Ten minutes earlier, when the starting gun had sounded on the fifth open water race of my life—which made it also the fifth competitive swim of any sort I’d ever entered—the ocean had been bottle-green and glassy-smooth, rolling in calm, even undulations to the Virginia Beach shoreline. Now it had turned into a sloppy, wind-driven mess—an entirely different ocean of whitecapped, gunmetal-gray water breaking over my head, with a nasty southbound current apparently determined to deliver me straight to the Outer Banks. I inched north, past the oceanfront hotels and lounging beachgoers, stroke by stroke against the battering sea, finally to win through and stagger across the finish line on the beach, where they would soon raise the red “danger” flags on the lifeguard stands.
So it is with competitive open water swimming, a sport now enjoying a surge of popularity worldwide. Typically involving mass starts with up to hundreds of swimmers, and subject to all the whims of nature, every race is a swim into the unknown. But you take what the day dishes out, from winds and waves to jellyfish stings or a kick in the nose, and you do so happily, because, for reasons nearly impossible to explain to anyone but fellow open water devotees, plunging into murky, wild waters and racing through a crowded melee of thrashing arms and legs is exactly my idea of fun.
Open water swimming debuted as an Olympic event with a 10K (yes, that’s 6.2 miles in the water) in Beijing in 2008. In Virginia, however, open water swimming has a deep history, with several long-running races, including the Jim McDonnell Lake Swims in Reston (23 years), the Chris Greene Lake Cable Swim outside Charlottesville (33 years), and the Jack King One Mile Ocean Swim in Virginia Beach (27 years), where I found myself enjoying such a lively time of it in 2009.
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