Chapter 5 The Fast Lane -1

WHERE ARE THE RED BALLOONS? Where is my enGENE? For more than forty minutes, in between strokes, I’ve been looking for both—three giant blobs tied to a boat that’s supposed to be my turning point. “When you reach that spot, it’s almost halfway,” I’ve been briefed. “You’ll have completed the hardest section, and at that point the surf will assist you. You will swim as if you have an engine!” The advice is stern, the accent endearing. Ahmet Celik, our Turkish coordinator, pronounces it “enGENE,” creating a mantra that loops endlessly through my brain: Where is my enGENE?

Officially, I’m in a race, swimming against 431 competitors trying to beat me to Asia. It’s a friendly competition. Just under half are foreigners like me: mostly Britons and Australians, some Russians, a handful of Americans, and a dozen-plus dashing Dutchmen (“responsible dads with busy jobs and big mortgages”) who are swimming as a team to raise money for charity.

 The rest are Turks, literally young Turks, with taut young bodies and irrepressible energy. Almost all are younger and faster than me, with records to match. Kate Bischof, a thirty-four-year-old Australian molecular biologist with the wiry frame of a teen, tells me she’s just completed a twenty-kilometer (twelve-mile) race in the ocean off Perth. Bernie Stone, a fifty-two-year-old insurance project manager from Kent, England, likes to “swim the major gaps between continents.” Last year he did the Gibraltar Straits (eighteen kilometers, or nearly eleven miles) and is practicing with an ice vest to swim from Diomede Island in Alaska to Russia. Lynne Tetley, a rosy-cheeked fifty-two-year-old from Yorkshire, came because her daughter wanted a companion. Lynne is diabetic and took up long distance swimming when doctors told her she couldn’t. She swam the English Channel twenty-five mnb years ago. “Just to show that when they say I can’t do it, I bloody well can,” she says. “But I’m not in that shape anymore.” I am utterly awed, and at the coaching clinic before our big swim, I trot over to Simon Murie, the tall, slender, Australian-born Briton whose company, SwimTrek, organized our swim, and report brightly that there’s a Channel swimmer in our midst. “Lynn,” he answers with patience, “there are a lot of Channel swimmers here.” Including himself. Oops.

Me? I’m just trying to make it across. What makes that a special challenge is time: on this single day each year, the ships that usually ply these waters are stopped only for an hour and a half. If you don’t hit the finish line by then, the safety boats will fish you out. Or before, if you’re in trouble. At the prerace briefing, Ahmet assures us that fifty boats will be following. “I hope so!” shouts one nervous swimmer from the audience. “Follow me! Remember what I look like!” Never has ninety minutes seemed so short. Never has my swim involved so much preparation.

Before the event—early this morning—we were registered, examined (heart, blood pressure), numbered (I’m 327), tagged (with an electronic chip braceleted around the ankle) and capped (with special swim “bonnets” provided by the local Rotary Club: orange for foreigners, yellow for Turks), then transported across the strait by ferryboat at noon. The starting line is a pebbly beach where the water, a blissful 77 degrees, laps gently at our toes. Thank you, Poseidon. Last year’s conditions were so foul, two-thirds of the swimmers didn’t make it. And we’ve nervously watched blustery winds create three tense days of bumpy seas. Not today. The sea is so inviting, I think of Rupert Brooke, the English idealist who never made it to Gallipoli but wrote of “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” I’m hoping we’ll get the same.

The mood under the brilliant sun and paint-box sky is cheerful but edgy, a scrum of near-naked humans who have come together for three days of mutual passion but no idea what they’re about to encounter. With our head-hugging caps (sorry, bonnets), skin-clinging suits, and bug-eyed goggles, we look like a colony of aliens about to greet the earthlings. I edge away from the crowd to find my own space. Swim your own swim, I’ve been told. Relax. Have fun. The orange flag lifts, and I take a deep breath. The gun goes off. The race is on.

Six supple needles weave orderly paths through an azure loom: fifty meters one way, fifty back again, across and back, across and back, a steady chain of flawless strokes from long, strong bodies. They are human submarines, missiles with manners, so in sync with the water in the outdoor pool, they barely ripple the surface. It is mesmerizing. The men and women of the Netherlands national swim team—two Olympic golds, one bronze already tucked away—are working out in Curaçao, a Caribbean reprieve from the raw snow and indoor haze of an Amsterdam winter. They’re here to practice in the sun; I’m here, coincidentally, to improve my own it-hardly-seems-like-the-same-sport skills. The contrast, even on this blissful afternoon beneath a matching blue sky, with the rolling sea snuggling up under the deck, is sobering. As the Dutch journalist traveling with them informs me unapologetically, “This,” nodding at his colleagues, “is swimming.”

Yup.

I have come to this arid island near the coast of Venezuela for Swim Training Camp, a week of drills and distance training another step in my plan to correct my stroke and crank up my pace. I am the rookie of the group, and not just because it’s my first trip. Many of the other two dozen participants are triathletes, which means that they will, after an arduous hour and a half of sprints and sets at 7 AM, duck into a phone booth to reveal their Superman suits and then run and/or bike up to thirty-some miles in the withering heat. All this while I’m back in my room reading the newspaper. When they return for the 4 PM ocean swim they can still fly past me.

Our chance encounter with the Dutch swimmers is an added bonus, a rare opportunity to watch excellence in action from pool-side, not the TV screen.