Firstly, a pupdate: thanks so much for your kind comments about Bella. She ended up having hip surgery out of town at Massey, New Zealand’s vet school, so she was in good hands. She is now at home recovering and we are so happy to have her back again. While taking care of her and following the vets’ instructions for post-op rehabilitation, which involves dog physio (!), I am also trying to take care of myself and swim when I can.
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It’s mid-June and we are almost at winter solstice here in Aotearoa. The mornings are sooo dark, the sun is low in the sky all day, and then darkness seems to fall abruptly at 5pm. It’s not very cold yet, though, so I haven’t gone into full soup-and-knitting mode.
I’ve been pleased to see so many mid-winter dips being organised around Wellington this month. People are really getting into it! Some people swim year-round like me, but for others this is their one sea swim outside of summer, and one lady told me it was her first winter swim EVER!
Yesterday morning I attended two solstice swims. The first was my Sunday group at 8am, involving a fun splash in the harbour followed by snacks and drinks with friends and family. Barb brought some mulled wine (which always conjures up happy memories of Berlin’s Christmas markets from when I lived there) and wow, it was potent and really warmed up my core temperature! A few hours later there was another swim at Hataitai Beach with dozens of people and a great atmosphere. We were all given a magnet afterwards that said: ‘Hataitai Polar Swim 2023’ (‘polar’ might be overstating things but it was nice to get a souvenir). I got chatting to a random person in the water, a man called Lester who is a regular swimmer, and he remarked on how you can bowl up to any sea swim and you’re guaranteed a warm welcome. It’s so nice.
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In my Sunday harbour group there are all sorts of people and everyone is welcome and accepted, no matter how fast or slow (I’m more the latter). Some have been open water swimming for decades. For them, it’s just a thing they quietly do every week without a song and dance; they’re not marvelling over the healing qualities of the sea, animatedly describing candy-floss-pink jellies, or rocking bright winter robes and bobble hats. Maybe in 20 years I will be more like them, but until then…
A few weeks ago I was talking to one bloke about his decades of open water swimming:
Me: “So you’ve been doing this for a while?”
Him: “Yep. 'Bout 20 years.”
“Wow. Have you swum all the NZ events too?”
“Yep.”
“Any you particularly enjoyed?”
“They’re all good.”
“Do you swim in the dark sometimes, at this time of year?”
“Yep.”
It was the coldest morning yet: clear and still and frosty, with the air temperature below 10°C and the water at 12. We shivered on the shore in the crisp morning light, wetsuited and non-wetsuited alike, as we waited for Barb’s 8am pep talk. A rich orange sun rose over the eastern hills, casting long shadows over the sand.
For my weekday dips I’m in togs and on Sundays I don a wetsuit, but I’m still not 100% sold on it. While it keeps my body a bit warmer I feel the cold more on my bare face and it takes me longer to adjust. It feels like an anaesthetic, masking the ‘pain’ (cold) but sometimes it’s better to feel the pain so your body knows what’s going on. My swimming is slower and I fret about hypothermia: am I getting the ‘umbles’? (Mumbling, fumbling, stumbling are all early signs to watch for.) Barb says if you can’t remember your phone number, get out. I can remember it but it is hard to quieten my thoughts once a Worry appears in my head. I slowly swim out to the first buoy, with my head mostly above water. Remember to breathe. Play with closing my eyes and feeling the sea all around me, hearing the gentle slosh of my hands moving through it. A dog barks in the distance on shore. Faint sirens. Sun on my eyelids. The sea is flat and glassy.
The hot coffee afterwards is always a treat to look forward to. Something about the early start, the cold, the swim, the people and the caffeine make me the happiest I feel all week.
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With a heady mix of solo and social swims, pool training and sea dips, I felt like I was getting my swim mojo back. I have entered the Legend of the Lake swim next March, which sounds forever away but time passes incredibly fast. I have – gulp – signed up for the Long Swim, which is 3.5km. While theoretically I could swim for free pretty much anywhere outdoors in NZ, the benefit of booking an event means I am motivated to train and keep up my fitness. (“You’ll have no trouble,” said Barb, “as long as you RELAX!”)
There are quite a few other swim events but what I like about this one is it’s in Rotorua, which is a beautiful part of NZ with thermal reserves and clear lakes. Last time we were there as a family was in early 2021, when my swim journey was just starting, and we booked a holiday house with its own little jetty on Lake Tarawera.
I remember getting into the lake in April, which for me at the the time felt brave – to be getting in any body of outdoor water post-summer – but then only swimming about 20m because I was still figuring out how to swim and how to ‘be’ in water.
It really was beautiful, but I was in the middle of book publicity and really struggling to ‘perform’ (as I saw it) in interviews and at writers’ festivals, and I felt like I didn’t belong to myself, and we were also in the middle of a pandemic which also didn’t help the stress levels.
So my dips in the lake felt like little oases in the chaos of the world.
I couldn’t believe how clear the water was.
The March 2024 event is in Blue Lake (Lake Tikitapu), which is a much smaller lake than Tarawera, and with a more achievable circumference. I have not swum there but I have driven past it and stopped for a few minutes and stepped to its edge. So I am looking forward to spending what will most likely be a couple of hours in it!
Now that’s it’s winter I’m more in dipping mode in the sea. While plenty of people enjoy daily sunrise dips in a group, I find those a bit challenging on weekdays (getting there, getting in, talking to people first thing in the morning, and getting changed and home again to continue the morning rush) so I tend to just dip by myself. I can do that at any point in the day, take minimal gear, stay in for a few minutes, and then I’m not as cold afterwards. I think of them as my ‘butterfly dips’ – fleeting, ephemeral, there and gone. One moment I’m immersed in a landscape painting, the next I’m home and getting on with my day.
That means I’m spending more time thinking about the pool and my technique, which I was feeling had stalled. I can swim 1km with no trouble, but not particularly well. A swim friend has been doing a training programme and forwarded me some handouts, then I watched a few YouTube videos. The main message is to relax and find balance in the water, then glide with a minimum of fuss rather than pushing and pulling and kicking. It’s called Total Immersion and it’s very graceful! You can see an example of the technique here. Because I swim for distance and fun and not speed/sprints, this technique suits me very well. I tried it at last week’s pool session and it felt really good.
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And finally (because this is getting very long), on Saturday I attended a Litter Intelligence workshop run by Sustainable Coastlines. It involved a beach cleanup, then sorting the litter into categories, weighing it, and inputting the data into their website where all the beach survey data is collated nationwide to show the bigger picture of what the litter is and where it comes from. It’s not glamorous but I think it has a lot of value for evidence-based pollution solutions, by tracing litter back to the source. A group of five of us picked up 800 pieces of litter within a 25x10m perimeter, mostly soft plastics. Horrible, but perhaps not as scarring as finding a human foot on the same beach.
Hopefully the litter data will be useful and it made the sea a tiny fraction cleaner. Sustainable Coastlines run similar events and training workshops around the country.
Firstly I'm so glad Bella is improving. Poor little girl - what an ordeal.
I love your water-report. I always think what a star you are to have accomplish what you do so soon, after learning to swim. I often think about knocking off distance, of training and conditioning my body, but then in summer, I just get in and have fun and good intentions disappear.
I start in my full wet suit this week - on Thursday for the Solstice. It'll be a quiet flop, just on my own - I will also wear gloves and boots but can no longer put my head under as I get terrible icecream headaches. Mostly I walk at armpit height but that's okay. Just to be in the water is amazing.
I also really liked the swim link - perpetual motion is such a lovely easy style, more like the way we were race-coached in the 1950's-60's. It was such a graceful style. Interesting that they don't close their fingers too, nor kick like mad. Lovely. Shall practice...
Thanks again, Shona.