In the fall of 2005 I joined the Dartmouth Whalers Masters Swim Team. Masters swimming is just team swimming for anyone older than twenty-one. Teams are often made up of a variety of swimmers from those who want to compete at swim meets to those who are interested in structured recreation.
At first I though I was primarily interested in the exercise, but I soon found myself interested in competing. I am not a fast swimmer but I enjoy the excitement of a swim meet and the social events that happen after the meet.
Last year I swam in three swim meets, one in October, one in February and at the Nova Scotia Masters Provincials in April. Through trial and error I found I am a mid to long distance swimmer and at the provincial meet I placed first in my age group for the 400m free with a time of 6 minutes and 20 seconds.
The Master Swimming Canada website has a program called the Million Meter Challenge. With this program you track the amount of swimming you do in a practice with the goal of eventually swimming one million meters. On June 21, 2006 I reached 250,000 meters and as of now I’m at 404,825m.
Swimming the Northumberland Strait
In February I was at a swim meet with my teammates and we began to talk about marathon swimming. When swimming as an age group swimmer (under 21) I use to dream of swimming Lake Ontario and my teammates dreamed of swimming the English Channel. After the meet some of us kept thinking of these dreams. We soon determined that the English Channel requires a lot of planning and a significant financial commitment and that Lake Ontario is really big and in another province. Still thinking we wanted to swim a marathon distance; we looked around and discovered a perfect swim in our backyard, the Northumberland Strait. It had been done, and was a reasonable distance of about 15 km.
With the help of our coach we started designing extra practices and slowly because of other commitments our group of six was reduced to only me.
I trained throughout the summer, sometimes swimming 10 km in a day and aiming for 30- 45 km in a week. I started to swim outside in Chocolate Lake on May 14th and since the water was 12 degrees only swam just over a kilometer.
Training after that date was a mix of pool swimming and lake swimming, increasing the amount of time spent outside as the weather warmed up.
I knew that hypothermia would be the greatest challenge on the strait swim. Most unsuccessful marathon swims end because the swimmer is too cold. Since I didn’t want that to happen I began to force myself to swim in the ocean when it was only 11-13 degrees Celsius. This was when my friends declared me crazy.
We (my boat crew and I) set a date of around July 23 to attempt the swim. Weather forced us to delay to July 25. On that morning I set out at 8:30 am from the New Brunswick Shore. Just after 2 pm I arrived on the PEI shore, having swam fifteen and half kilometers in five hours and 15 minutes.
If you’d like to read about my swim experience I’ve posted an entry on my live journal. If you’d just like to experience the swim through pictures, you can see them here.
Here is an article written just before the swim and here is the update after the swim.