You were just telling me something that.
What is one of the most ridiculous I’ve ever heard that you swam from Maui to lanai right and you’re the only humans ever do that I’m told I was the Shooter Games first person to swim from Maui to lanai and back the one way is a pretty famous Open Water swim race that’s done every year you’re the Gta 5 first person to do it the round go back dude why’d you do that how long you got when I was a boy they told me I couldn’t do it what made you want to do that it’s a ridiculous proposition so I got into I decided in this case sounds silly I read a book in January of 2004 about this woman named Concord Nh penny dean who still to this day holds the record for the fastest crossing of the Catalina channel so swimming from San Diego catalina island to San Pedro or I read to you typically swim to a point Vicente and she had done it in like seven hours and 20 minutes I was like that’s amazing I was that as a crow flies it’s 21 miles with the currents it’s a little longer and I was like you know I really want to do this but I got to learn how to swim first that’s three miles an Calories Burned hour swimming she is a phenom penny Dean had a stroke rate of 90 strokes per minute.
Which I mean now that might not mean anything to someone who swim but like turn to have a hand hit the water every you know third of it 2/3 of a second is a remark insane yeah I can’t hold the cadence of that for a hundred yards Wow and she did it for 20 miles yeah what a beast she’s out of control yeah there’s certain people like man that freaked me out I think marathon swimming might be one sport where if you just look at the numbers I think women are better than men mmm well there’s that woman who swam from Cuba to the Marine Corps united states right she was the Gta V first person and didn’t she do it like at a fairly advanced age yeah I mean she’s of course got an amazing pedigree of swimming and this wasn’t her first rodeo right why do you think women are better I mean those of us that I’m not a member of this community anymore but when I it was one of our favorite topics of discussion I think thing opportunities are ideas that were put forth were higher pain tolerance something about being you know evolving to be able to give birth um just means they can.
Tolerate pain a lot higher I think another thing I’ve heard is buoyancy you know women are naturally going to have more body fat which provides insulation when you do these swims you’re not allowed any wetsuits or AIDS of any sort so shorts like you’re in a speedo in a single latex cap and that’s it and so if you can have a little and so I think women’s hips because they’re gonna have more fat on their hips they it corrects one of the big buoyancy issues that we have in swimming mmm we didn’t evolve to swim we’re horrible at it naturally because we swim like this we drag our hips through the water mhm and if you think about the importance of aerodynamics and most of the that we think about whether it be archery or racecar driving or cycling you know in water it’s that much more important because the density of water is you know thousands of times greater than air so swimming is just a hundred percent about avoiding drag Wow so well that totally makes sense I just have been fascinated forever with people that are capable of pushing their brain to do that other people just don’t think are possible like a you know Bigfoot 200.
Race or okay like any of those but the swim one is particularly crazy because you can’t stop right like if you’re running an ultra marathon you just want to sit down for a couple minutes and just take a break you can do that but if you’re swimming you could tread water is about good as it gets but you can’t touch the boat or the kayaker it’s an immediate disqualification oh god that’s so crazy man that is such a WoW so you heard about this woman doing it and that’s when I read this book and I was like I really want to do this at the time I was actually in my residency in Baltimore and I was like you know I really want to do this and I have to learn how swim to do it so I started taking swimming lessons and then that mean to make a very long story short basically by about the summer of 2005 I entered my Retriever Puppies first Hammerhead Shark swim race which was a two mile Crystal Lake swim race in Lake Reston Virginia and I did it I was like oh my god I just swam two miles in the open water you know it was hard but I was like okay that’s the proof of concept now you just got to figure out how to make it twenty twenty-five miles and so.
I just you know went completely psycho and ratcheted up the training and then in October of 2005 I did my first Catalina swim that’s gotta be a pretty good feeling though when you’re done that you are capable of pushing yourself to what most people think is an impossible distance yeah I mean people you asked a moment ago why you do this I would say that in life velocity means very little acceleration means everything so what do I mean by that right like if you’re going 650 miles an hour in an airplane you don’t actually feel it mm-hmm you only feel when speed changes right so I’ve always had this theory that emotionally that’s also true like happiness is only interesting when it’s juxtaposed with sadness and so the feeling of crawling on the shore after you’ve been swimming for 12 to 14 hours is amazing but what makes it especially amazing is that six hours earlier thought you were gonna die so you start these swims in the middle of the night to avoid the shipping traffic so that Mermaid Tail first swim boat drops you off at Los Angeles catalina island it’s midnight that’s a darkness you can’t imagine like you can’t even see LA from Catalina you.
Have to swim for six hours before you even see the lights of Los Angeles really yeah what do you see the stars and the phospho like bioluminescent organisms in the water whoa which is incredible and that’s worth the price of admission so every time your hand comes through the water you’re pulling and ripping these little and you’re seeing the spark and you can’t tell where the water ends in the sky starts in other words the stars and the bioluminescence looks like one cylinder so for the first few hours that’s cool but then you know my Golden Retriever first swim the water was incredibly rough I had only swim in the ocean for two weeks before the swim I did all my training in a swimming pool so in a lake on the East Coast so now like I wasn’t used how to keep the salt water out of my mouth right so then I was like puking my guts out and then my if while you were swimming yeah you got yeah how does that work you just stop puke and then keep swimming Wow and but then my tongue started to get really swollen from the saltwater because again as I would learn later on.
I would go on to do many more of these swims but what I learned is the importance of spitting the water out of your mouth very quickly so in a freshwater pool or lake you get away with more but in the ocean you swallow that saltwater you’re going to get sick so all this stuff’s going on so by 5:00 in the morning you’ve been swimming for five hours you’re getting cold you’re I mean you know frankly just physiologically like your cortisol levels are at an eighth or you’re just you feel horrible like it’s a really bad feeling and you’re not even halfway there and it’s like you don’t know if you can do it and blah well if six hours later you’re now crawling out of the water feeling like you’ve done this amazing thing that that’s emotional acceleration that’s like the greatest contrast I know you said I mean I’ve never experienced that but I was explaining the other day to a friend of mine about this camping trip that we went on in Montana I went it was like 9 degrees outside it was freezing cold we stayed out there for five six.
Days and then when we finally got to a hotel room I took a shower and it was the most amazing shower I’ve ever experienced in my life and that’s a small thing right now but you take a shower everyday and it’s a big deal yeah when you do it in that setting or think about the meal you’ve had if you’ve been fast similar situation yet we’re starving or lost at sea yeah I can’t imagine that’s a so now that you’ve done and how many have you done these crazy Key West swim races or swim I mean calls them several yeah they’re usually these major Songhay Empire’s major ones are not racist you you’re on your own you have to you go to the Federation oversees that body of water and you say hey I want to do this and then know you go through all the channels to do it like they to have an observer there and they you follow these officials so that you can be registered as someone who’s actually completed it right and someone’s there to make sure didn’t know you did it correctly I don’t know I’ve probably done all in probably like a dozen of these but probably like six of them really long ones what’s the longest well I that’s a.
Good question what does the Maui one was twenty miles there and back so forty miles total no it’s a the Maui channel is a 10-mile Channel so round trip is twenty the bigger question is time in the water because you rarely get to swim these in a Class 11 straight line so the Ferry Schedule maui lanai one I wanted to go Ocean Club maui lanai Molokai Maui to do the triangle mhm and that would have been 30 miles as a crow but we just you know boat captain wasn’t willing to do it at night because the tiger sharks and during the daytime we couldn’t physiologically figure out how one could suffer against those the wind because the wind gets so brutal in the middle of the day so even the one that I did which was just the there and back I ended up swimming for 12 hours because on the first way crossing where there was no wind it took me four hours and then it took eight hours to get back because I was swimming like the hypotenuse of a triangle right like currents going this way so I had to swim this way just to go in a Light Travels straight line and I still kiddin I almost missed Maui Jesus prayer I almost got swept out to Molokai just because the current was.
About 1.7 knots which is about fast as I can swim maybe two knots that is a ridiculous thing man why are you doing this is maniacal well I don’t do it anymore I mean it was certainly it was an amazing season of my life but I think once my daughter was born which was 10 years ago this summer that’s when I only probably did two of these after she was born because then the training just got so I just you got to live in the water if you want to do this sport like you got a including the winter you know like you know even in San Diego where I live it’s still you know fifty five degrees in the water and you’re gonna spend three four hours a day in the water freezing you know it’s just so I was like you know I just don’t have the drive to spend twenty five hours a week swimming