An Entirely Different Ocean

I left the house at about 10:40. It’s overcast out but I’m hopeful that we are on the verge of clearing up. The air temperature just emerged from the 50s. Summer feels so very far away.

I get to the parking lot and head for the stairs. There is a pretty good breeze blowing and a fair amount of texture on the water. It is not warm but not necessarily cold either. I’d say for what I’m wearing (just swim trunks) it is a touch south of comfortable.

The moment my foot hits the sand, it feels so warm and luscious. My foot sinks in ankle deep and I wonder if I really want to proceed to the wet sand. I do.

The water hits my toes and it’s cold but not notably colder than my last swim on Thursday. There is a Curlew running along the sand just as the water laps shoreward from the last wave. I guess you could call it a wave? Another day of small to miniscule surf.

I see a few Cormorants fly just above the ocean’s surface on my way to my starting point. It feels like the intensity of the light is increasing. I’m now facing the horizon and I can almost overlay some sunshine on top of what I’m actually seeing in front of me and it doesn’t look too far away from what I am sure will be here in just a little while.

I’m walking into the small surf and the time comes to take that final plunge. I don’t really want to do it but I can’t start this swim without it. In I go. Oh yeah. Cold. Big exhale and let the cold flow through me. I’m swimming north today and head out toward the tip of Monarch point. I’m hoping once I add some distance between me and the shore, the water might get a tad warmer. So far, no luck.

There are a lot of smallish boats fairly close to shore. A couple that I can see have diver’s flags on them. Last night was the beginning of recreational Spiny Lobster season. I’m sure these are dive crews looking to catch lobster. I see several lobster trap buoys over the coarse of this swim. Last night I walked with my son and dog out near the Ocean Institute and there were a ton of boats and divers out off the beach and jetty. You could see maybe 30 lights or more below the water. It’s like this every year. Even though the season extends several months out, the first night and weekend is always the most active by far.

This all makes me remember back to last year at this time and I distinctly recall thinking how nice the water felt in the fall as I swam on by a small lobster trap buoy. I can’t say I am having the same reaction to the water temperature right now. As I stare at Monarch point, I think of how I was right at that point exactly three weeks ago and the water was incredibly comfortable. Today I am in an entirely different ocean.

The title of Thursday evening’s water temperature forecast was “The cool down is complete.” I was in the water just a couple hours before that was published and based on what I am feeling now, there was still more cool down left. It is for sure colder than Thursday. It hasn’t plummeted, but here in the very low 60s, every degree is critical.

The water is pretty cloudy on the Strands side of the point and then seems to clear up a fair amount into Salt Creek. I’m trying to just relax. The cold stirs up my anxiety level. I catch myself wondering if I can endure this. Of course I can. I just need to settle into it and I’ll be totally fine. I won’t be comfortable. I just won’t, but that’s ok and part of the whole point. For this hour or so, I will be cold. There is nowhere I can go to escape it as long as I want to reman in the water - and I do. I really believe this helps me to build up psychological resilience to adversity. Doing this every other day rewires the neural pathways in my brain.

Sure there are times I wonder if this is really true. I look at my life and there are days or hours where it seems like I’m just a big train wreck waiting to happen. There are other times when I’m totally stressed out and I remember these moments in the water and somehow summon the muscles I flexed here and manage to flex those same ones in my stress and I can feel the anxiety slowly fall. It’s about learning to relax on the inside despite what is happening on the outside. It’s about letting go of the inner narrative that wants to tell me everything is terrible and hopeless and replace that with a new narrative that doesn’t necessarily say much but assures me that if I keep swimming, I will get to the end of the beach.

So I find myself wandering back and forth between moments of equanimity and moments of thinking the cold will overtake me. I know the later will not happen. I just know it. I have enough historical precedence built up to prove that.

Wow it really isn’t getting any brighter here. It almost seems like it is growing darker but I can see all the while a small patch of blue sky over the golf course on the other side of the highway. I swim to my usual turn around point between the last bathrooms and the beach club. I turn around and I’m pretty sure the return trip will be a little faster now that I am going in the direction of the wind. I think it does.

I feel like I intersect with a couple patches of warmer water here and there as I get close to the finish. No complaint there but we are almost done here. My stress level always goes down in this stage of the swim. It feels like whatever bad thing that could happen out here would have happened already. I’m so close to the end now, what could possibly go wrong? I choose not to answer this question.