On Swimming the Alcatraz Channel, for the Tenth Time…
Hey guys,
Tomorrow at around 7am Pacific Time, I’ll be jumping off a stalled boat tucked in by the South East corner of San Francisco Bay’s famous Alcatraz Island 🙂
Former lighthouse island, then US military prison, then US Federal penitentiary, then museum and icon for triathletes globally
On some days, she’s beautiful…
On other days, you can hardly see her for the fog moving across your face and the ugly surface chop in the mist…
Back in February 2011, when I landed in San Francisco, I still had this snapshot memory of a moment on a surf trip in Morocco that I knew I had to re-set.
It was a beautiful day off the central coast from Sidi-Rbat, my great surf and life buddy Dan and I were maybe half a mile offshore, surfing Sidi righthander, alone, just the two of us, in great conditions on a calm sunny day. Clean long lines of glassy waves in small swell, with just a little more size on the sets.
I love this guy and being in the water with him, he was a like a big brother as I was ‘growing up’ in my surfing experience, always baiting me off the shoulder to sit a little more courageously at the ‘peak’ of where the wave was breaking.
We even took this posey picture with our boards in the setting sun one evening after…as we noticed how beautiful the different shades of the boards looked lined up on the wall, and had to join them posily…
I took a wave but stuffed it up, and took the wipeout and the fracas that ensues and came up laughing at the experience, as often happens on our happiest days surfing. Just like the uglier moments from rugby days, when you come through a mauling and start laughing at the absurdity of the experience.
But in that wipeout in Morocco something was different in the moments after I popped to the surface and immediately checked to my right that Dan wasn’t flying down the next wave about to land on my face.
The momentary yank on my ankle – your surfboard leash tugging at your leg as the wave tries to drag it in its wake – this momentary yank didn’t happen.
Everything felt different in my stomach in the split second I realized that my board, my big buoyancy aid, was no longer attached to me by a polyeurethane leash, with its velcro cuff. Just the cuff was, and a piece of snapped leash, the board was somewhere in that whitewater running its way to shore on its own.
I was now boardless in the Atlantic half a mile from shore with a smile fading from my face as my stomach whirred into the low setting of a blender of anxiety.
But it was a calm day and warm and best buddy was just a wave’s peak over yonder from me, and I was in a wetsuit and in a mellow current system pushing me the right way. Even then 13 years ago, I’d spent thousands of hours in the ocean picking my way through currents on a surfboard, and so that doesn’t phase you (Feeling the currents and water flow is part of the game out there).
But the vast expanse of open water and being boardless was not a fun feeling. I remember feeling pissed off that I was anxious even. Our mind is often the major problem, really, in a situation like that. And I knew that.
But I had these two radio frequencies emitting in my head, with two different talk show hosts blabbing away. One was shrinking in his seat feeling terrified at this new sensation of being in the wide open water. The other saying, “it’s all good, just a long swim and you have to relax…”
Spin forward to 2011, in San Francisco, at New Year that following December I remembered the incident and the anxiety where the sheer vastness of the open space we’re in becomes daunting (perhaps an agoraphobia I learnt in diving training).
And I wrote down as a 2012 goal to fix this little agoraphobia incident: “swim the Alcatraz channel”…
By happenstance, a few of my early friendships in San Francisco were fun triathletes and I heard about the Escape from Alcatraz race in the Spring, an OK timing to say yes to just as the surf conditions crap out every year after Fall and Winter.
And then bro Pete put up his hand to do it, flying in from Vancouver for the 2012 race. But I had to pull out with a shoulder injury. I was inspired like hell then, seeing him gruel through that race that sunny Sunday morning June 2012 after I had hardly slept a wink with worry for little bro…
Long story short, I was able to get a place in the next year’s 2013 race through putting my hand up for a fundraising place with the Brain Aneurysm Foundation team.
A high school friend had collapsed and died in 1996, found by me and another best mate of high school days, his life brought to an end in a finger-click from a freak brain hemorrhage. And so seeing that cause, I had to put my hand up to raise money for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation team. Over the next 5 years, I took up the reins of managing the team, grew it to 15 athletes and raised nearly $250,000 for Brain Aneurysm research.
And with that I have jumped off that boat to swim that crossing nine times, six in the race, and three in training swims. Tomorrow will be my 10th Alcatraz crossing…!
But waking up this morning I could hear the window gently rattling in a nigh-time wind, and rolled down the hill to see us in a thick cold blanket of fog. Though the wind has mellowed…
Race day starts with getting up around 3.30 – 4am to ensure you’re all set to be on the buses by 5.15am shuttling us from the Marina Green start over to the piers where the Ferry departs us over to Alcatraz.
And this is what it’s like….
We jump feet first – only the pros can make a dive start – because there are over 2,000 athletes exiting from the front door and the back door of the San Francisco Belle mock- steam cruiser over seven to eight minutes after the horn goes.
The over 40s are upstairs and the under 40s downstairs but I always stay downstairs and tuck in behind the Pros and parathletes for inspiration. We’re all packed on the floor of the boat for half an hour or so as it motors into the Bay and positions into a stall. And then they play the National anthem over the speaker system, and the captain revs the juddering diesel engines of the old steamer at the crescendo of Star Spangled Banner, for effect…it’s a wonderful and lightly edgy last moment of being dry and warm and able to make nervous jokes with everyone around you.
I like to use the left side (back door) and line up to get off the boat at the front of the crowd, being tucked in behind the pros and parathletes that have a minute of space each. I shuffle up front instead of hanging on with all the 40+ers, just to get on with it, instead of waiting in the nervousness and the giant line of shuffling wetsuited athletes waiting to jump.
Before you know it, a marshall is yelling at you “Go, Go, Go” as one person after another pencil sticks themselves into the chilly Bay waters and starts into a chaotic “get away from the boat” swim. It’s like those nature documentaries of lemmings shuffling off a cliff.
You feel the jarring cold, first thought is to immediately check that your goggles are still on, and immediately sprint stroke to get away from the next guy about to jump.
And it’s chaos then for a few minutes.
Noise, splash, marshalls shouting, then gurgling silence in a deep green murk as you look down and power out fast initial strokes to blast some heat and motion into your shoulders. Black bodies with windmilling arms, both sides of you, seeing a kicking leg here and there ahead, glimpses of all the different hat colours.
Immense adrenaline, totally chaotic, “flight and fight” breathing…
And then the curmudgeonly old talk show host turns his volume right up in my head… “Oh fuck. What are you doing? This again? Fuck. This was such a stupid idea. What the fuck are you doing Kevin? What the fuck are you doing?… Get me out of this somehow” (Editors note: in normal life, I hardly say fuck…)
“I want to stop now. Get me out of this somehow. Maybe this is the year I just give up and sit with a kayak and abandon this…”.
In several early years, I’d have this nausea building, one year with a gag reflex starting and thinking I’d vomit as I swam…
And then…and then…and then the the talk show host that is a “keep on”, and a cajoling coach takes over the channel…
“Alright, sort your breathing out. Sort your breathing out. Now!” he yells encouragingly.
Head down. Two strokes and breathe. 5 times. Increase exhale smoothness…Hang on, watch that leg in front kicking weirdly to the right. And then three strokes and breathe, 10 times.”
“Steer left, get away from the central chaos. Relax triceps as they work, feel the width in your fingers as you mimick wrapping your arm around a barrel in each stroke, try to create a flow of the corkscrewing rotation of your pelvis and chest…”
All these thoughts of technique. And then back to the breathing. The focus on lengthening your exhale to settle down.
Our breathing literally controls our mind, and the more talk show host #2 stays in charge and focuses on the length of the exhale…and the sharp blast at the end that I learnt in Bronze Medallion surf life-saving training in Australia…the more there is of that, the more the smile appears slowly of loving the chaos of the rugby maul, and the wipe-out and the Alcatraz fracas of the start…
That’s some five minutes in or so, that you just start to feel okay, “I’ve got this” – as they say here in the US so emphatically and beautifully – and now we’ll focus on our sighting and steering and trying to find a ‘lane’ within all the continuous movement around you…
As I settle into feelings of “I’m okay”, and then slowly first thoughts of “yeahhhh, I love this race” start to arrive, and it’s beautiful when my head starts to slowly flip through pictures of all the people that have donated and almost feel emotional about that. And in the half way section too I get these moments of gratitude for my limbs and muscles and bones being intact and cells and arteries and veins and brain all being healthy still at 48. I always think of Warren, who had the whole amazing experience of being alive snapped out of him at just 17 (I’ve had 31 years more, and feel so lucky.) There’s so much thinking time out there that all kinds of different wonderful thoughts start arriving in the endorphins of exercise and adrenaline.
Talk show host #2 tends to stay on top then and gets just more ebullient and excitable and colourful, and proud and competitive, as the second half of the swim unfolds, as we start to feel the supportive longshore drift of the current increasing our speed down along the piers of Fort Mason and past the Marina and then with the red roof tiles of the Spanish style architecture of the Yacht Clubs and the crowds on the swim landing beach coming into view.
The voice in our minds, the talk show host holding charge, determines so much of how we react in life, right? It determines literally what happens next in our lives, when we stop, and give up, or when we drive ourselves onwards despite fear or pain, (as Muhammad Ali said: “you only start counting the reps when you want to stop…”).
Tomorrow, I’m going to make the first five minutes of my race exquisitely good in terms of the talk show host in my head, no matter what is happening around me. Talk show host #2 will be running the show from the very first moment of the jump.
Because…
“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”
– MK Gandhi
You know, I can’t wait to Escape, for the tenth time…it’s going to be exquisitely good 🙂
“Go, Go, Go….!”
I’m already smiling at the thought of those boat door marshalls just hours away from me now…
