I've had a lot of people ask me about why I have taken up the weekend sport of ice swimming in the Chesapeake Bay. They also wonder why I enjoy submerging myself in 30-something degree stream near my house. Even though I do it every day and I'm clearly happier, it can't possibly be healthy, comfortable or normal.
Friends:
"Are you freaking kidding me? I don't even like going in our cold neighborhood pool!"
"Maybe we need to stage an intervention."
"Is that...even...safe?"
"The Party Trick that Opens Your Heart"-- Bob Soulliere, Breathe Your Power
A life well-lived always has heartbreak. The last couple of years, I have had a lot of it...some gradual and some sudden. Nothing is ever broken beyond repair, but if I'm being honest with myself, my heart just kind of got numb.
It's not so much that I found ice swimming as that it found me. Funny how those things work. It found me in October 2020, exactly 5 years after the core of my identity vanished in a second. I think true love is like that...you don't find it when you are actively looking, but at the same time you can only recognize it for what it is when your heart is open and willing. Sometimes a broken heart finds love in the most unsuspecting of places.
The Before
In 2014, I fell on the sidewalk while training for the Boston Marathon. I didn't know it at the time, but I cracked the cartilage in my knee. I took a few weeks off from running, but kept up with all of my workouts by running in the deep water, joined by my dedicated teammates Mike, Tony and Jessica, who took turns "running" with me in the pool.
When I returned to the roads, I was thrilled that I had kept all of my fitness. Tony and I ran PRs in Boston. When I crossed the finish line, my love for myself and gratitude for what my healthy body was capable of flowed strong.
I had hated running when I was a kid. I wasn't good at team sports; I'm clumsy as hell, afraid of the ball, and have no spacial awareness. And yet I had just run a PR in Boston, the most exclusive marathon in the world. Not only that, but my finishing time qualified me to be in the first wave of runners the following year.
I felt a great love for my teammates when I finished that race. Never could I imagine competing at the level I did without the inspiration, laughter, and unconditional friendship of my Capital Area Runners friends. It wasn't just about pushing each other on intervals and the high after a good workout. As we ran through Rock Creek Park, we discussed nuances of jobs and relationships, current events, poop jokes, our college romances, kids' struggles in school, and childhood pets. They were (and still are) my friends, in the truest sense.
Maybe Just One More
After Boston, I knew something wasn't right with my knee, but Brett and I had decided to see if Baby #3 was in the cards for us. I cut back on my running in order to fatten up a bit. I still needed to focus my mind on some kind of endurance event (my friend and mentor Bob Soulliere says, "your brain is a dog--if you don't give it something to chew on, it will bite you"... and it's true). So, while spending a small fortune feeding my pregnancy test addiction, I also trained for my first long swim, DCAC's Swim for Life 5-mile.
Brett was training for an Ironman at the time, so he did the 1-mile swim option. It was our first open water race we ever did together, and I loved it. Picking up our swim caps and then waiting on the beach together waiting for the race to begin...maybe that isn't romance for everyone, but it was for me.
After a miscarriage in September, a difficult-from-day-one pregnancy followed the very next month. There was my usual upchucking with no warning, but for the first time, I also had too-wacky-to-sustain-pregnancy hormone levels. Lots of monitoring, a few weeks of calm, and then a prenatal diagnosis that gave our baby had a 1.5% chance of surviving to birth. More weekly monitoring, numerous invasive tests. Termination of pregnancy was offered.
In June of 2015, our cherished, loved beyond measure, perfectly healthy but also terribly colicky little M3 arrived. She had the same round eyes as her siblings, one dimple on her cheek and a little crescent on her chin. She was perfect, and also pure hell. If she wasn't asleep or nursing, she was crying. Not just occasional baby whimpers. Not even the pissed off newborn cries that sound like a baby goat. This was choking, vomiting, the crying til she stopped making noise and turned purple but still crying-variety of crying.
That was during the day. Then, beginning at 4pm every day for four straight months, she would stop sleeping and eating, and cry. This went on until 2am. I used to take her outside, but then a neighbor told me that they thought an animal was being killed by a fox until they realized it was my newborn.
The baby and I moved into M1's room; M1 moved in with M2.
I paced and rocked and rocked and paced until around 2 am, when she cried herself to sleep upright on my chest in the 2009 floor model Babies r Us rocking chair. I would try to doze in the chair as well, but she would usually start hiccuping and resume crying again. She slept pretty well from 4 am onward, which gave me exactly 2.5-3 hours until 4 and 6 year old M2 and M1 awoke. They were not quite old enough for compassion and definitely young enough for jealousy, so I stumbled through the day with the big kids as best as possible, with New Baby strapped to me upright in her baby carrier.
This was not what I imagined for our life with 3 kids. I loved our new baby, but I mourned the loss of the time I used to spend with my other children. The real time...time with them when I wasn't just faking it. I missed sleeping in the bed with my husband. Mostly, though, I just shhhhed, and rocked, and sang...trying to soothe myself as much as soothe the baby. My little, perfect, 1.5% chance baby. My heart was so full, and also so broken.
Comeback
Despite getting no sleep or rest, in August, I knew I had to return to my running team. I had to go back to my weekend mornings at Fletcher's Boathouse and weekday evenings at the track. I needed the schedule, the dependability of my teammates. The old jokes and the pounding feet and running in the rain. It was medicine, and a huge part of my identity.
4 weeks after my return to the team, I started getting some signs that my Lyme Disease was no longer in remission. By early October, my joints were really stiff in the morning. I couldn't sleep. My head ached. On October 2, out for an "a slow, easy 10 mile run at 8:15 pace" (laughable now that this really was slow and easy at the time), I felt a tearing sensation in my kneecap. I tried to walk it off, but the joint was stuck. I couldn't fully straighten it or bend.
An MRI and subsequent surgery showed that the piece of cracked cartilage from my 2014 fall had come loose, gotten stuck in the joint, and completely torn off. Now I had a 3 cm pothole on my femur and 4 cm section of my patella that were completely exposed bone. They were what's knowing as "kissing lesions", meaning the two sides of bone rubbed together, or "kissed," I guess. Cute.
Forget about running; I couldn't walk or sit without pain. 4 orthopedists told me that at 36, my only option was a total knee replacement.
"You can still swim," the doctors all said, but definitely no more running.
How could a black line at the bottom of the pool replace the therapeutic effect of my teammates' laughter and the sound of feet pounding a gravel trail? I quit following training reports, unsubscribed from marathon signups, and forgot to respond to my running friends' supportive texts.
Lots of people asked if my knee gave out from too much running.
By December, M3 was 5 months old and her reflux was beginning to get under control. She was cute! She smiled and babbled. She still would not sleep in a crib, but she would sleep in an elevated bassinet for a few hours so I could lie down in a bed next to her instead of the rocking chair. She had little wisps of soft blonde hair that smelled like warm hay, and adorable ears that folded down like an elf.
I was also beginning to research cartilage restoration doctors, and undergoing PRP treatments at Regenerative Orthopedic Sports Medicine. The injections sucked. They took forever, they hurt a lot and oddly, Baby could be SOUND asleep in her carseat carrier, but the second the needle went into my knee, she would start shrieking. The doctor and I wondered about that; to this day, that little one seems to have a 6th sense to know if I'm hurting, physically or mentally. I was also working hard in PT to get stronger, and Dr. Beck at Capitol Rehab was working his magic with Graston and Chiropractic work. I had a whole crew working on my behalf.
The PRP did help to heal some of the soft tissue damage, and I started swimming a little on my own at the gym. M3 had found ONE gym childcare employee that she tolerated in limited doses, so I would call ahead to see if Sharon was working that day. I would arrive already in my swimsuit, cap and goggles. Sharon would pry M3 off of me, and then I would swim for less than 30 minutes. Like clockwork, just as I was approaching my zen, I would get a call from Sharon that M3 had made a poopy diaper, (usually the first one in days, because her tummy still wasn't right). It was time to end my swim.
1 Step Forward...2 Steps Back
By January 2016, the Lyme had gotten bad enough that the oral antibiotics weren't enough. For 8 months, I had a PICC line so that I could receive IV antibiotics. Fortunately, these could be done at home, although there were times that I had up to 5 infusions per day, some of which took an hour. Once a week, a nurse came to my house to change the bandage and draw labs to check on my liver.
I definitely learned to multitask, and my car was filled with alcohol wipes, heparin and saline syringes so I could infuse on the go. It sucked, I'm not going to lie. The worst part was that I couldn't get the PICC wet at all. That meant very careful showers, and definitely no swimming. By the end of the 8 months, though, I was much stronger and healthier.
Swimmy Swim Swim
Exactly one year after I first got my PICC line, I reminisced with my long-time triathlon and ultramarathon training partner Stephen at his annual New Year's party. He encouraged me to join the Arlington Masters swim team once again. ARMS was where Stephen and I had first met; he was one of my very first friends when I moved to Virginia. "Just try going once a week," he said, now also balancing the spirit of an endurance athlete with the demands of being a parent.
Although I first joined the team in 2003, it had been 7 years since I had been in the pool with ARMS. Nearly all of the faces were new, and Stephen and I never overlapped days. On one of my first weeks back, a friendly, muscular and fast swimmer named Carolyn noticed my downtrodden face. "Don't worry," she said. "We are a fun group and swimming is way better for your body anyway."
A few weeks later I was invited to a swim girls' wine and cheese party at Carolyn's apartment in Clarendon. I stayed later than I planned, laughing for the first time in awhile. I didn't feel like an exhausted mom with a broken down body.
I felt, maybe, a little bit like my old self. It wasn't ever going to be the same, but it was a start.
.....to be continued.
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