satchmo
member
2077 posts
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Registered:
Nov 24th 2004
Occupation: pediatrician
Location: Los Angeles, U.S.
Long text warning...
This is an article from today's Los Angeles Times. It goes along with the discussion of endurance sports.
30,000 strokes to go
It's a marathon swim from Catalina to the mainland. James Rainey jumps in as one man tackles the open-water adventure.
James Rainey
October 18, 2005
THE darkness spreads around us ? black as obsidian and even as a slate.
Faint flickerings from the stars above and the lights of the Southern
California coast offer a meek challenge. But as the moon sets behind
Santa Catalina Island, sea and sky unite, nearly obliterating the
horizon.
It seems a cruel prank to dump a man into the open ocean in this
void ? outfitted only with a swimsuit, goggles and cap ? and then to
watch as he struggles to swim back to the distant shore.
Yet we have come to Catalina to do just that. Friends, school
chums and support crew, even his parents, are accompanying Peter Attia,
a young doctor from Baltimore, on his quest to become the 120th person
to cross the channel.
That means swimming from Doctor's Cove near the northwest end of
the island to a beach beneath the Point Vicente lighthouse on the Palos
Verdes Peninsula ? 20.2 miles as the dolphin swims. And possibly much
longer for a human buffeted by wind and waves.
Many people in Los Angeles cast their gaze across the water at
Catalina and recall summer idylls past ? peering at fish through a
glass-bottom boat, tracking buffalo in a noisy Jeep or smacking
saltwater taffy in sleepy Avalon.
Endurance swimmers look across the same expanse, says veteran
channel crosser David Clark, and feel the same compulsion as some small
children when they first enter a pool. "One lap across?. Just one very,
very long lap."
The English Channel remains the world's marquee attraction for
marathon swimmers. But if the Dover to Cape Gris-Nez crossing ?
conquered by an estimated 810 swimmers since the late 1800s ? is the
Mt. Everest of long-distance swimming, then the Catalina Channel is K2,
a monumental challenge that rarely enters the consciousness of those
outside the swimming fraternity.
Although the two passages are similar in distance, the English
Channel generally is considered to offer the stiffer challenge because
of its colder water and swifter currents.
In its relative obscurity, the Catalina Channel ? known on
nautical charts as the San Pedro Channel ? has gone unchallenged for
years at a stretch. But not this year, according to the Catalina
Channel Swimming Federation (www.swimcatalina.org), the volunteer
organization that promotes and monitors the crossings.
The federation logged 11 successful transits from July to early
this month, more than in any year since a 17-year-old Canadian became
the first to accomplish the feat in 1927.
Now Attia, a native of Toronto, rides a small Boston whaler from
his support boat to the shore at Doctor's Cove ? the closest departure
point to the mainland that also offers a hospitable beach.
If all goes according to plan, the prevailing southeasterly
current will give him a little push, and his late-night departure will
help him avoid the winds and chop that tend to blow through the channel
in the afternoon.
The 32-year-old surgical resident has prepared as much as he can
for this moment, boosting his fitness by logging 20 to 30 watery miles
a week training back home. He diagramed the physics of his stroke like
a scientist and became a savant of sports-drink chemistry to prepare
his mid-channel nutrition.
But all the preparation in the world can't diminish the more than
30,000 strokes needed to reach the far shore. The distance is nearly
50% farther than he has ever swum. And those miles will not be logged
in his overheated club pool or the Northern Virginia lake that
maintained a steamy 80-plus degrees this summer.
Attia will plunge into an ocean that he knows has beaten far more
accomplished swimmers. He can recite the story of the renowned swimmer,
Lynne Cox, who gave up one quest when her support boats lost her in
dense fog. And he knows how a record-breaking distance man had to be
dragged from the channel, near death, after his body core temperature
plummeted to 88 degrees.
The dangers not only don't deter him, they inspire him. "He is an
extremist in everything he does," says his wife, Jill Attia, 28. "He
has to do everything to the nth degree."
Attia calls it "an honor and a privilege to even try this," adding
on one of his last days of training: "If the channel is kind enough to
let me through, I will be honored to be in the company of those who
went before me."
*
And so it begins
JUST before 12:19 a.m. Oct. 11, Attia stands alone on the pebbly
beach. A diving barge that normally teems with young campers on bright
summer days floats just off the beach, eerily silent. Flying fish flit
just below the surface in the unexpected light from the 63-foot dive
boat, Bottom Scratcher, which will follow Attia and be home base for
his supporters.
The muscular swimmer wades into the water, his skin shining in the
faint light. A smattering of applause and shouts of encouragement drift
over the water. "Let's go, Pete! Go, baby!" screams Jason Pyle, a
Stanford medical school buddy.
Within a few moments, the euphoric rush of the start gives way to
the night's quiet ? broken only by the rhythmic slap, slap, slap of
Attia's arms breaking the water.
From the boat, little can be seen but the glow stick pinned to the
swimmer's Speedo and the matching lights hung from a kayak that help
him to navigate.
On board the Bottom Scratcher, Clark's wife, Margaret, the channel
federation's monitor this night, begins her log. She notes the water
temperature ? an unseasonably warm 66 degrees. And she jots down the
condition of the seas: "silky smooth."
Attia feels a surge of adrenaline ? fueled by the glassy
conditions and by a light show unfolding before him. Each time his hand
cuts the water, microscopic algae near the surface burst into a plume
of phosphorescent sparks.
Rolling onto his back for his first feeding from a bottle of
dextrose-enhanced sports drink, Attia declares: "The water is
beautiful!"
On board the Bottom Scratcher, I can't help but feel a little
giddy too. Attia had said a few days earlier that I could join him in
the water at some point as a pace swimmer. Now the prospect of plunging
in seems a bit more pleasant ? the placid conditions subduing my
earlier fantasies of a death struggle atop a roiling ocean.
But skipper Greg Elliott, who at 64 has two decades on the ocean, issues a good-natured warning.
"You never talk about how good the weather and the ocean is," says
the sun-ravaged, white-bearded captain, "or God will jump up and throw
a hurricane at you."
*
Lurking predators
EVERY channel swimmer must overcome emotional hurdles, at least as
steep as the physical ones. For Attia, that included the fear of
swimming at night in an unknown ocean, reaching again and again,
forward into the colorless sea.
Once, crawling in darkness, he sensed something had changed.
Barracuda. From behind. They bared their razor teeth and surged
toward him. Attia amped up his stroke rate. He tried to pull away. But
he couldn't escape the sleek predators here in their domain, and they
bit and ripped at his ankles.
Then it ended, quite suddenly with Attia snapping awake. Still
home in his bed. It was only a dream, several weeks before he left for
California.
"There are so many things," he said, "that make this really frightening."
To say nothing about the rigors of preparation. While at Johns
Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Attia had logged as many as 100 hours a
week in his demanding residency. What little time remained he divided
among eating, sleeping and swimming ? three or four hours a day in the
pool and a swim each weekend of up to eight hours in northern
Virginia's Lake Barcroft.
No matter how well he budgeted his time, the roughly 26 miles of
training he could cram into a week left him at the low end for those
preparing to take on the Catalina Channel.
Many endurance swimmers begin training in childhood, but Attia did
not have a tremendous reservoir of experience to draw on. He swam his
first pool lap just five years ago and didn't complete his first open
water swim until the summer of 2004.
Most swimmers who start so late in life can be spotted with ease.
They're the ones churning the water furiously, producing little glide
per stroke.
"They usually just really, really struggle to get it," says John
Flanagan, Attia's coach and a trainer of Olympic medalists. "But
Peter's kinesthetic awareness is just so great that he is able to do
something that is totally alien to him. He's a beautiful swimmer."
At 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, with thick shoulders and chest, Attia
resembles less a distance swimmer and more a defensive back or the
boxer he once was.
Attia, who majored in mechanical engineering as an undergrad,
worked relentlessly on streamlining his body position in the water. He
drew diagrams to understand how to balance the center of gravity in his
belly and the center of mass in his chest ? forces that tend to drive
the upper body toward the surface, while dragging the lower body down.
He crammed a notebook with workout logs and sketches of stick
figures in motion, then broke it down in his mind. His ideal stroke, he
will tell you, begins by entering the water, "pinky first, immediately
rotating my humerus, catching water with my elbow high, pulling and not
seeing any bubbles because I've entered cleanly. And then rotating my
hips ? snap, snap, snap. It's really a beautiful, beautiful problem of
physics ? generating a torque to oppose the torque our body generates."
In the 11 days leading to his attempt, Attia and his wife holed up
in La Jolla, where he made daily swims to acclimate to the cold ocean.
In the couple's tiny room at the Travelodge, he spent hours planning
how to dilute and enhance a variety of sports dri
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge
