Swim Around Key West

Last weekend was the 12.5 mi Swim Around Key West, one of my favorite races despite the very hot water. This was my 4th time swimming the race - I did it twice in high school and also swam it last year. I was especially excited this year because several DAMA friends were swimming it as well. Matt Davis and Karen Fritchie did solo swims while Jason Mask, Joe Caruth, and Josh Eudaily did a party cruise, er, relay.

A couple of things were different about the swim this year. The swim started later than usual (8:30 am instead of 7:00 am) and it also started in a new location, a different point on the island:

I wasn't sure how these changes would affect the current-assisted swim, so I tried to set a reasonable goal. I finished the race last year in 4 hours, 37 min. Since I now had better endurance from all my channel training, I hoped to finish this year under 4:30.



The morning of the race was fraught with excitement. We ate our breakfasts, changed into our suits, and walked down to beach where the starting area was. Now for those of you who have never been there, Key West is a very colorful place. During our weekend stay, we were met with a variety of characters including several drag queens, a man in a Borat-style bathing suit, and a group dressed as the village people. Needless to say, this was not a place where Karen and I expected to draw much attention. After all, we are straight-laced young professionals who couldn't possibly match the level of weird that Key West is used to.


However, as we walked down to the beach we were repeatedly subjected to pointing, giggling, and incredulous looks from passersby. One man stopped his car, pulled over to the curb, and pleaded with us to let him take our picture. How could this be?! How could Karen and I draw such attention to ourselves on an island of freaks?




Perhaps it had something to do with the entire pound and a half of zinc oxide that we applied to our bodies before the race. One man even asked Karen if she would do "mime moves" for him. She respectfully declined.





After an hour or so of camera dodging, the race finally started. The water was hotter than I remembered - upper 80s -and it felt like bath water, even from the start. My original plan was to stop and drink every 30 minutes, but I already started to feel dehydrated after the 1st hour, so I changed it to every 20 minutes. I usually drank Gatorade, but every third feeding I took chocolate milk instead, to give me a little bit of protein and to take a break from all the electrolytes (since I was already swallowing so much salt from the water).


I felt very strong for the first half of the race, but then things began to fizzle. The race is usually timed so that the current pushes most of the swimmers the entire way. The fastest swimmers might slightly out swim the tide and could end up swimming about a mile against the current. No big deal, right? Well, this year there was a serious error in the timing of start relative to the currents. We swam AGAINST the strong current for almost half of the race. This is not something that any of my team had trained for and it was exhausting. After the race, Matt told me that he didn't stop to drink for 2 whole hours because he didn't want the current to push him backward while he was treading water and drinking.


As my kayak support person, my mom tried very hard to steer me to slower moving water. However, in many places the water became very shallow, too shallow to take complete, full strokes. In several places, my mom had to decide whether to keep me in the extremely shallow water, or to move me out to deeper water where I would be swimming against a stronger current. It was a tricky tactical decision. She usually kept me in the shallow water, which seemed to be to my benefit.


Finally, my stop watch read 4 hours. Thank God! I was absolutely elated. According to my projected finish time, that meant I should only have about a mile to go. I asked my mom how much further we had and she said "You're doing great. You're almost at mile 9." Almost at mile 9?! In other words, I still had 4 miles to go? I couldn't believe it. I had mentally prepared myself to swim for only 4.5 hours but now it was clear that I would swim well over 5. My arms couldn't handle that! I had already bargained with them, told them that if they hung in there just a little longer, we'd be done soon. Now what was I going to tell them?

It was then that I understood the value of what English channel swimmers call "total body confusion" training. These swimmers go into their training swims with no plan of how far they will go or when they will stop. They might swim for 1 hour one day, 4 hours the next day, and two hours the day after that. They make spur of the moment decisions at the end of their swims to extend their training a few hours longer. On long swims, they don't look at the clock; it is their coaches who decide how far they will go and when they will get out. The idea is to get out of the habit of training yourself to swim for a certain amount of time. These time frames impose physical and mental limits that are difficult to overcome. If I train to do a 10 hour English Channel crossing, what happens if conditions are worse than expected and I need 12 hours to complete the swim? How would I make it through those last 2 "bonus" hours? By preparing myself to swim Key West in 4.5 hours, I had made swimming beyond this point extremely difficult.

Sure enough, by 4.5 hours I was thoroughly cooked. I made it through the rest of the swim by sheer power of will. I began to understand why some English Channel swimmers give up within a mile of reaching France. We all have a point that we reach where it feels like we can't swim another stroke, let alone another thirty minutes. Extremes in temperature - the heat of Key West or the cold of the channel - add to the fatigue. I made it to the finish buoy and got another surprise - the finish line had been moved to the beach! I had another 200 yards to swim and then would have to crawl out of the water before the clock would stop.


Muttering expletives that only the fishes would hear, I swam hard to the shore. When I got out, the race had one last surprise for me and this one was a good one. I was the overall solo winner! They only 2 people out of the water ahead of me were relay swimmers.


I left the beach to shower, remove as much of the zinc oxide as I could, and change into some dry clothes. When I went back to the beach to watch the others finish, I realized that everyone was having a hard time with the conditions this year. Times were all much slower than expected. Karen and Matt both finished strong, but the relay ran into some trouble. I found out that Joe started throwing up 8 miles into the race and had to be rescued by one of the safety boats. Jason and Josh finished for the team, both swimming more than they had prepared to.


A reporter from the Key West Citizen interviewed me and I was quoted in the paper:
http://keysnews.com/print/1437979


Awards for the race were Key West conch shells. Karen and Matt both placed in their age groups and the relay came in 2nd place out of the 3 person relays. We all won conchs!

Conch-erers!

The next day, a group of us drove to Orlando for some "active recovery" at Disney.

We had a blast! We all left much more broke than we had arrived, but such is the spirit of Disney.