for the 1km option). That just left me doing the swim.
- By 10am: I lost my goggles when I got dumped by a wave whilst warming up. This was a bad omen, but my friend had a spare old pair she offered to lend me.

So there I was, “warming up” in the rather cold November Tasman Sea, thinking, “I’m not sure this feels right”…. A mostly pool swimmer, I’d forgotten how hard it was to swim in the swell in unheated water!! I had a headache (not sure if it was due to not having coffee that morning for the first time in a while, or if I was coming down with something…), I was unusually thirsty, I had no friend to hold my hand, and the island I had to swim around looked a long way out…

At the last minute I met someone through my friend, and we walked up to the start line together and made “just having met” chit chat, which helped ease the butterflies quite a bit. Then suddenly my cohort of similarly aged swimmers (some very buff and brown and fit looking) was up at the start line, ready to have blanks fired out of a gun by a newly-in-government Peter Garrett, to make us run like startled sheep to the water!!

Off we went! The start is a flurry of kicking feet, waves, trying to find a patch of ocean on your own to swim in, and trying to catch sight of the buoys ahead of you whilst getting into a swimming rhythm in a body of water that won’t be still. After about 400m I felt settled down a bit, and started to enjoy it. The course is basically out to sea, around and island and back again, and I got to the island ok. The water was cool, but the sun was nice and warm on my back. Then the sea got a bit rough, and I actually felt a bit sea sick. Tried to ignore it – what else could I do but swim back?

By the return journey, the field had thinned quite a bit, so you didn’t have to worry about other swimmers so much. But each time you looked up to see where the next buoy was, you were taunted by a far off vision of the Coogee foreshore – was I really that far out? I kept trying to repress the sea sick feeling, tried to ignore the fact that I’d stopped having fun and wanted to just float for a bit, and kept going. Finally, I reached the last buoy, and suddenly, the bottom of the ocean was only a few feel below, the water was warm, and the waves - with a bit of careful timing – carried you into shore (despite my tiredness, I managed to not get dumped). I made it out of the water, made an effort to run like my co-swimmers (although I really couldn’t be arsed), and stumbled through the finish line, which quite strangely had the words “START” above it.

I felt a bit ill and cold for an hour or so after, and was mindful of the memory of my brother going in a Triathlon as a kid and vomiting afterwards from the effort of it. But after I’d sat in a hot car on the ride home, then eaten a bowl of stodgey vege risotto I’d made the day before, I felt much better. Then I had a bath, relaxed for a bit, and it sank in that I’d actually completed something quite hard, and had kept going despite wanting to stop.

I think I’d like to do more ocean swims, but maybe ones with better courses – triangular swims in bays or swims around headlands don’t feel so bad. With the Coogee swim, you round the island to head home and think “my god! I’ve got another KILOMETRE to go!” Which is quite hard psychologically when you are starting to get a bit tired at the same time!

* is that how you spell it?