Time to Read:
The water is perfect.
It’s the kind of color that you could argue with someone whether it was blue or green – and you’d both be right. What wouldn’t be up for debate, though, is how beautiful it is. See for yourself.
We are living out our week in a hotel on the bay in Matsuzaki, Japan – a town that it seems the world forgot about. It’s filled with hot springs and striking coastlines, a secret getaway that you would think would be hard to keep people from flooding into. But still, the streets are mostly empty and the atmosphere is one of a quaint small town that hides a long list of “used to be”s in the history behind its quiet and charming facade. There is a natural isolation to its geography that has kept it from becoming a typical resort town like some of the other spots along the Izu Peninsula. But, if you manage to get to it, it boasts beautiful traditional architecture, a stunning coastline and a killer view of Mt. Fuji peaking through the clouds.
And, of course, it has the most important thing for a rag tag group of swimmers from around the globe – crystal, clear, blue (or is it green?) waters. And miles and miles of it. Or kilometers, of course.
Our fearless leaders are the folks over at Effortless Swimming and they have planned an absolutely amazing week of swimming up and down the coastline of Japan for us. They even organized a special ceremony at a local shrine where a Shinto priest did a special blessing on us for safety and protection in the waters.
The food is out of this world and our swim coaches are the best of the best. And, I am definitely giving them a lot to work with.
We had a great morning in the pool where they video’d our swimming and gave us each feedback to tighten up our strokes.
Anyone that swims or has ever tried to work on improving their swim stroke knows that swimming is a profoundly technical sport. The amount of body parts that have to be just so in order to move through the water with ease and speed is astounding. Once the right patterns are all in your body, it’s mostly a physical game. But, on the way there, there is no sport that will keep your brain more occupied than swimming. It takes so much focus to keep track of all of the ways you need to reign your bodies natural flailing instincts into form. And there is so much form that needs to be just so. Elbows out, armpit open, head looking forward (but not too forward) and down (but not too down), hips up, ankles loose and so on and so on and so on.
There is no question that I’m getting better thanks to their fantastic coaching…but there is a long road ahead of me still.
But, I actually didn’t come on this trip to get better at swimming. That is just an added bonus. I came here to swim. I came here to celebrate. I came here to marvel.
Check, check and check!
And, we have an absolutely amazing group from around the world. Everyone is fun to be around. Everyone is kind. Everyone is game. Great people, great scenery, great food, great swimming. What more could you ask for?!
And, as my language adventures are slowly taking up residence in my memories, their ripples are still very much alive. Not only am I enjoying the occasional moments to get to practice my Japanese with some locals, but I have two new languages that I’m getting to absorb! One of our two brilliant coaches is, Taz, a sparkling South African woman with beautiful sun-kissed blond locks and a killer swim stroke. As all great swimmers do, she makes it look so easy – cutting through the water, well, effortlessly. She has now taken it upon herself to be my personal Afrikaans coach as well. I’ve already got down “please”, “thank you”, “beautiful” and a few other colloquialisms. She has her work cut out for her trying to improve my swim stroke, but damn sure, she’ll have me up and speaking a little bit of Afrikaans before the week is done!
Then there are Bojan and Manuela, a couple from Austria. I am sad to say that I seem to have lost my confidence to speak German. Once I start studying again, I know it is all still there. But, Manuela has been so kind to me, willing to speak to me in German, even if I respond in English. I understand her almost completely, but I need to warm back up to actually using it. Unlike some of my other languages where my speaking has remained buoyant, I seem to have become German shy. And, even though they live in Austria, Bojan is originally Croatian, and they both speak it. So, now I’ve got a few Croatian words under my belt too! In swimming, there is no question that I’m in the back of the pack doing my best to keep up. In the waters of language, however, I continue to swim with some degree of ease.
It’s the morning of Day 4 and we’ve got another big day of swimming in front of us after 3 glorious days already in the rear view.
Day 1 was a “short” swim of about 2.5K just in front of the hotel in the bay where the waters are still a bit brown and dirty from a recent typhoon. On this round-the-world trip, I have managed to get a handful of swims in. But only that. So, a week of intensive swimming everyday is definitely giving me a run for my money. In France, China and Japan each, I’ve managed to get in the water, though never much more than 1K each time. I remember, back in my days of attending Masters Swimming 3 or 4 days/week when I was swim training more rigorously, that an average day in the pool would easily hit 2.5K. But, these days, that kind of distance was a real stretch for me. Once we passed 1.5K on day one, I was a limp noodle. Translation – it kicked my ass. But, the nice thing about swimming is, if you can just swing your arm around one more time, you can keep going. So, I did. I knew I had much more distance in front of me, so I pushed myself to get there.
Day 2, we ventured out on the boat a bit up the coast to get our first glimpse of those bright blue-green waters, with an epic view of Mt. Fuji soaring in the background. It is wild to float in the sea and look up at the summit peaking through the clouds, imagining myself standing on it a week from now looking back down at these distant waters.
Those of you that know me well know that my swimming journey began barely more than a decade ago – and it began smack in the middle of a near-debilitating fear of swimming that I inherited when I was an asthmatic child struggling to breathe. Remembering a not too distant past where I couldn’t swim more than four strokes in a pool without having a panic attack while I was busy carving my hands through the soft sheen of these pacific waters with a view somewhere between 30 and 70 meters to the volcanic rock on the seafloor far below was an absolute marvel to me. I don’t think that myself from a decade ago would have believed it was possible for me to be here in waters so vast and so deep, hanging with a bunch of legit swimmers – relaxed, calm and enjoying every second of it.
Even though I have overcome those fears that would have robbed me of this tremendous experience, they have left a bit of debris in my nervous system. Every time we’ve gotten in the water, there is a moment where I feel the old feelings, not in their entirety, but a slight whisper of them. In those moments, while I’m still getting acclimated to my surroundings, I find myself picking my head up out of the water looking around for the boats. But those moments are fleeting and fall quickly into the depths below me as I start to find my rhythm.
Then came yesterday’s swim. It was our first big coastline push of the trip. We set out on a 25 minute boatride down the coast until it was time to jump in. A few folks have opted for wetsuits. Despite the fact that I tend to run cold, each day, I’ve opted to skip the wetsuit. The water, for me, has been a perfect temperature to sustain a long swim. Depending on who’s watch you ask, we swam somewhere north of 3K before stopping for lunch on the boats at the Bay of Monkeys. You can guess where it got its name. We ate our lunch while we watched the monkeys play around on shore. Then, we hopped back in the water after an hour or so of digestion to pile on another 2K. For those of us still bucking the metric system, that means we swam north of 3 miles yesterday. The Ironman Race that I trained so long and hard to be able to participate in back in 2019 starts with a 2.4 mile swim. When I think about how impossible that felt and how long it took me to get in a shape where I could do that, I can barely comprehend that yesterday, basically without any training at all, I swam 1.5 times that. My mind is blown.
But, let’s be clear, I was a limp noodle again by the time we reached the top of those 5K while others of my compatriots were still going strong. But still…wow.
Oh, and did I mention the caves? Our swimming guides pulled us through the crystal waters inside the rock walls of nature’s strikingly beautiful funhouse. Every once in a while I just had to stop swimming to look around.
I wish I had words to describe the feel of cutting through that water with the volcanic cliffs peering over us, or the cavern walls curled up around us.
I don’t.
But, thanks to an onboard photographer/videographer and folks in the kayaks and on the boats with cameras too, I have plenty of pictures to give you what my words simply cannot.
Oh, and I also got my first jellyfish sting and a back full of sunburn thanks to forgetting to put my sunblock on. It all just makes me feel that much more initiated and welcomed into the ocean.
I will admit, without the training behind me to really qualify me for such an intensive swim experience as this, I am whooped. You would think that exerting myself so hard would mean better sleep. Not so. I am definitely waking up tired everyday. But, it’s a good kind of tired. It’s a pushing myself kind of tired. It’s a going for it kind of tired. It’s a living life to the fullest and squeezing every last drop of life out of it as I can type of tired.
With my body working to the max, everytime I go to get in the water, my first thought is, “you’ve gotta be kidding me”. That’s my body talking. But, my second, third, fourth and fifth thought…and every one after that is, “Heck yea!” By the time I’m in the air about to plunge into the water for the first time, all doubts have disappeared. And once I’m bobbing in the water, my body starts to get on board as it keeps getting the message that we are doing this. And after a few strokes, all tiredness, all doubts, any drops of reticene are gone and all parts are on the same page.
That page is a simple page filled with the simple pleasures of one stroke after another immersed in nature’s brilliant colors. Swimming bliss.
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