The Naturalist: Simultaneous

Are you drowning, or are you swimming? Or are you simultaneously doing both? So much of life is this dichotomy.

I am training for a triathlon to swim 2.4 miles in low-50-degree Fahrenheit water starting at 12 a.m. under the July midnight sun of Iceland. The swim must be completed in under two hours.

I don’t know that I can do this. Let alone bike 127 miles afterwards over mountain passes, then run a marathon over a glacier and back again — the glacier is  the one covering the extinct volcano in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I’ve been swimming in Gardiner’s Bay for six weeks now, in a special wetsuit for the cold water of the race. I haven’t been able to complete the 2.4 mile distance yet.

But I have spent a lot of time in the paradise and prison of my own mind. I am focused on one thing: my next breath. Are you drowning, or are you swimming? Or are you simultaneously doing both?

There is nothing natural about swimming. Not in the way that any child instinctually knows how to run. It must be learned and then practiced.

For many of us, navigating life’s social interactions is much like swimming. It will never be natural. But through frequent practice, inept social non-drowning becomes adept verbal swimming. Life’s convenient requirement of constant training produces these often ignored gains.

This last year of pandemic quarantine — and the limbo that followed — took that training away. Hidden behind masks, we were all asked to swim with one arm tied.

I believe mental physiology mirrors physical physiology. The reversibility principle in sports training requires that you consistently load the system past capacity, or you lose the gains of previous training. Past a certain age, each year comes with an innate loss of general fitness. The elegance of training is that it serves to preserve gains and prevent loses.

Before the last six weeks, I hadn’t been swimming for over seven months and no open-water swimming for even longer. I have no prior experience with cold-water swimming requiring silly neoprene boots, gloves and a hood.

I bought the gear when I signed up for the race shortly after that last swim. Months past staring at the items in a spare bedroom. Fear welled up each time, knowing that the time would come to enter the cold water of Gardiner’s Bay. Then not drown. Then swim. Then swim farther than I ever had before. Under new conditions. In a transformed world.

The time arrived. Poetically, so did the COVID-19 vaccine, the reopening of Iceland to allow the race, and the easing of social-distancing and mask-wearing here at home.

As for my return to the water and people, I’m comfortably uncomfortable. Or, uncomfortably comfortable. The way that consecutive distances of not-drowning for 100 yards can equal miles of swimming. The way that maskless conversations do graduate to handshakes and hugs. 

For others, people lost everything this past year. And people rightfully had unsurmountable challenges they could not transcend. And people still have breathing that never ceased to feel like drowning.

When I panic in the water, I think about this. I search for grace in practicing the transformation of one feeling into another. It’s inside that place, what I call “the simultaneous,” my state of being balanced between fear and flow, that I find my blessing.

I’m lucky for my practice. I’m lucky for my training. I’m lucky for the ridiculous challenge of my race. I’m lucky to be alive.

Completing the race is not the reward. I certainly may not finish. But that was never the point.

Are you drowning, or are you swimming?

Or are you simultaneously doing both?

No, I’m just focused on one thing: my next breath.