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Thanks for checking out my site. This website is my attempt to provide information about what I've learned about open water marathon swimming. I'll cover what I've learned about marathon swimming and go into specific swims. There will be a blog page about my Swimming and Rowing training. Specific pages dedicated to specifics about open water swimming and specific swims. Please feel free to contact me at steve@nowetsuit.com if you have any questions or ideas for the site. I have a day job, so things may not always be up to date. Think of it as a perpetual work in progress.
Steve Green
My goal is to make this site a resource for learning about marathon swimming. I've been fortunate to live and train in San Diego, where La Jolla Cove is sort of a Mecca of ocean swimming. It's a place where you can be in the Jacuzzi just across the street from the cove and be the only one not to have swam a major channel. The danger of such a jacuzzi experience is your definition of normal can start to change and you could be bitten by the bug to swim "long."
La Jolla Cove is an ideal place to train, as essentially all of the long distance swimmers are very welcoming to people who want to learn more about it. The water temperature almost never gets below 52F, and being an underwater state park, there are limitations on the speed at which boats can travel in the bay, making it safer than most places to swim. Questions about how to feed, where to swim, how to train for a long swim, safety concerns and other issues are easily answered if you swim there. I hope this site can serve as a resource to anyone wanting to learn about open water swimming. I'll give my ideas on these issues as well as some of the fun things which go into training as well as long distance swims.
So why Nowetsuit? One of the first questions I get when talking about marathon swimming is, "you wear a wetsuit of course?" No... The thing about wetsuits is besides making it easier to tolerate the cold water, they float. Swimming is all about decreasing resistance in the water. Anything which artificially floats a person makes it easier to move through the water. Basically it changes the whole mechanics of moving through the water, so it isn't really the same sport as swimming without one. In the past I did triathlons where almost all use wetsuits, so not wearing one made it hard to compete. If wearing a wetsuit helps someone get out into the ocean, who could not have done so otherwise, then by all means they should use one. Marathon swimming, at least what this site is about, doesn't include wetsuits or fins or other artificial swimming aids.
Somewhere around 2005 I started doing triathlons. I'd cycled for years and was comfortable with that. Running was newer to me, but I was enjoying it more than hating it. Swimming was a non-issue since I'd always known how to swim. I did the mission bay sprint triathlon. The swim was 400 yards in a wetsuit. No problem. I took over 13 minutes to finish. Today if it took me more than 6 minutes, I would be upset. I realized I wasn't doing so well each time another heat of swimmers (who'd stared 4 minutes later) passed over and around me. When I got out a well meaning dude said "It's just great that you are out here!". I walked from there to the transition area. The rest of the race went well, but I decided I should learn to swim more quickly, so I started masters swimming at the JCC in La Jolla. For six months I was the slow guy in the slow lane. When someone would show up who was slower, I'd tell my wife that night I wasn't the slowest that day... Usually they had the sense to quit and I held my position. After almost a year I moved over to UCSD and started working with Sickie (legendary masters coach who started the program) and met many friends there which has motivated me to stay in swimming.
At some point I was invited to join some of them at La Jolla cove for a Saturday morning swim. Usually a few miles, then breakfast. Then in spring 2008, Tom Hecker sent out an e-mail invitation to swim across Lake Tahoe with him and it was a week my family was already planning on camping there, so I figured, what the heck? Tom shared his maxim with me (maltodextrose powder from England which marathon swimmers "feed" upon at regular intervals). He also advised me on training to prepare. We made it 8 of 10 miles before the high wind warning came true for Tahoe and the whitecaps were causing our canoer to take on water and we bailed and got scooped up by a motor boat Tom had organized just in case.
Despite not swimming all the way from A to B, I was motivated to learn and do more of this. I signed up to swim the Maui Channel (10 miles from Lanai to Maui) the next summer. At some point before the swim, I realized I should get more formal help and began meeting with Sickie for lunch where he would set up training programs in both swimming and weights, all for buying lunch! Maui was an experience. Rough seas and currents made it a challenge. The low point was when the boat captain told me solemnly I had not moved in the last half hour according to the GPS. At that point I decided I had not gone that far to get in the boat, so I put my head down and swam hard for about 40 minutes. When I stopped to catch my breath, the captain smiled, telling me I'd made progress and had under two miles to go. After a mere 7 hours and 30 minutes, give or take, I made it to the beach on Maui. Tired, sunburned, but happy.
The next summer (2009) I wanted to go back to swim across Lake Tahoe in July and get to the other side. I consulted Sickie in November and we worked out a swim plan. My friend Tom Riley came up from Sacramento and kayaked me across the lake. He towed a stand up paddle board in case I had problems and needed to get to shore, but it was never used. We had GPS issues and added about three bonus miles to the swim, but got it done. OK, well my wife did call the Coast Gaurd because we were so late, but they just waived when they found us out there.
