Chicken of the Sea (The Kinetic Sprint Triathlon – Part 1)

 by Emilie L. David, 16 May 2012

 It was going to be my redemption race.  The tri where I made it through the swim without freaking and frantically paddling from safety kayak to safety kayak.  The one where I didn’t fall apart on the run.  I trained (mostly) seriously for it.  My Coach’s method seemed to be to bulk up my swim workouts under the notion that if I could swim 3x the sprint distance in the pool, 750 meters would feel like no big deal.  The truth of the matter is, I loved the swim workouts.  They were hard and they were long and they made me feel like a grown up and not some little kid who was just playing at swimming.  Two weeks before the triathlon, my body was ready.

I took that body to a lake for an open water swim lesson.  The first 100 meters were great.  And then on the way back, without any warning, it felt like my lungs just shut down.  It felt like I couldn’t get any air in.  Like I was slowly being crushed by my wetsuit.  I side stroked, but that didn’t help and I ended up flipping over and floating.  For a long time.   My mind was decidedly NOT ready.

I fantasized about dropping out of the race.  But eventually I rejected that.  It’s not that I didn't want to do it, it’s just that I was afraid to fail.  When I was about 8, my mother sent my father and I off to join the YMCA’s father/daughter bonding experiment, which was known as The Indian Princesses.  I don’t  remember that we really bonded.  I do remember that we all got to invent Native American inspired names for ourselves.  I came up with the name Whispering Falls, which I determined was intellectually poetic, befitting the sensitive/dramatic 8 year old that I was.  My father, who refused to take anything seriously, declared himself to be Brave Chicken.  I rejected the notion that I was Daughter of Brave Chicken.  32 years later, struggling to find ways to combat my swimming fears, I realized that I had not escaped my heritage.

What I needed were tools and tricks.  Enough to build a safety suit around myself that I believed in.  These are the little lies and tricks I used to get into the water and out 750 meters later with a smile on my face:

1.  Get in the open water before the race

Two weeks before my race (on my birthday), I scheduled an open water swim lesson with the women my friends refer to as The Swim Whisperer.  It was on that lesson that I freaked out in my wetsuit.  I swam across the lake, approximately 100 meters, and it felt pretty good.  Nice and glidy.  And we were the only two out there.  And there were no geese (have I mentioned my bird fear?)!  We had a chat on the other side and I was pretty proud of myself.  It was not all that hard to sight.  I headed back to the other side.  And suddenly, although it didn’t seem like I was working any harder, I completely lost my breath.  This created a sort of domino effect – my neck started hurting, I couldn’t get my head up high enough to site and I couldn’t figure out where I was, panic, panic, wheeze.  I got so every breath in was a gasp.  I started doing the flailing jellyfish dance.  And finally, I started side stroking, and then floating on my back, trying to get my heart rate down.  Luckily, the Swim Whisperer was there with me. 

Mei Mei is unlike any swim instructor I have ever known.  For her, it doesn’t matter how long you can swim in the pool, how streamlined your form is, or how awesome your wetsuit is.  If you are afraid, none of that is going to help you.  What she sets out to do is identify what you are really afraid of by popping all the lesser, distracting, wannabe fears like they are little bubbles.  She reminded me that I couldn’t sink in a wetsuit.  She reminded me that if I was in distress, it was easy to roll over on my back and raise my arm for help.  She reminded me that it’s supposed to be hard and I am supposed to get a little breathless, but that there is no point in rushing to get to that breathless state.  And that now that I’d freaked out, I wouldn’t need to do it on my race.  And  she reminded me that I love lakes, and that I shouldn’t let all those other triathletes rushing about ruin that for me.  Even though I had a rough swim, I went home thinking about everything she said, and repeating it to myself.

2.  Become Batgirl

I spent a lot of time trying to identify exactly WHAT I was afraid of.  And I determined that I was afraid of that constricting feeling of the wetsuit, and how it felt like it was CRUSHING me when I started breathing hard.  My brother, who is always helpful, offered to remove all the cushions from the couch, put me on the couch, put the cushions on top of me, and then sit on the cushions while yelling, “Breathe!!  Breeeeeeaaaththththththe!”  The more I thought about it, the more I definitely didn’t want to be crushed under couch cushions by my brother, but I did think that conditioning myself to get used to the wetsuit probably couldn’t hurt.

I squished myself into the suit every night that last week before the race.  Sometimes I got on the balance ball and practiced stroking.  Sometimes I lifted light hand weights.  Sometimes I checked out my butt in the mirror (horrible).  Once I watched the opening of that creepy Grimm show to see if I could get my heart rate up and then try and calm myself down (turns out it was too stupid to make my heart race much).  Sometimes I practiced my superhero poses, which would lead to me wondering about which super power I really wanted to have, and would I rather have a really fast car or a motorcycle, and suddenly I would realize I had been sweatily daydreaming in my suit for half an hour!

3. Brainwash yourself

There is a reason the word “Giggle”, carved out of foam in bright colors hangs on my door.  I put it there so I don’t already feel like murdering people BEFORE I get on the metro to start my work day.  Most days it works.  Words have power.  My psyche knows this and is probably responsible for my picking out this strange little bracelet one day while I was browsing around one of my favorite little gift boutiques.  It was a simple bracelet made of embroidery floss tied around a silver charm that spelled out an adjective that I would never use to describe myself.  But it was cute, and I bought it and put it away figuring it would make a nice gift for one of my spunkier girl friends when her birthday rolled around.  I came across it while I was cleaning up and I put it on.  And intermittently during the day I would look at it, and it would remind me how to act, and how not to give up on myself.

The day before the race I went for a manicure, something I don’t do often as I’d rather spend my money on, say, 5 flavors of frozen yogurt from one of those neon headache fro yo stores with 16 yogurt choices and a gabillion toppings including chocolate sauce, lychees, rainbow sprinkles, and Cap’n Crunch!

 (Sorry.  I had to stop there for a minute and day dream)

Anyway, like I said, I went for a manicure and got my nails decked out in a dangerous looking red polish, because red is not for sissies!

4.  Run through the plan

The night before the race, again, I got the wetsuit on.  By that point you would think I could get it on easily, but it was still an exercise in groaning and yanking and cursing and excessive sweating.  On the positive side, I had figured out how to tug the shoulders of the suit so that I could get a little extra room up there, which helped keep that feeling of suffocation at bay.  I practiced transitioning from swim to bike – jogging while pulling the wetsuit off my arms (impossible), getting it down in a pool around my feet and stepping on it with one foot while freeing the other (not bad), pulling too hard and slipping on the hardwood floor (oops).

5.  Get there early enough to look at the whole swim course and freak out in advance

I got to the race plenty early.  Early enough to watch the buoys get placed.  Predictably, looking at the whole course from up above the beach made me nervous.  It looked horribly far from beach to just the first buoy.  There were two turn buoys around which swimmers were to make a 90 degree turn.  Those looked excessively far apart.  Gulp.

6.  Find ways to calm yourself down

To my great fortune, there was a playground just above the beach.  When I grew up, the “Time Out” method of discipline did not exist.  When we acted out my mother would simply say “get out of the house!  Go play or something!”  And I would retreat to my swing set.  Even now, if I have a rough day at work, I will head to a park for a bit of a swing.  Somehow, when I swing up high and tip my head back, everything bad sort of falls right out of my head and all I feel is the exhilaration of motion.

7.  Really check out the course

I walked down to the water to check out sight lines.  To find other things on the shore lines to look for if I couldn’t find the buoys.  I determined that if I lost sight of buoys on the way to the first turn buoy, I would look for the white house on shore.  If I lost sight of them on the way to the second turn buoy, I would look for the pontoon boat.  I felt better knowing I had a plan.  Plus, the closer I got to the water, the less scarey the distance between buoys seemed to be.

8.  Take a bath

We were allowed get in the lake before the swim waves started, so I was able to get used to the temperature, get my face wet, get a feel for the lake and it’s darkness and chop, and practice swimming around others.  This helped me more than I expected it to, because I got to play a little bit, which made it a lot less scarey.  And I noticed that LOTS of people were nervous, which made me less so.

9.  Ignore the dude with the bullhorn

Mei Mei had warned me that the race organizers would try to pump me up, but that I should close that out and find my calm.  I focused on my breathing and my plan for the swim.

10.  Take it easy

When the horn went off to start my wave, I let most of it go splashing out towards the first buoy.  I walked out for as long as I possibly could.  I was the last one in my wave not swimming.  Then I gracefully fell forward, took a couple breast strokes, and started my freestyle.

11.  Use the rhythm method, make love to the buoys

I decided the best way to not freak out was to make up a silly song and hold onto it for dear life.  Use it as the cadence for my strokes as I looked for the buoys.  I breathe every other stroke in the open water, making my cadence slightly lopsided, so my song went like this:

I’m a boat!  I’m a boat!  I’m a boat!  Oooo, a buoy!  I’m a boat, I’m a boat, I’m a boat, where’s the buoy?!  Where’s.  The freakin’.  Oooo, a buoy!  I’m a boat!  I’m a boat!  This is not!  All that bad!  Is that a bird?!!  Oooo, a buoy!

My coach says it’s ok to “hug a buoy”.  She says the buoys cannot get enough love for the work that they do so it is ok to kinda hug them on the way by if you need to.  I have a greater fear of getting stuck in the middle of some other swimmer’s love for the buoy, so I sort of love them from a distance.

12.  Have a momentary flight of fancy

While the rhythm kept me steady, it started to get monotonously boring.  I felt so good when I hit the first turn buoy that I decided to try out the turning stroke where you flip over on your back for half a stroke to get around the corner of the buoy, and then flip back onto you stomach.  I made it onto my back quite gracefully, I think.  And then I felt sort of stuck as I sort of heaved myself, in little jerks, back onto my stomach.  Embarrassing.  But I had a bit of a giggle about it, so all good.

13. Scream a little into the water

I was amazingly calm through the longest portion of the swim.  But turning the 2^nd turn buoy and facing the shore put me in the direct line of the sun.  I could definitely see the shore, but I could not see any details on it.  Like where, specifically, the swim exit was.  I knew that really all I had to do was follow the other swimmers, who, like me, upon passing the 2^nd buoy were trying to haul it into the shore.  And sometimes I would see splash and follow it, and then two strokes later I would see no splash and wonder where the hell I was.  It was frustrating, and I was feeling really stubborn about breaking into the breast stroke to get a really good slow look at the shoreline.  So I screamed a little while blowing out under water.  It was awesomely helpful.  I probably screamed half way back to shore. 

14.  Fist pump on the exit

My intention had been to swim until I felt the bottom with my fingers, but I swam into someone who decided they weren’t going to wait that long, so I had to fight my way through chest-high water.  I was alive.  More importantly, I was done swimming!  I was so excited.  While everyone else was charging for the ramp to the transition area, Brave Chicken was waving wildly at her coach, “I’m out!  I’m out!  I did it!”