The Great Chesapeake Bay Swim

Let’s get the shitty part out of the way first.

Two months before The Great Chesapeake Bay Swim (GCBS) I had a Hashimoto’s flare up that caused a rather unpleasant digestion issue. Instead of increasing my mileage in the pool to ensure I could make the 4.4-mile swim, I experienced a solid month of diarrhea. Ugh. Ew. Gross! Lucky for you, I’m going to spare you the gory details and just say my training came to a complete halt. Around the time a little firmness started to creep back into my life, I had a Lyme flare up. There was a lot of concern regarding my participation in the swim due to my overtaxed immune system and lack of training. One morning, two weeks prior to the GCBS, I spent a couple of hours deciding if I was going to do the swim or not. If you think I did some soul searching while making a pros/cons graph to help aid with my decision, you obviously don’t know me very well.

 

28-May-2017

Months prior to my Hashimoto’s/Lyme flare up I signed up for a one miler and two-miler at an annual lake swim in Reston, Virginia. Many participants use the double swim as training for the GCBS. I swam the mile in 27:26, and less than two hours later I swam the two-mile swim in 56:31. I am not going to lie. I was tired after all of that swimming. Despite being seriously undertrained and having never swum more than three miles in the open water at one time before in my life, I deemed myself ready for the 4.4-mile swim.

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You may wonder what my definition of seriously undertrained is. Let me shed some light on it for you. Leading up to the Hashimoto’s flare, I regularly swam two miles, 0-2x per week in a pool. As I mentioned earlier, just as I was about to increase my mileage, shit happened.

Let me guess, now you have more questions.

• Hey Julie, why did you wait so long to increase your mileage?
• Hey Julie, does swimming zero times a week count as training?
• Hey Julie, why would you want to swim this far anyway?

These are all valid questions, but if you're asking them, you obviously don’t know me very well.

[Side note] Over the past two years my health has improved greatly; a big part of this improvement is because I am listening to my body. If I am feeling tired and run down, I rest. For my health, this is great. In terms of training for an endurance event, this is not great.

11-June-2017

GCBS Details:

• Start: Sandy Point State Park
• Finish: Small beach on Kent Island
• Most of the swim takes place between the dual spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. If any swimmer gets pulled by the current and/or swims outside of either span, it is an automatic disqualification. For those of you not familiar with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, check out this stock photography so you can get a picture in your head of what it was like to swim between the spans of the bridge.
• It is a diagonal swim from the shore of Sandy Point State Park towards the dual spans of the bay bridge.
• Once inside the spans of the bridge, each mile is marked by a red buoy.
• There are race volunteers in boats, kayaks, etc. following the swimmers throughout the race.

It was the perfect morning for my first ever GCBS. The sun was out and the bay was calm. I couldn’t have asked for better conditions. I started in the second wave at 8:45 am. As I stood at the shore line with the wave two swimmers waiting for the start signal the only thing I was remotely nervous about was my wetsuit. I hate swimming in a wetsuit. I have a sleeveless wetsuit and I still find it to be very restrictive around my shoulders, and it usually ends up choking me. The water was just cold enough that I would have frozen my ass off if I had opted to just swim in my Speedo. I struggle with body temperature regulation, courtesy of Hashimoto’s thyroid disease. I figured it was safer to wear the wetsuit then to risk uncontrollable shivering during my swim.

When the ten second countdown for wave two began, a moment of panic washed over me and I second guessed my decision to participate in the event. Luckily for me it was a fleeting moment. Before I knew it, I was running in to the water trying not to dive on other swimmers, and I felt right at home.

You may be wondering what one thinks about during a 4.4-mile swim. Lucky for you I am going to break it down in to the three stages I experienced during my swim.

Stage 1: Elation

After years of health issues I was so excited to be a part of this event, that I couldn’t stop smiling. The smiling caused me to swallow a lot of water. It was so cool to see cars and trucks speeding by every time I took a breath. It was pure luck that the bay was calm the year I swam it. All I had to do was focus on swimming straight ahead. I didn’t have to worry about fighting currents that could possibly have pulled me out of bounds. 

Examples of the thoughts in my head:

• Oh cool. Check out that mint green truck that just went by
• It would be so great to be eating mint chocolate chip ice cream right now
• Did I lock my front door this morning?
• Did I ever text Alexis back about lunch next weekend?
• Holy cow, this bridge is tall! 
• This isn’t the dirtiest body of water I have ever swam in, but it would be a good idea to stop getting so much of it in my mouth!

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts and the scenery that I didn’t even check my pace as I passed the first mile marker. I felt strong. I was on cloud nine. My bathing cap was slowly sliding off my head. I kept trying to adjust it while swimming but it was not an effective approach. As I swam up to mile marker two, I stopped and adjusted my cap while treading water. As my wrist passed my face to grab my cap, I caught a glimpse of my watch. It read 52:10. I did a double take.

Stage 2: In the Zone

I am sad to say that stage two was very short-lived. If you think back to the amount of time it took me to swim the two swims mentioned earlier in this post, you don’t need me to tell you that energy conservation for later in the race was something I neglected to focus on. Once my cap was fixed and I started to swim again I concentrated on locking myself in to a slower pace that I could maintain for the rest of the swim. Unfortunately my pace kept getting slower and slower. I made it to the mile three marker and then the wheels fell off. Is that a weird analogy to use for a swim? Perhaps, I made it to mile three and my suit fell off, would be better? Probably the best thing for me to say is, I made it to mile three and then everything fell apart. I could easily delete the other two sentences but where’s the fun in that?

Stage 3: Am I there yet? 

Immediately after I swam passed mile marker three my left arm got so tired I could barely lift it out of the water, my legs started to feel weighted down and my wetsuit began to choke me. I tried to adjust the neck of my wetsuit, but getting the leverage needed to adjust a wetsuit while swimming was impossible. I began to fart, a lot. It could have been from me gasping for air while breathing because I was tired and being choked by my wetsuit, or it could have been from something I ate before I swam. Who knows? What I do know is it made me giggle. It felt ridiculous to have bubbles running up my back and escaping through the neck of my wetsuit that I was trying to adjust. And probably just because I was tired and grasping at straws, I thought my farts were making me more buoyant in the water.

By this point in my swim, seeing the cars drive by on the bridge was no longer a novelty. I was working extremely hard and not making much forward progress. I wanted to flag down a car and hitch hike to the end of the race. This thought caused me to have a flashback to the first time I ever crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I was in my friend Andy’s car and we were heading to Cambridge, Maryland for a triathlon. Just before we paid the toll Andy turned to me and said “I hate driving over bridges, and this is my least favorite one”. As he paid the toll he closed his eyes, gripped the steering wheel and kept driving. Please note those pictures I linked to earlier. The bay bridge spans are 4.5 miles long, very narrow and 186 feet tall at their peak. I grabbed on to the wheel to make sure we made it over the bridge safely and was in awe of the amount of sweat he generated while white knuckling the steering wheel. Once we crossed the bridge and he opened his eyes I said, “You know, you could have just asked me to drive”. One minute I was laughing about this memory and the next minute I was craving tacos and wondering if there were any sharks in the Chesapeake Bay that would attack people. 

Finally the mile four marker came in to view. I slowly made my way towards it. I swear that every time I popped my head up to see where the buoy was, it seemed like somebody was moving it further away from me. I finally reached it.  It was very anti-climactic, mostly because there was still 0.4 to go, and all I wanted to do was take a nap.This buoy was the signal to swim out under the right span of the bridge and towards the finish line at Hemingway’s Marina. During the pre-race meeting they advised us not to stand up in the last straight away even though it was shallow, because there could be crabs, broken seashells, etc. that could cut your feet. The minute my hands touched the bottom of the bay while I was swimming, I stood up. It was just what I needed. I was able to adjust my wetsuit. As I was standing in disgusting muck that was squishing up between my toes, I could see all the jovial people at the finish line cheering the swimmers in. I got a burst of energy and started swimming again. I am not going to lie and say I sprinted to the finish line. But I will say, while my left arm was barely breaking the surface of the water, the rest of me was moving faster than I had been prior to reaching mile marker four.

When I dragged myself out of the water and walked/wobbled through the finisher chute my cheerleading squad went wild!! Special thanks to Rachael, Amy, Maggie and Jesse for coming down to the finish line to see my graceful exit from the bay after my long ass swim.  And an extra special thanks to Rachael who got up at the crack of dawn to experience the pre-race madness with me. It is a demanding job to help coordinate proper hydration, sunscreen, body glide on the hard to reach places and car logistics. I appreciated her enthusiasm, precision and the fact that she drove me home over the Bay Bridge in my car with her eyes open after my swim. 

In conclusion: Even though it is way easier to drive over the bay bridge and of course more efficient in terms of time, I hope to participate in this event again with the proper amount of training beforehand.