Swim fan
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023
In my memories, I grew up on a beach.
I didn’t really grow up on a beach. I actually grew up in a series of houses and apartments in the midwestern United States and Central Europe, about as far from a beach as you can get. But my grandparents lived on the beach, and in my memories, we spent every summer of my childhood there.
That’s also not true, however. We spent some part of some summers there, but not all summer, every summer. Childhood summers seem endless, though, so the beach takes up a tremendous amount of space in my psyche. Before I was even old enough to walk, my dad would scoop me up in his arms and wade with me into the surf, and it must have been then that the saltwater got into my veins, because I’ve been a beach girl at heart ever since.
So it is more than a little embarassing to admit that I lived in Brighton—a real, honest-to-god beach town—for over two decades before I dipped my toes in the water here. To be fair, a stony shore lapped by the frigid waters of the English Channel is not exactly my archetypal beach. The beach I grew up with in Florida has powdery sand that singes your feet in the heat of summer. The silty waves crash there endlessly, a natural white noise generator that has lulled me to sleep many a night. The surfers wear wetsuits in the winter, but the water is temperate—warm, even, in the summer. The air is heavy and smells of brine and dry sea oats. There are palm trees, you know? There’s a lot of sun. Sure, there are sharks and rip currents, too, but it’s a beach.
Brighton is one of the sunniest places in the UK, but honestly, that’s a pretty low bar. It’s often cloudy here, and more often than not it’s windy. The shingle beach is steep, and I find it massively painfully to walk on the stones with bare feet. Sometimes there are no waves to speak of, but sometimes there’s a brutal shore dump that can (as I now know) knock you off your feet and drag you back into the water. And that water, as mentioned, is not warm. The coldest water temperatures in northern Florida are about equal to the warmest water temperatures in Brighton—around 18C/64F (for perspective, I was generally never tempted to get into a pool unless it was about 30C/86F).
I guess what I’m saying is that Brighton never really resonated as a beach for me in the way a warm, sandy beach does, so it never crossed my mind to try swimming here. But saltwater is in my veins all the same, so when my friend Alison mentioned last summer that she was thinking of doing an introductory sea swimming lesson and she wondered if I’d be interested, it was like a switch flipped inside me—the beach switch—and I nearly jumped out of my seat with enthusiasm and said yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I want to swim in the sea!
A few weeks later, on a sparkling day in late September, clad in far too much neoprene (in retrospect), we took the plunge on Shoreham beach with Swim + Tonic Kath. The water was glassy clear, which I hadn’t expected, and it felt cold until it didn’t, sooner than I expected, and I floated on it and dived under it and looked across its brilliant expanse and thought: wait, this was right here the whole time?!
That moment of joyous realization changed everything. Alison and I did another sea swimming session with Kath, and we went along to the monthly meetup of the Shoreham Mental Health Swims group, who are an incredibly kind and welcoming and encouraging bunch of people, and we were having so much fun that we really wanted to keep going with the whole thing. So having only just dipped our toes into this watery new world, we went all in and signed up for the Arctic Tern Challenge with our local Seabirds swimming community. The challenge was to get into the sea at least once a month every month from November through April. Yes, I—who really have no tolerance for physical discomfort of any kind, and who would not previously have gotten into water that was cooler than about tepid bathtub temperature—decided it would be a good idea to voluntarily submerge myself in the English Channel all winter long.
And you know what? It was a good idea. It was a brilliant idea. I had never felt the kind of searing cold I felt while wading into the water here in February, when the sea temperature was about 7C/45F and the air was about the same and it was like being consumed by freezing fire. I had never felt the terrifying power of that shore dump, where you try to scramble up the slippery shingle to get out of the water but the waves grab you and pull you back in. I had never dragged myself out of my warm, cozy bed on a dark winter weekend morning and packed a big bag of stuff and bundled myself up and gone to the beach and unbundled myself and thrown on a bunch of cold-water gear and gotten into the churning water for all of two minutes before stumbling out again and stripping off the sopping wet gear and trying to get dressed with the wind whipping my clothes away from me and finally huddling with a granola bar and a thermos of hot tea hoping the afterdrop wouldn’t get me. I never realized I had the willpower to do any of this, or the fortitude. I can’t overstate how much I am not a “hardy” person in any sense. But it turns out that you can just decide: I’m going to get into that cold water. And then you do it, and eventually your perception of things like “cold” changes—as does your perception of yourself.
So I “dipped” all through the winter, and eventually the sun started shining longer each day, and the water slowly began to warm up, and there came a day when I realized I didn’t need the neoprene booties and gloves anymore, that I could just wade into the glittering sea and swim—and I mean properly swim, something I had never really done in the open water until this year. I started taking swimming lessons in a pool back in January with the aim of improving my technique (I’ve been swimming all my life and thought I was pretty decent at it until I tried to swim 100 meters consecutively during my first “front crawl improvers” lesson and had to stop and gasp for breath about 40 meters in—it’s all about the efficiency, folks!), and those lessons eventually moved to the sea so we could learn an entirely new set of skills. I spent many Friday afternoons this summer swimming along in a shoal with my other classmates, swallowing remarkable amounts of seawater as we navigated wind and waves and currents and groynes and other swimmers. I never knew all the different moods of the water here, and how radically the contours of the beach change with every passing storm, and what the tides do and what the wind does, and when you can brave the surf and when you’re better off giving it a miss. And in the process I befriended other women who love the sea as much as I do, and now I can always find someone to swim with when the mood takes me.
It’s been just over a year since Alison and I first took the plunge in Shoreham. The days are getting shorter now, the water’s getting cooler, and the Salty Seabirds have announced their Arctic Tern Challenge for this winter. The summer beach shoes are going to make way for winter booties, and I’ll be walking down to the beach in my oh-so-cozy changing robe instead of flip-flops and shorts. In the meantime, I’ve started taking a new swimming course: the Pool to Pier Program, which builds up to a pier-to-pier swim and an around-the-pier swim in the summer. Right now I can’t imagine being able to do it—but a year ago I couldn’t imagine even stepping foot into this water, and now I can’t imagine life without it. So who knows what’s possible?
