Saturday morning, 5 A.M. Jason texts me: I’m nervous, but excited. He’s about to swim three miles from the Statue of Liberty to the World Trade Center—with Navy SEALs.
Three weeks ago, Jason joined me to swim across the Hudson River from Newburgh to Beacon, 60 miles north of New York City. Now, he’s on a barge by Battery Park with firefighters, cops, soldiers, and veterans for an annual charity swim to benefit the Navy SEAL Foundation. Besides a three-mile swim from Jersey City to Manhattan, they’ll do 300 pushups, 66 pull-ups, and run two miles.
I want to cheer Jason in person, but his swim conflicts with dog training school for our new puppy, River. Life is choices. So while Jason swims with SEALs in the city, I spend a sleepy Saturday in the suburbs.
Today, I’m tired from swimming a mile at the pool yesterday—and three times this week. For the first time in three months, I’m not training for an event. And for the first time in two years, I’m not following a training plan. Instead, I’m dabbling in random regimens. Some people swim spontaneously; I need structure to stay focused. Still, it’s more challenging to maintain motivation after Adult Swim camp and the Hudson River swim, i.e. without external accountability.
I walk River. I watch the Spanish broadcast of the Spain-France men’s soccer Olympic gold medal match. At dog school, we review prior lessons (Touch! Sit! Come!), then learn a new command (Stay!). We learn how to walk the dog properly: leash on the left, River on the right.
No word from Jason.
I watch the USA-Brazil women’s soccer Olympic gold medal match, also in Spanish. My son and I throw a baseball in the backyard. I doze reading Karaoke Ñery, a Uruguayan detective novel.
Still, no word from Jason.
I walk River. After dinner, I watch Pacto de Silencio, a Mexican miniseries about a young woman seeking vengeance on the four women who abandoned her as a baby. I tell myself watching six hours of tv today is educational because it’s all in Spanish. No subtitles. My brother calls such rationalizing the Foreign Language Loophole.
Still, no word from Jason.
Now I’m worried. After recently swimming one mile across a river upstate, the notion of swimming three miles in urban open water seems ludicrous, like swimming across the English Channel. Imagine 220 laps in a pool, but in murky water too deep to stand, no lap lanes or black lines on the floor to guide you, and choppy current strong enough to sweep you out to sea.
As a firefighter, Jason rescues people for a living. What if he needed to be rescued?
The Same River Twice
Sunday morning, 7 A.M. I text Jason: How did it go?
No reply.
Two hours later, Jason texts selfies from the event—and says he feels fantastic.
I’m relieved.
Not only did he finish the three-mile swim, but the event felt easier and less stressful than the one-mile Hudson River swim we did together a few weeks ago
“I did the training, so the physical part was easy,” he says. “It’s the psychological part that you need to conquer.”
The discrepancy between Jason’s two swims in the Hudson—three weeks and 60 miles apart—reminded me of Heraclitus’s maxim. “No man ever steps in the same river twice. It’s not the same river—and he’s not the same man.”
Swimming—like any practice—can be a paradox: predictable and surprising, familiar and strange, ordinary and magical.
Love the “foreign language loophole”!
I’m currently making use of it while watching Italian Netflix series 😃