Great Lake Superior Swim: Swimming With My Younger Self

A tranquil morning, as Merle, my best swimming friend, checks the water temps pre-race. 

Grant, my husband, told me once that the happiest he's ever seen me was when I was training for my (one and only) Ironman triathlon. I'm not sure happy is the most accurate description of that period of time, but those nine months felt full of purpose and satisfaction. The process of going longer, getting fitter, and gaining confidence, no matter what the race, is uniquely crisp and fulfilling. Life, as a rule, isn’t crisp and fulfilling (but you likely already knew that.)

I’ve been struggling for over two years with an intense case of sciatica. The positions that set it off are ones that require me to be upright: standing and walking. (Yes, that’s as frustrating as it sounds, and I’m actively working on solutions.) Cycling and swimming give me a reprieve from the nervy pain, which has worn me down and made my world feel small. There is very little crisp fulfillment in my life currently, so I decided to set a big-for-current-me goal.

In the process, I hoped to regain some fitness and confidence back in my body. I eyed two open-water distance swims: the Carter Lake Crossing, a 3-mile swim in Colorado in July, followed by the Great Lake Superior Swim, a 2-mile swim in Lake Superior in August. 

Then I broke my wrist in early May, which kept me out of the pool for six weeks. I’m a capable swimmer, but preparing for the first swim, a three-miler, in less than two months was likely not going to make me—or my body—any shade of happy. Two miles a month later? Definitely doable. I spent an afternoon putting together a three-days-a-week swimming program for myself—and then I barely looked at it again.

This is a solid workout...too bad I didn't do it. :) 

Part of the problem was that I had no accountability; I work best with teammates and, ideally, a coach. I also knew the course thread a straight line 50 yards from the shore, which meant I could stop anytime and stand up if I needed to. Finally, I would be wearing a wetsuit, whose added buoyancy makes things slightly easier.

While those reasons are valid, the truth is also I just didn’t have the energy during this ridiculously hot, hot summer. In July, the only things remotely interesting to me were efficiency of our swamp cooler and the delivery status of my estrogen patches.

Still, I signed up for the two-miler, telling myself I could drop to one mile if I needed to. I swam about a dozen times in two months. I tried not to criticize myself too hard for watching my detailed swim workouts simply float by on my training app, no green check marks signaling completion.

One day, I took to clearing out some shelves in the basement, one of the sure places for a reprieve from the heat. I opened a box my mom had labeled DIMITY and found a trove of pictures from my childhood.

As I sorted through Christmas mornings and middle school gawkiness, this one grabbed my attention.

I’m standing on the edge of a screened-in pool at my grandfather’s house in Florida. My fingers are shriveled, my hair reeks of chlorine, and I bet the blue fish on my suit didn’t have a chance to fully dry before I put it back on again. Whenever we visited—or I was near another pool—I spent hours somersaulting and playing Marco Polo and trying to swim from one end to the other with no breaths. At that time, I had no clue how fast I swam. I didn’t care that my belly stuck out and my thighs stuck together. I just wanted to be in the water as much as I could be.

I brought the picture upstairs and put it on my writing desk. I let the little girl in the striped suit talk to me. She reminded me how much I love the simple act of swimming, feeling supported and weightless at the same time, experiencing another dimension of my body. 

As I loaded the bus to the race start, I noticed a woman with a floaty flamingo attached to her waist. “Do you have a name for her yet?” somebody asked. I wasn’t going to swim with a flamingo, but I was going to be present and light. It wasn’t hard to do. The atmosphere of this open-water swim is not unlike that of a trail race: yes, you’re all going to do a hard thing, but you get to do it in a glorious setting around like-minded people. It’s hard not to just be grateful.

And Lake Superior? Not just glorious. Magical, really. The water was so clear, I could see my hands as I pulled through the water. Small divots in the white sand below felt like lane markings. When accidentally sipped a little, the drink didn’t leave my stomach roiling. The conditions were perfect: the 63-degree water was warmer than the air (unusual for Duluth) and the wind was minimal. In fact, the only complaint was that the sun, hanging out right on the horizon, was so bright, it was hard for the spotters on land to keep track of their swimmers.

I tried to channel striped, somersaulting Dimity as often as possible. I'm swimming in Lake Superior! No sharks and no salt! There are pancakes waiting for me!

Of course, endurance athlete Dimity crept in when things got hard. The buoys, signifying a half mile, seemed never to get closer. My sciatica acted up. My ego started swimming next to me when I saw my splits, crystal clear on my Coros, were slower than I thought they’d be.

Striped Dimity never wore a GPS, though. And she wouldn’t have cared where she finished, as long as she did some somersaults at the end. Adult Dimity forgot to do those, but she did spend some quality time in the water later, working on her (crisp and fulfilling) handstands.