Marathoning with Willis: My first Ocean Swim

Santa Monica and Venice Beaches

I did my first ocean swim today. It's actually surprising in that it has taken me so long to get myself out to the ocean, considering that I have been swimming since last August and have owned a wetsuit since November. It has been all pool training for me since then, which is actually recommended, since the choppier water of the ocean is known to inhibit your development of good swim form as a beginner.

My next-door neighbor conveniently happens to be a triathlete as well. He and I bike and run at substantially differing speeds, but turns out that we both swim nearly the same pace. With that, we decided to head on out to the Santa Monica beach for some Sunday morning open water swimming, bright and early at 7AM.

The big difference for me between pool swims and the open water swim is really the wetsuit. I own a full body wetsuit which includes full arm coverage for maximum flotation and warmth. Wetsuits are really, really tight to begin with, and I have particularly large latissimus muscules on my sides, so it makes for a very constricted armpit region. In my first tri, I failed to pull up the neoprene high enough on my body, and what ended up happening is that the suit ended up rubber-banding my arms downwards, so that my arms were exhausted from reaching overhead within minutes.

This time around, I made sure to get everything set up properly. Still devilishly tight, but definitely workable. My neighbor and myself gingerly waded into the surf, and both of us immediately began hyperventilating. In fact, I glanced back at my neighbor, and he immediately said, "you know, we could just do this another day. Maybe the waves will be smaller." I was having the exact same thoughts, but I'm pretty good about never letting unjustified fear get in the way of myself. After all, I have been swimming for nearly a year now, consider myself in decent swim form for a beginner, and now I've even got a wetsuit assist. My neighbor has even more open water experience than myself, so there was no reason to panic.

I encouraged him onwards, and we both waded out into the waves. I don't think either of us swam for a good 10 minutes. We just floated around out there just past the waves, hoping we'd start feeling better about things. After that, we began doing mini-swims of about 1-2 minutes, and then checking on each other to make sure we were still doing ok. We finally did get into the groove about 15 minutes into the swim, and it finally became fun to get moving out there. The most difficult thing for me was definitely sighting, or trying to swim in a straight line. It's really easy to get disoriented out there with your head in the murky ocean water, and it took many disruptions of my stroke to ensure that I was still on course. I'm clearly not even remotely decent at open water swimming - but I'm working on it!

After about 20 mins in the surf, a big lifeguard boat starts approaching the two of us. I immediately start thinking, "come on now, we don't look like we're drowning out here - we're not THAT bad at swimming!" I was hoping they were headed for some nearby surfers, but no, they were coming straight for the two of us. Once within range, I hailed them, and they just said that we should probably move our swim to a different section of the beach due to a nasty riptide coming our way. Well, that was very helpful information - and I'm definitely glad to have not gotten sucked into a riptide (tows you out away from shore) in the first place. Kudos to the lifeguards!

We didn't quite pack it in at this point, and instead headed over to Venice beach, about a 5 minute drive south, where we kept up our swim for another 20 minutes of solid, albeit intermittent swimming. All in all, a good start for my illustriously unspectacular swimming career!

As an aside, running and cycling have been going very well as of late. The cycling in particular, is surprising to me, as I've suffered big blocks of lost time off the bike due to traveling - I will have been on the road (East Coast) 7 of the 9 past weeks due to various long academic radiology conferences, which has nearly eliminated all my regular cycling. I have, however been doing short stints on stationary bikes which seem to have helped a lot. I managed to ride the hammerfest weekend bike club ride with the 2nd fastest pack of riders, which is an entirely different level of riders that I have normally been keeping up with. Very encouraging on that front.