This year I turned 49 years old in April. I don’t take for granted that many people don’t live this long. An even bigger deal is on the horizon of turning 50. Why not mark it in some way? I have read about the mental health supports of rituals, particularly of in-between areas such as shifting of life stages.
How about some ritual of community, of play, of celebration of life?
Welcome to the 50 swims challenge where I will document swimming in fifty (50) different open water locations by the time I turn 50 in April of 2025.
Why open water swimming?
Why not (cold, danger, difficulty — okay we’ll come back to that)?
I love being in the water. It also represents a form of freedom that I coveted as a child.
As a teenager in Arizona I wanted to join the swim team and for long, convoluted reasons that I won’t get into here, there were a series of barriers about why I was not allowed to swim. I was able to secure permission to be a student manager of the high school team my senior year and coaches let me get in the water to refresh my memory from childhood swim lessons about floating, and kicking from one end of the pool to the other. My attempts at the strokes were just attempts.
When I left for Oregon to attend college it was one of my main goals to learn to swim. I asked the swim coach of our (at that time) tiny swim team in a liberal arts school to teach me to swim so I could join the team. He was skeptical, and told me years later that he hadn’t expected me to last more than two weeks. I swam all four years in part because of his, and the team’s, willingness to accept someone starting from nearly zero.
He taught me how to float and how to not be afraid of the deep end of the pool. He and the assistant coaches through the years taught me the various strokes, turns off the walls, dives into the pool off the blocks, and so on. It was such a small team and our division wasn’t the fastest so I squeaked in because there weren’t try outs. Some fellow swimmers felt resentment (they’d been swimming since they were children), others became my friends. My body changed so markedly that I used Icy Hot like it was lotion. I found the whole experience both astonishing and physically painful at times.
Decades later I still love it. Moving through the water is one of two experiences that feels close to flying to me. The other being flying through the air in aikido ukeme break falls after a good throw (that’s another story).
A few years ago I joined the River Huggers, which is an open water swim team project of the non-profit Human Access Project, in Portland, Oregon. I joined as a safety paddler because I enjoy being on the water in a kayak or stand up paddle board. Then some of the swimmers found out that I know how to swim and encouraged me to join in. I felt a lot of anxiety about swimming in a river with its currents, tidal changes (the Willamette is affected by tides via the Columbia river) boat traffic, and the human-debris that happens when people live near a body of water in a city. The science on swimming in the river was safe — it was clean enough (thank you policy and community advocacy).
I was drawn to it.
After a season of being a safety paddler I started swimming once a week the next season (paddling the other times). Then the next season I swam more… and when I realized there were groups of people who swim year-round in nearby rivers and lakes — I was in awe. You can do that?!
I learned from the experts in the group about things to keep in mind which I’ll detail in future blog posts.
I will update this blog with batches of swims, if not each one as its own post.
Here are the “rules” (made up by me):
A “swim” minimum counts as five minutes of treading water and ideally five strokes (of any kind) in two directions. Which means the waterbody has to be deep enough to accommodate that. And it’s okay in cold winter seasons if it feels too cold to actually put my face in the water.
A “new” location means that using the same body of water, such as a lake or river, or ocean, is fine as long as the locations are sufficiently different from one another. If in doubt, go with at least a mile apart.
I put safety first. I invite folks to join me as shore support if there aren’t fellow swimmers. I tell folks where I’m going to be, at what time before I depart. I wear a safety buoy, a spring wetsuit during colder months, and put wool in my ears to prevent dizziness that I’m prone to from cold water hitting my ear drums. I know my limits and follow them.
Stay tuned!
