The Epic Return of Disaster Magnet (or "How to turn lemons into a whirlwind tour of Arizona")

Sit down and pour yourself a drink (or just stop reading now) because this is a long one. I haven't written anything in a while because, obviously, while hiding out during a pandemic, there was very little to write about. Like everyone, the coronavirus shut down my organized activities, and I was forced to step back and reevaluate my entire existence.

But I needed to write again. If I don't write, the thoughts in my head are destined to bury themselves deep in my soul and slowly carve away my self worth until my brain starts to wonder if the only way out is to jump off a bridge or something. And I can't jump off a bridge because THAT bridge - you know, the one over the valley that everyone jumps off - has recently been retro-fitted with a high fence in an attempt to thwart said jumps in the future. No, I am NOT making this up.

Let me start at the beginning of the spiral.

In January 2020, my mom died. In March 2020, all the pools closed. Shortly thereafter, all my planned swim events were cancelled.

Desperate for self-medication of my anxiety disorder, I started running again. Daily. Too many miles. I ran myself right through the point at which I couldn't run anymore. After two days of limping down the road in pain and basically going nowhere, I got on my bike trainer. I started weight training and elastic cord training to keep my arms in swim shape. And, when I could, I swam in a wetsuit in sub-50 degree water.

Looking back, it was precisely where I made the first mistake. This would have been the perfect time to start acclimating my body to cold water. But my endurance-oriented OCD brain wanted to keep my swim yardage high. It only made sense to someone inexperienced (me) who hasn't evaluated the situation properly (also me). There was absolutely nothing to train for because, I repeat, all the swim events had been cancelled. So instead of using this opportunity to cold-water acclimate, I put on a wetsuit, gloves, booties, more gloves, and a neoprene cap, and swam until I couldn't feel my face anymore. This wasn't really "swimming" - seriously, it was a complete waste of time. I couldn't even "feel" the water. But it got me out of my own head once or twice a week, and I didn't have to wear a face mask doing it.

Isn't that what any and all of us really wanted during this quarantined time? To get. Out. Of. Our. Heads. My personal brain fog was compounded by the grief and guilt I also struggled with at my mother's passing. I needed to do more than binge-watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. Especially since I couldn't go to work.

Fortunately, I did have two creative hobbies to throw myself into, one new - sewing - and one old - fine art printmaking. During this "down time," I painstakingly created two large linocut prints in memory of my mother. 

"January Mourning"

"Ocean State"

But it was still not enough.

My husband Jim, slightly immune-compromised and relegated to working at home, never left the house except to take walks and grocery-shop. We avoided restaurants, and we couldn't attend baseball games, our favorite summer pastime. Jim adapted very well to an engineering career in a home office. In fact, he will argue he is more productive at home than he ever was at his office. Without a home-office-workable desk job, I became an expert at meal planning, cooking with almost no waste, and drinking boxes of wine. I felt confident enough to host a socially-distanced, masked Thanksgiving and New Years Eve with our two closest friends.

And it was still not enough.

I started sewing masks for donation. I begged and bargained for supplies. I survived the Great Worldwide Elastic Shortage of 2020, although I had bruises from a vicious altercation with a vendor on eBay. To my own surprise, I even managed to thrive in its aftermath. After a friend asked if I was making masks for purchase, I dug into my dwindling pre-pandemic stash for the rainy-day custom (note: expensive) cotton fabric. This began the mind-numbing but soul-satisfying process of sewing hundreds of masks in my personal fabric designs and offering them just above cost to my Facebook friends. Inundated with requests, I made a pseudo-business of it for many months. I was honored when a friend on the Greater Cleveland Aquarium dive team helped get me a commission from her supervisor to make 75 masks with my sea-animal designs. One of the few times Jim and I ventured out into the pandemic world was to use our complimentary entries to the Aquarium. (And I got to touch a stingray which made my heart smile.)

Yep. But it was still not enough.

As a lifeguard and a swim coach, I was unable to work for many months. An additional setback came when my swim team started practicing again and my services weren't needed because of budget concerns with only six swimmers in the pool at a time. That changed when demand for swimming increased and more practices were added. Finally, in summer 2020, for about two hours a day, I was at ease walking the pool deck. I was even able to get in for some pool swimming a few times a week.

In July, some pools and gyms reopened, and I went back to work as a lifeguard for about two weeks at my local rec center. They were allowing "swimmers" one-per-lane, but only for 30 minutes if others were waiting. One day, after my guard shift, I asked a fellow patron after his 30-minutes if he wouldn't mind moving his water-running to the (empty) diving area so I could swim in the lane he was occupying only half of. He looked up at me and just said "no." (Is it here that I mention how many times over the years I have kindly sacrificed a lane for him because he's old and crotchety and prefers his own lane?) I looked up to the on-duty guard/co-worker for assistance. Her dour expression indicated a bad day was being had, so I waited until the water-running-lane-occupier was done and jumped in to swim. After 20 minutes, said lifeguard (and my supervisor) asked me to give up the lane because I "was a guard" - albeit clocked out and NOT on duty.

That, as they say, was the end of that. I couldn't hold back the tears. Was everyone feeling the pressure like this? Or was it just me? All I wanted was a tiny bit of slack. I left and never went back there. To swim OR to work.

(Luckily, I found another local rec center with a monthly fee that allowed me to swim indefinitely. I even work there now.)

But let's rewind to mid-pandemic hysteria, July through November, 2020. No events to train for. Home-bound except for when I was coaching or swimming. I had nothing better to do than go back to basics in my own swimming. I re-taught myself to bilateral breathe. I focused on fundamentals-gone-awry like narrowing my flutter kick and symmetric shoulder rotation. The goal? To be fully prepared to increase my yardage to mileage beginning in January 2021. To ultimately crush those already-paid-for open-water swim events postponed in 2020.

There were two huge ones looming: the epic SCAR in Arizona and a solo swim across Lake Erie.

Swimming in the last quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021 went well - even as planned. By the end of March 2021, I could sustain an unprecedented (since college) 45-50,000 yd/week. I was handling it with no major pain or complaints, no mental freak-outs or breakdowns, and no injuries. I may even have developed an oh-so-tiny bit of self-confidence. 

There was only one additional thing I needed to prepare for: cold water. I knew it would be THE issue at SCAR. And I had a plan for it. I would to do the only things I could. Jump in and swim in really cold water and take very cold baths for increasing time periods. And gain a few pounds of fat for insulation.

At work, my new boss even let me tether myself to a railing and swim in the yet-unheated 66-degree water while filling the hot tub after cleaning it. In fact, it was his idea. Later, he confessed to having to explain the situation to angry patrons who thought I was keeping them out. The "Danger Pool Closed" sign obviously didn't work, but they might have understood better if they just stuck their toes in the water. (Don't get me started on angry pool patrons again.)

In April, my training took a negative turn. At the time of this writing, I am extremely baffled by all of it. My swim speed had increased in March - it was like all the hard training and stroke work was paying off. Then, in April, I swam progressively slower. Like, on a daily basis. It was maddening. I was tapering my yardage and instead of feeling good or fast, I couldn't hold a decent pace to save my life. Nothing felt right. Panic set in. And you KNOW what happens then. Every time I got in the pool, I beat up the water. I exacerbated it. 

Upon realizing I would now be suffering for longer in cold water, I focused on an essential weight gain. I ate more. And would you believe this? I actually started losing weight. How do these things even happen?? I felt like the victim of a cosmic practical joke.

The ONLY thing that seemed to be going well was the cold water immersion. Jim even told me he was "impressed" with my willpower to take daily cold baths. The man who has been intimately related to me and my will power for almost 30 years was "impressed" with it. We were now in the proverbial "upside down." I had this urge to binge-REwatch all of the Netflix series Stranger Things (which we proceeded to do).

Looking back, trying to make sense of what was happening, all I can come up is that I got lazy. I relaxed my dedication to proper form in training and focused on distance covered. Maybe I threw all the technique gains out the window as I added yardage. Maybe I got tired. Who knows, but in retrospect, there is now evidence pointing to a technique breakdown near the end of April.

As they say, the damage was already done. When I boarded the plane to Arizona last Monday, I was borderline terrified. The question I kept asking myself over and over was: Why the heck didn't I defer my entry to 2022?

The first swim of the SCAR series would be in Saguaro Lake on Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, there was a fun "warmup" swim - Patty's Party Swim - at 11:00 am in Saguaro Lake. I was desperate for a chance to get in the water and find out how cold it would actually be. But, seriously, the extra-great thing about the fun swim is that it was a chance to reconnect with open-water swimmers I had either met before or connected with on Facebook. In fact, not only would this swim put my mind at ease about the cold, it would give me a bigger confidence boost to talk to others who had done SCAR in the past. 

The water temperature was completely "manageable," and I gained confidence in my ability to finish this thing AND sleep well the night before. By now, the only thing that mattered was to finish. I knew speed would not be on my side, and after the test swim, I was perfectly OK with that.

My friend and experienced open water swimmer, Mark, told me everything I needed to know about the lakes we would swim in. The swims started and finished at the dams - that's where the water would be coldest. Saguaro would be cold at the starting line and would warm up after the first mile. OK, I can do that. I just had to make it through the first mile, and then the water would be "manageable" (again, my words, my confidence level with the water after the practice swim).

Jim and I drove to the Saguaro Lake Guest Ranch to check in for two nights. Our room was a quiet and relaxing cabin with no TV. I could get used to a place like this. In all honesty, right up until the first swim on Wednesday morning, the sightseeing, swimming, meetups, and conversations had almost completely erased the fear that had reared its ugly head over the previous four weeks. The first two days, we marveled over the landscape near Mesa, Arizona, and the hilarious but awesome Saguaro cactuses that looked like something straight out of a roadrunner cartoon.

Tuesday night, Jim, who would be my kayaker, helped me prep all my feeds for the next day, and we were in bed by 9:30 pm. I struggled with some anxiety, but when the alarm woke us at 5:45 am, I was rested and ready to tackle this thing.

The SCAR swims begin by ferrying swimmers and kayakers to a staging area - a beach - where we do final prep for the swim. Kayakers prep their boats and swimmers prep (caps, goggles, sunscreen, etc.) for a short boat ride to the starting area at the dam. Once at the starting line, we jump in, swim to a buoy line, raise our hands, and await the start signal from event coordinator Kent Nicholas. 

If memory serves, when we got to the starting line the exact phrase humorously uttered by the boat driver was: "now get off my boat!" 

I jumped into the water. Great Googly Moogly, it was COLD! Much colder than the day before. It reminded me of the swim start at Ironman St. George - like someone had punched me in the chest (except this time I wasn't wearing a wetsuit). I took deep breaths to settle my heart rate from the initial shock. It would warm up. Or so they say.

We started. I swam. I reminded myself I could get through to the warmer water. After what seemed like forever, I found Jim in the kayak. I didn't stop. I had to keep swimming to stay warm. There were patches of warmer water that I swam in and out of. A feeling of thankfulness hit me every time I found one. Each one was short-lived but gave me hope. After about 30 minutes of swimming with no consistent warmer water, the fear began to set in. My hands weren't numb yet, but my core temperature was dropping. I could tell because my teeth were beginning to chatter WHILE I was swimming. This had never happened before. Usually, my fingers and toes go numb BEFORE my core temperature drops. This water was way colder than the 64-ish degrees I trained for. I finally stopped and voiced my concern to Jim. He yelled at me, "just keep moving!" He said it was 60 degrees. But it wasn't warming up. Jim said one swimmer had already dropped. I knew I would be next. I think I started to cry. I had to get out. I tried to climb onto Jim's kayak to get warm. He flagged down a support boat. I hung onto the kayak and frantically kicked my legs to keep warm, but desperation was setting in. 

By the time I was on the boat, shivering had become shuddering, but I was still aware of my surroundings and able to speak. (In 2009, in stage III hypothermia after the rainy finish of Ironman Coeur d'Alene, there was no shivering and no ability to communicate... just a tunnel with people looking in at me.) Once I was wrapped in blankets and warming up, my thoughts of survival changed to thoughts about what just happened. 

Disappointment. Defeat. Embarrassment. The other swimmer who dropped out was trying to comfort me. When I apologized to Jim, she laughed and said she had already apologized seven times to her husband/kayaker. Huddled up in the back of the boat, we hugged for a long time.

The mental backsliding would now take over. I was in way over my head. I did not belong here. I couldn't walk, much less crawl, in the footsteps of all the amazing swimmers who also jumped in the water that day (and finished). My mind made a running leap right smack into irrationality. Feelings of humiliation and worthlessness overwhelmed me. This had been a waste of time and money. No... wait... I was the waste of time and money. 

And it spiraled downward...

It had been a long bad year. I had spent many many nights awake thinking about my mother. Thinking about her last moments. Thinking how I failed her. And when I failed that day in Saguaro Lake, all those failures came flooding back. I wasn't just a failed athlete. I was a failed daughter. A failed caretaker. A failed wife. A failed friend. A failed human. 

I think I hit emotional rock bottom later that day. I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. And poor Jim. He had to figure out what to say to me now that we were stuck in Arizona for four more days. A week prior, before we got on the plane to Phoenix, he had jokingly said: "If you jump in the water and sink to the bottom of Saguaro Lake, we will just pack it in and drive to the Grand Canyon." It was ridiculous, and yet, now, it had become a very real possibility. He suggested we abandon the event. 

I was at a crossroads. I rarely give up, but my brain was hurting. So I did what any completely rational person would do. I threw the question out to Facebook. Should I throw in the towel now and go to the Grand Canyon?

The reactions were swift. Friends came to my immediate aid. The swimmer I worshipped all of my high school years said "do the Canyon." Those words carried weight. And yet, there were other respected swimming voices giving perfectly reasonable explanations as to why I should go back and try again the next day. The next swim would be different. Better, even.

After a night of crying and arguing and drinking too much beer, I told Jim I wanted to try again. He was worried that a second abandonment would send me into an even worse mental state. I assured him that was completely impossible. That this was as bad as it would get. I fully expected to fail in the next swim - Canyon Lake - because the water there is always colder... and colder longer.

Thursday morning, I woke up with a pounding headache. I ate cake for breakfast, we packed the car, checked out of the hotel, and headed to Canyon Lake. We arrived relatively early, and somehow, I found the courage to get out of the car and face the people I didn't feel worthy to stand next to. Yesterday's finishers. 

Mark was the first person I saw. He walked up and said the unexpected: "Sorry, the water yesterday stayed cold for two and a half miles - much longer than expected. Everyone has a DNF. You're a talented swimmer who had a bad day." I argued the money angle. He told me how expensive some of the other swims are. And told me about some of his big DNFs. 

Whoa. Empathy, kindness, and rationality. I wanted to cry, but not because I was sad. I needed to remind myself that the open-water swimming community is different than running and triathlon. There's no judgment. No one will say "you're only as good as your last race" (yep, someone in my former running club regularly said that). 

And my brain reset. The letters S, C, A, and R represent the names of the four swim lakes. I may not get SCAR, but "CAR" would be OK. I like cars. 

The second swim, Canyon Lake, is often considered the most beautiful of the four. And the boat ride through the canyon to the start confirmed that. I tried to focus on it. The day was warm. Feel the sun, appreciate the scenery - that's what I kept telling myself. We had a nutrition plan - to start with warm feeds until the water warmed up. And just before we hit the beach, that song by Chumbawamba came up on the little speaker down near the boat driver's feet - you know the one, "I get knocked down, but I get up again..." - I stifled the urge to burst out laughing and subsequently having to explain myself. You just canNOT make this stuff up!

Things happened quickly on the staging beach, and we were at the dam start before I knew it. Jumping off the boat into this water was a much bigger shock than the day before. It was later referred to as "stinging cold." I guessed it was in the low to mid 50s. By the time I found Jim in his kayak, I was afraid to stop moving. I waved off a warm feed hoping I could find a warm patch of water. Once I found one and was able to stop for a feed, Jim said it was 57 degrees on his thermometer. This was the "warm" spot. My hands were so cold I couldn't even get the feed bottle open. Knowing time was of the essence, Jim grabbed it, opened it, and threw it back lightning fast, and I took a drink and started swimming again. 

It was already too late. Shortly thereafter, I made the call. We turned around and headed back to the staging beach, the perfect place to stop. This time, I don't remember much after trying to stand up in the water just off the beach.

The next thing I remember is lying on the beach with lots of people looking down at me. They were smiling. I remember a lady helping to get my wet bathing suit off. I was wearing socks and a hat. And they were putting Jim's dry T-shirt on me. The shivers were tremors.

I remember being carried to a boat where they wrapped me in more blankets with a hose pouring hot air underneath. By the time we reached the dock at the parking lot, I was warmed up and coherent. The boat guys told me about the swimmer they pulled out and warmed up the day before with the same heater. 

And Jim filled in the details of what happened at the beach.

He said I sat on a rock. I don't remember that. He said there was a woman unrelated to the event who jumped off her boat and came to help. She was a nurse. She directed them on getting me to lie on the warm sand (so, THAT was why my entire backside was covered in sand when we got to the dock). Jim said the event director, Kent, must have had a bag of warm dry clothes for just this sort of thing. He was one of the people looking down at me when I finally came around. Today, my regret is not being able to thank the nurse and others who came to my aid. 

And that's my only regret. I'm glad I got in the water that day with determination. And I'm glad I now know what I will face in the future to swim in cold water. This time, I just wasn't ready - for many reasons.

After hanging out with a couple others who dropped, we discussed our plights. Some said I should at least go to the next location, Apache Lake, and test the waters that afternoon. I said: Nope. On the boat, Jim said the words, "You scared me," and I was immediately transported back to the exit of the medical tent at Coeur d'Alene, when our good friend and J-Team member Julie said to me "Jim waited for you outside in the rain for two and a half hours." No. Not putting him through that again. We got in the car and headed north.

We stopped once, to grab something to eat and to find a hotel at our next destination. This would be a very expensive excursion. 

While driving, Jim and I mused about what it must have been like for the first person who ever saw the Grand Canyon. (Seriously, who was that person?) I wondered what it would be like for me. In the grand scheme of things, would it be up there with those soul-stirring moments of my life? Does everyone have those moments? Moments in which the emotion is so overwhelming that the human body can't possibly contain it - like my heart will explode, like being surrounded by a divine presence. 

I can count them on one hand: 

• Our wedding day; 
• The moment I looked up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel;
• That fateful evening I lost my balance in Newcastle after the first three notes of Turin Brakes' "Feeling Oblivion"; 
• The day I walked amidst the Canadian Rockies to take in that over-water view of Mount Edith Cavell, the real-life version of a framed picture that hung on my childhood bedroom wall for ages;
• The moment, after miles of lugging heavy loads and finally pitching our tents on a hill, our great friends Andy and Caroline proposed a toast as we looked out over the fields of the Glastonbury Festival our first night there.

My mind swirled as we made our way to the famous South Rim overlook, Mather Point - would this compare to one of those moments?

All the photos, all the words of magnificence, all the personal accounts... nothing prepared me for that expansive monumental vista. But my first thought was not what I expected. My first thought was of my late mother. She always said, one day, someday, she wanted to see the Grand Canyon. It was her only real bucket-list wish. And as I stood before that sweeping view, my eyes filled with tears - for two reasons. One, was that my dad finally took her to this sacred place. A place that she dreamed of since she was a little girl. My hope is that it was the most awe-inspiring and surreal experience of her life. The second, was that I was standing in the spot she may have stood, walking the steps she tread. And I thought: "Grand" isn't quite the right word for it. 

While looking west, I overheard a man trying to answer the question I continued to ask myself every single time we looked out over that vast landscape: One river did all of this? 

The next day, we rented bikes and rode along the rim to a place called Hermits Rest. At every lookout point, every time we stopped to take in the view or take photos, I made a desperate visual search through the landscape to find the source. The River. The water. It all comes back to this, doesn't it? Water. The stuff of Life. The stuff of Swimming.

The rest of our trip was a quick but hilarious trek back to Phoenix. We spent the entire time quoting scenes from our all-time favorite movie Midnight Run (I highly recommend, including multiple viewings). We stopped in Williams for a tiny bit of historic Route 66. We stopped for beer at the fictitious Red's Corner Bar where, in the movie, Charles Grodin and Robert DeNiro do the hilarious "litmus configuration" and steal a bunch of $20s from Red. Then we considered "boarding the freight train" as a train streamed by.

Here's Jim drinking at the bar in which that scene took place and the train out the window:

Satisfied we had done something of Hollywood significance - only to us - we then took the scenic route 89A through Oak Creek Canyon and drove through the sublime red rocks of Sedona. 

We stayed overnight in Phoenix, and when we boarded the plane back to Cleveland, I was already mapping out a new plan to follow in the coming year, certain that my bucket-list open-water swimming goals were still well-within reach.

It would just take a little more time.