Who Swims 21 Miles In The Middle of The Night In Open Water?!
My friend Ali, that's who.
One Of A Kind
My friend Ali was the 656th person to solo swim the Catalina Channel off the coast of Southern California. This swim is 21 miles of open water.
It goes without saying, she’s dedicated. She’s strong. She’s determined. But those words don’t really capture who she is, and I feel like it’s really important to understand her as a person before you learn about the incredible things she’s done.
In the end, I feel the best way I can describe her is to simply offer the response she gave me when I asked her to tell me about this incredible feat:
“First, I want to say that I recognize how privileged I am. To experience the journey of waking up to our own systemic racism in this country and then to talk about this swim goal of mine… I'm so aware of my privilege.”
And that’s Ali, in a nutshell.
So self-aware. So sensitive to others. As I talked to her about her Catalina swim, I learned that she’s currently supervising a volunteer phone bank for the upcoming election. Because of course she is.
Growing Up
I’ve known Ali since we were kids and in all that time she has been two things: very athletic and very into nature. I mean, when she was just a baby, her parents would carry her in a backpack and take her hiking. She started swimming when she was 6. In high school she started her own outdoors club and was on both the swim team and the tennis team. As an undergraduate at UCLA, she joined the water polo team.
I was happy to watch from afar. After an ill-fated camping trip with Ali and another friend in high school where I almost burned my face off, it was clear nature wasn’t totally my thing. When I tried to swim with her on the swim team in high school… let’s just say the only races I got scheduled for were the ones no one else wanted. When we were at UCLA together, I was too busy staying up all night to possibly do anything as strenuous as water polo, dear God.
She hiked the John Muir trail from Mount Whitney to Half Dome, which is over 200 miles. She hiked Kilimanjaro. Backpacked in Tasmania. She biked from San Francisco to Los Angeles. And. So. Much. More.
The girl doesn’t just love nature. It’s more than that.
“Things like the whistling sound of wind through conifer trees or the smell of wild fennel…. they remind me, ’oh, now I'm home.’”
Open Water
Her first foray into open water swimming came when she had an internship in the Cape Cod area. “I found it was a really beautiful way of getting exercise but also feeling like I was in nature, whereas going to the pool just felt like work.”
When she read the book Swimming to Antarctica by Lynne Cox (the first person to swim from the US to the Soviet Union via the Bering Strait) in grad school, she knew that she wanted to someday do a channel swim. ‘Someday’ most likely being after she retired because of the sheer time involved to train for something like that.
She earned a PhD in oceanography and got a job with the federal government in the Department of Energy, briefly working in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Eventually, she transitioned to working in energy policy at the California Public Utilities Commission, and by the time Covid came around she had been there for three years.
When everything got shutdown, suddenly she found herself gaining back the 2- 3 hours she usually spent commuting. At the same time, with public pools closed, more and more people took to the open water. It wasn’t long before she started seeing and supporting friends that were training for channel swims.
“I caught the bug as far as, okay, I don't have to wait until after I retire from my work. It’s possible to do this and have a full time job at the same time.”
But… why? That’s what I couldn’t wrap my head around. Why would you WANT to swim 21 miles?
“Initially I think, | was going for the athleticism, the competition. And then I think it changed into… can I just physically do this?”
Training
First, in order for it to be counted as an official swim by the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation she would need to book one of three approved boats to be her guide and support on the big day. Their availability was what would determine the date she would be able to do her swim.
She booked the boat for September 2022 and started training that February, which would give her about seven and a half months to prepare.
She did most of her training swims in Northern California off of Albany Beach. She started with swimming around 5 miles per week and then built to swimming over 30 miles a week.
“I'd get up and start my swim at like 5 a.m. and then finish at 8:30a.m. and then start work at 10 a.m. and then try and find a break time at 2 or 3 p.m., take a half an hour cat nap, and then go back to work.”
When I asked what those swims were like: “monotonous and mind numbingly boring. “I would tow my buoy with my feeds into the water, anchor it, and then I would just do an hour swim out, come back, go out another hour, come back.”
And to top it off, she was training in the San Francisco Bay, notorious for its cold water, wind, zero visibility, and choppy waves. Fun!
It was grueling, but there were some plusses:
First: “It was the first time in my life where I was tired of eating. Getting enough calories in was requiring a lot of chewing and a lot of time spent eating. So, I switched to really high calorie for low volume foods like lots of Nutella and ice cream.”
Second: “I really loved having this swimming goal as an excuse to say no to things. It was empowering to make decisions only for yourself instead of what others are expecting of you.”
Okay, I can get behind both of these. I mean, ice cream is delicious and empowerment is liberating!
Time To Do The Thing
For a solo endeavor, there were a lot of people involved. There was the support boat crew, but then there was also Ali’s personal crew made up of kayakers, buddy swimmers, a feed prep person and then a chief crew person to manage it all. Last, there were two observers from the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation to monitor the whole thing to make sure that all the rules were followed.
The jump was scheduled for around 10:30 p.m.
Yep, most of the swim would be in the dead of night. When I thought about it, this made sense since swimming in broad daylight for 16 hours would probably be pretty brutal, but STILL! This seemed nuts to me. Like, isn’t it hard enough, already?
Also, despite being about to swim in open water at night, she was in just a swimsuit, cap, goggles, and earplugs. Nothing more was allowed except zinc oxide for sun protection.
Ali would dive in at Doctors Cove on the west end of the island and swim straight to the mainland to a place called Smugglers Cove.
“I think my main emotion was, ‘I can't believe this is finally here.’ After so, so, so many months, it was just the surreal-ness of ‘this is really happening’. I don't remember nervousness like I have before going into a water polo competition or going on stage to public speak. It was just, ‘Oh my God, I'm actually gonna jump in the water tonight.’”
And then it was time to do the thing.
“The jumping in was actually very funny because my first reaction was, ‘I forgot my snorkel!’ because my association with being in the water in Catalina is scuba diving. So at first I was really confused and I'm like, ‘I don't have my snorkel!’”
Once she remembered she was actually there to swim 21 miles and not look at fish, however, everything was fine.
The Swim
Not long after the start, Ali encountered her first hiccup.
“About 45 minutes in I was kind of, pinballing between the power boat and the kayaker guiding me. You're supposed to swim parallel to the kayaker but it was totally dark and so I couldn't really gauge the distance. All my crew on the boat started yelling that I was going to be swimming twice the distance if I didn’t straighten out.”
Ali thought about how to fix this and came upon a solution:
“It was a beautiful clear night and eventually I realized that if I just looked at the stars, Orion should be at 3:00 in my eye-line when I breathe. And if I it is, I know I'm swimming in a straight line.”
Good news? This worked. Bad news? “It took me like, 5, 6 hours to figure this out.”
Feeding
Because of the immense amount of energy she was expending, she determined she would need to eat something every hour for the first 6 hours, and then every half hour after that if she didn’t want to hit a wall and crash.
“You're also not allowed to hold onto the kayak during the swim because it can disqualify you, so, to eat, they throw a small container out on a rope and then you just roll over on your back and open it and take it in like an otter. You wanna be able to do it in less than a minute.”
Once she said, otter, I immediately pictured this:
Pain
After several hours down, she wasn’t getting tired, but she was starting to have various pains.
“The first one was a carbon dioxide headache, I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. So I changed how often I was breathing which worked. But, as soon as it went away, something else started up.
“The first eight hours it’s like the pain was just shifting around my body. And I'm thinking, as long as it keeps moving to different places, I'm good. It's when it locks in in one spot, then I’ll have a problem.
“Right then, around hour nine, this muscle right where the scapula connects to the spine started spasming.
“At the next feed, I said to my kayaker ‘Drugs!’ They gave me some Tylenol and it kicked in 30 minutes later and I felt great again.”
Final Stretch
“People talked afterwards about it being a beautiful sunrise, but I wasn't looking up too much. You don't wanna see how far or how close the land looks to you. But I do remember the light shining through the water and looking at the rays and the deep dark blue and it being really stunning.”
Things start to change. “I start to see kelp. There's these columns of kelp coming up from the sea floor, really beautiful.”
Then, all of a sudden:
“The crew were like, ‘You can look up now!’”
“And so I look towards shore, and I’m maybe a thousand yards away, and I had a whole bundle of folks that wanted to support from the beach, and i see all these huge fluorescent signs. I was so excited.”
Finished
“I came in right under 13 hours.”
She had done it. She trained for 7 months, she swam 21 miles in open water in the dead of night wearing only a bathing suit, and she finished three hours faster than she had thought she would.
Afterwards, she recovered. However I was surprised to learn how little she seemed to need it. She had done all that and was feeling fine just a few days later.
At the end of the season, the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation had a banquet where they gave the people who completed the solo swim a certificate, a participation medal and a swim cap.
Ali says now that she’s done it, everyone asks what she’s going to do next.
“I'm good. That was a life goal. I'm done. I feel like l've done what I wanted to accomplish in life with swimming the Catalina Channel.”
Lasting Benefit
Obviously, there was a huge physical benefit in completing such a difficult task to be sure, but there was another benefit that Ali gained that seems far more meaningful:
“Immediately after I completed it, for the following 3 months, I definitely felt like I had a new confidence - that if I have a goal and I set a plan, I can make it happen.”
“And I carried that confidence with me when I decided to make the transition to leave my job to start my own non-profit consulting business.”
That’s right. Ali started her own company. And, because it’s Ali, it’s for underserved communities to help them implement their own solutions to environmental justice, climate justice, energy justice.
It’s this part that inspires me most about the whole damn thing.
I mean, yes, the rest of it is incredibly impressive. However, to truly allow yourself to see what you’re capable of, and to believe it, and to let that guide you… we all know how hard that is. I’ve been trying to do that my whole life. I may not swim the Catalina Channel, but Ali’s story shows me that challenging ourselves and persevering can be a path to self-belief.
I think I need to find my ‘Catalina Channel swim’.
But, like, not 21 miles at night in open water. That’s nuts.
I have so many questions but the main one I keep wondering is 'What about sharks?'!!
Ali moved into my cohousing community when we had a green that looked like a golf course.The problem was that she was embarrassed that her friends would drive by and see sprinklers running every night. She immediately figured out how to convince the caretaker that the grass would grow better if it were encouraged to reach deep for water instead of waiting to be sprinkled. She did this with calculations that measured exactly how much water the grass needed and the rainfall. The sprinklers were only used when the rainfall was below a certain level. Ali can do anything! Wonderful writing.