Swimming to Antarctica

by Lynne Cox

  Two weeks later, near the end of the workout, Coach Gambril asked Hans if he wanted to try a “deal” again. The deal was that he would swim the mile in segments: fifteen one hundreds, with a ten-second rest in between each one hundred. This was an exercise that would give him enough rest to go fast, and also enable him to feel the speed he would need to maintain for an Olympic race. When it got closer to the time of the Olympic Games, he repeated this exercise with only a five-second rest in between each one hundred, and then months before the Olympics he would do it again with only a one-second rest.

  The whole team stopped what they were doing, lined the wall, and instantly became silent. Hans looked at us and then said, “Okay. I think I can do it.”

  “All right, Hans. Let’s go then! Come on, you can do it,” team members encouraged him.

  My heart was pounding in my chest when Hans climbed out of the pool. I thought, I hope he’s not going to collapse on the deck again. Hans curled his toes around the edge of the pool, bent over, and flexed his knees. As Coach Gambril whistled he circled his arms and sprang into the air. In flight he heard the entire team shouting, “Go, Hans! Go!” And he entered the water like a torpedo. In seconds he was moving like a speedboat across the pool, arms and legs propelling him forward, with a wide bubbling wake behind him.

  When he reached the wall after the first hundred, he rested for ten seconds. As he pushed off this time, four of the older girls and boys jumped out of the water, picked up their towels, and waved them in giant circles so Hans could see them as he swam.

  He made the second one hundred on time. He pushed off again, and the team began shouting louder. Other swimmers got up on the deck to walk along with him, waving their towels, encouraging him to swim faster. In the background we heard Coach Gambril making a loud piercing whistle, urging Hans to go faster. He made the third, fourth, and fifth times, but by the eleventh he began to slow down. The team went wild, jumped up and down, pushed him with their voices. Finally, after the fifteenth one hundred, when Hans touched the wall at the finish, he looked up, gasping for air, and Coach Gambril broke into a huge smile and said, “You did it. You made the time by three seconds. And all you have to do now is go three seconds faster with an unbroken swim and you’ll break the world record.”

  Hans grinned, and everyone hugged him and patted him on the back. And a few days later, Gunnar made a nearly record-breaking swim in workout in the eight-hundred individual medley.

  One day after practice, I swam across the pool and asked them if they would watch me swim and help me with my stroke. They both said, “Sure.”

  Hans demonstrated the freestyle for me, and Gunnar swam the butterfly, backstroke, and breaststroke. Then they had me swim for them.

  “You look really good, but you need to change your breathing if you’re going to be a long-distance swimmer,” Hans said. “Try breathing every third or fifth stroke—that will help you balance out your stroke. And you could try kicking a bit harder on your freestyle.”

  And Gunnar added, “When you’re pulling the water with your hands, try to accelerate through your stroke, starting out, say, at one mile an hour and speeding up to one hundred miles an hour. You’ll get more from your pull.”

  So I practiced what they told me, listened to Gambril, and worked hard. I enjoyed being a part of the team. And there was nothing as satisfying as seeing myself improving, getting stronger, and even having a few seconds to talk with the kids on the team when we took short rest breaks.

  Gradually I began to feel I was accepted. We had been doing long and hard workouts during Christmas vacation and everyone was tired and grouchy. Gambril was about to tell the team what we were going to be doing when I came up from behind him, lifted all 220 pounds of him up, and hung him over the edge of the pool. “How far are we swimming tonight, Coach?” I asked.

  The college swimmers broke into cheers. “Drop him in; let him go.” And the rest of the team joined in.

  Coach Gambril was so shocked, at first he didn’t know what to say. When he found his voice he warned, “You better not drop me.”

  I laughed really hard so he couldn’t be sure what I was going to do. The tension in the pool immediately lifted. After that, whenever I sensed that the team was dragging, I’d sneak up behind Gambril and dangle him over the pool, sometimes letting him slip just a little for drama. He would squawk and threaten to make us swim more if I dropped him.

  During the course of that first year, Gambril watched over me, gave me pointers, and simply cared. Because of that I was strong enough to move up into lane three. I wanted to improve more quickly, so after a while I asked him if I could start doing double workouts at the college, along with my brother and the college team. I was fourteen years old. He suggested that I wait until I was a year older. He thought it was too soon to start me on four hours a day. All summer long I worked hard, and I moved up to lane four. Finally Gambril agreed to let me start double workouts.

  But there was one huge stumbling block: Miss Larson. I had the misfortune to have her for my second year of physical education. And I could only participate in Gambril’s morning workouts if I was released from her class. We were learning how to play basketball, and I was doing well, until the day she came by to watch us play

  The game was tied, and we were in the final five seconds of the match. Someone threw the ball to me. Determined to show her that I wasn’t a total failure, I leaped up, hit the basket, and collided with three other girls. They landed on top of me on the asphalt. For the first time, Miss Larson said, “Good job.” I held back my tears. I’d hit the ground so hard that I had heard my elbow crack and I felt the pain spread up my arm and start to throb. All I could think was, How is this going to affect my swimming? And I knew Miss Larson was going to be mad at me for hurting myself. But I didn’t say a word. That year I didn’t enjoy school any more than the previous year, but I wanted to get high grades, and I didn’t want to miss any classes. But by the end of the day, I couldn’t straighten my arm, so much fluid had accumulated in the joint, and it was hot and throbbing with each heartbeat. Finally I asked to leave school one period early.

  My father was working at the hospital, and when he read the X ray he said that I had fractured my elbow. He said that usually a fracture like the one I had was put in a cast in a bent position. But if my elbow healed that way, I would never regain full extension of my arm. So he said he would put my arm in a sling. He told me I could continue working out. I wouldn’t be able to swim using my arms; I could just kick with a kickboard. But the water would support my arm and reduce the swelling; gradually I would be able to start using my arm again, and the resistance of the water would strengthen it.

  When Miss Larson saw me the next day at school she was furious. She thought I was faking the injury. She demanded that I bring in a doctor’s note. I showed her the X rays. She was angry that I had to take an adaptive physical education class. She didn’t realize that she was a great motivator: as soon as my arm healed, I asked Coach Gambril again if I could do double workouts. He agreed.

  My father set up a meeting with the principal, Mr. Hughes, and Miss Larson. Mr. Hughes was willing to let me out of physical education class, but Miss Larson fought to keep me in. She said that I needed the full range of athletic experience and the social experience. She said I was far too shy. My father argued on my behalf, explaining that I had a talent for swimming; it was both a gift and something I had worked hard for. He was able to convince the principal to let me out of her class, and I was overjoyed.

  3

  Open Water

  After I’d been training with Coach Gambril for two years, he noticed that my times were beginning to level off and I was getting frustrated. But Gambril also noticed something that I wasn’t aware of: I was stronger at the end of the workout than I was at the beginning. Gambril had insight that no one else had and realized that my problem was that there weren’t any races long enough for me in a swimming pool. At that time, there wasn’t even a 1500-meter
race for women in the Olympic Games. He recognized that it didn’t make any sense to continue coaching me in the pool for a race that didn’t exist. So after one workout, Coach Gambril said, “Lynne, why don’t you enter the Seal Beach Rough Water Swim? There are one-, two-, and three-mile races. It’s an ocean swim, and a couple of other swimmers have done it and had fun. Why don’t you try the three-mile race?”

  I loved swimming in open water. That was where I’d first learned to swim, along with my brother and sisters. My grandparents had a camp on a lake in Maine called Snow Pond. It was the place where we spent our summers, learning how to kick and blow bubbles. Our dalmatian, Beth, would jump in and paddle over to us.

  My grandfather, Arthur Daviau, had been an excellent swimmer. He had swum across many of the lakes in Maine, and once rescued some college students who had fallen out of their canoe in the Hudson River. He had taught my mother to swim, and she in turn taught us.

  Snow Pond was the center of our lives in the summertime; we swam along the edges of the pond, paddled our red canoe to explore the Messalonskee River, to the north, and at night fished with our grandfather near the islands in the middle of the pond. Once my grandfather told me he had swum all the way from our camp to an island and back, about three miles. He showed me the island he had swum to, and I always wanted to swim to it too.

  The three-mile race started at six in the morning. When we checked in we were given numbers to pin to the back of our swimsuits. Mine was lucky 13.

  We stood shoulder to shoulder along the shore, an official fired the starting gun, and we ran across the beach and dolphined under the waves. The water was cold, salty, buoyant, smooth, and the deepest blue. And I swam as if I had learned to fly I raced across the water. My strokes felt powerful, and I felt strong, alive, as if awakened for the first time. Nothing in the swimming pool gave me this pleasure. I was free, moving fast, feeling the waves lifting and embracing me, and I couldn’t believe how happy I was. It was like I had gone from a cage into limitless possibilities. With each stroke, my own strength grew; I felt the speed, the wake my body created, just like Hans’s did in the pool when he swam freestyle. It was such a tremendous sensation, as if I had found my place, finally, found my niche in the universe. I swam with all my heart, and found myself passing one swimmer after another. I am really going somewhere. I am really moving forward. I lifted my head up and I could see the oil rig that represented the halfway point in the distance, about a mile away. I couldn’t believe I had swum so fast, but there was nothing holding me back. There were no walls, no black lines to follow, no lane lines or backstroke flags; I was surrounded by the wide-open sea and the infinite sky filled with puffy white clouds.

  Before I knew it, I rounded the large white buoy in front of the oil rig and started my return to shore. I felt currents tugging me first in one direction, then the other, and I wondered with great fascination how the currents moved, how they chose a direction.

  Everything was new, fresh, alive, and wonderful. The water played like music around my head, my shoulders shimmered in the sunlight, and I grew stronger, my strokes became more powerful. I went faster and faster, catching more swimmers, delighted with everything. There were white sails on the horizon, slowly drifting toward me; pelicans soared overhead in single file, wings stretched wide, each bird riding the tailwind of the bird ahead. There were fishing boats, with seagulls circling and crying overhead.

  I could see the end of the pier and there were people cheering. I saw my mother smiling at me, in a warm, honey-colored coat, and my tall father standing beside her, clapping. They were waving at me. And I was elated. I was flying across the water, stronger, so much stronger than when I’d started. I passed two more male swimmers, saw the beach beneath the water, rode a wave in to shore, ran up the beach, and won the race. For the first time, I’d finished first. It wasn’t the age-group race; it was the women’s race, and I was thrilled. When the results of the swim were posted, I discovered that I had come in third in the overall standings. That meant that I had raced against not just kids my age but men and women who were much older.

  Just an hour later, I entered the two-mile race. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had much rest; I felt all warmed up. And this time, I ran across the beach faster, cleared the waves, and won the second race. Then I entered the one-mile race and placed second place. I wanted to do better, but another girl was faster. Still, it was sweetly satisfying to realize that there was something out there for me. All those years of training in the pool had paid off. My parents came over and wrapped a towel around me. “You did a great job,” my mother said. Her brown eyes shimmered, and she smiled. My father patted me solidly on the back. “Good job,” he said. “How did you feel?”

  “I felt great. I wonder if there are other rough-water races. This was so much fun.”

  Over the P.A. system, Ron Blackledge, the coach of the Seal Beach Swim Team, was announcing that some of the members of his team were going to be attempting a swim across the Catalina Channel. In a straight line, it was a twenty-one-mile trip from Catalina Island to the California mainland. I don’t know why I even thought that it might be possible, but I knew I wanted to do it more than anything I had ever done before.

  The next morning at workout I asked Coach Gambril if he would ask Ron Blackledge if I could train with his team and attempt the swim with them.

  Ron Blackledge called me that evening. He said he had seen me swim and yes, he would be pleased to have me join them. He explained that I didn’t have to commit right away; I could come to some of their workouts and see what they were like. The team was training six days a week, with Sundays off for recovery. Workouts started at five a.m. and went for three to four hours, depending on the distance they were swimming that day. The team had been training for this swim for a year. They planned to make the swim in August, so I would have only six weeks to train with them. “Is this really something you’d be interested in doing? It’s a lot different from working out in a pool,” Ron cautioned.

  “Yes, I really want to do this. I’m so excited that you’ll let me try out for the team,” I said.

  The next morning, my mother drove me to Seal Beach. Beneath the lights of the pier, a group of swimmers were standing in a semicircle around Ron, huddling against the morning chill, while Ron discussed the previous day’s workout. He made comments to each swimmer about his or her performance. That was important to me. He saw each swimmer as an individual, and this was how he ensured I would know exactly how I was doing.

  “Oh, hello, Lynne.” Ron was in his thirties and had a youthful face, wavy dark brown hair, brown eyes, and thin gold-rimmed glasses. He motioned for me to join them, and suggested that my mother join the other mothers on the pier. In a few minutes he would be going up there, where they could watch us swim together.

  Ron went around the circle making introductions: “This is Stacey Fresonske, Nancy Dale, Dennis Sullivan, Dale O’Connor, and Andy Taylor. Andy is the youngest one here—he’s twelve. Everyone else is the same age as you, fourteen.” They each said hello and immediately made me feel welcome.

  “This is Lynne’s first time working out in the ocean,” Ron said, “so I want you to help her, teach her what you have learned. Okay, you’re going to start with a mile warm-up. Stretch it out and stay together. Lynne, you swim between Stacey and Dale. Okay, let’s get started.”

  At 5:00 a.m. the Pacific Ocean was onyx black, illuminated only by the small globe lights along the pier.

  Stacey led the way into the water, advising, “Make sure to slide your feet along the bottom. There are lots of stingrays here. They look like small bat rays, but they have a long tail with a stinger at the very tip, and they’ll zap you if you step on them. It’s just a defensive mechanism—they don’t attack—but if you get stung, your foot will become as large as a football. If you slide your feet, you’ll stir up the bottom sand and scare them away.”

  We moved under one of the lights on the pier as Stacey tucked her short blond
hair into a thick white bathing cap. She was tall and lean. Dale was walking beside me. She was a medium-built girl with long, dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a cheerful face. She showed me how to slide my feet, but the water was pitch-black and I couldn’t see a thing. “If you’re allergic to the sting you can go into shock,” she said.

  Something fluttered against my foot, and I instinctively jumped, wondering if it was a fish or a stingray. “What do you do if you get stung?”

  “Put your foot in water as hot as you can stand. That draws the venom out,” Dale said.

  “You’re doing fine,” Nancy Dale said once we were swimming, her voice high and childlike. Nancy had long blond hair that she wound up and stuffed into her bathing cap. She was a lot thinner than the other girls. “When you dive through the waves make sure to extend your arms over your head; that way if there’s a sandbar or something under the water, you won’t hit it with your head. You’ll want to do the same thing when you come back to shore,” Nancy instructed.

  A white line of bubbling water surrounded us like skirts of lace. It felt as if we were swimming through New Year’s Eve champagne. The bubbles tickled, and the chill made me draw in a breath, and I laughed. This was a great adventure, nothing like swimming back and forth in a heated pool, following a black line and going nowhere. This was so much fun. When a large wave rose above the horizon Stacey shouted, “We’ve got to dive under this one or we’re going to get crunched.”