Training and Part I of The Chicot Challenge

I had to report to work Monday morning. Summer is always one week too short. I had the afternoon planned since for eight years we have always been off after lunch. David reserved the pond at PD for me so I went. The water was brutally hot and I only managed 4.61 miles before I abandoned the water due to an advancing storm that displayed a lot of lightening.

Being off Tuesday, I called David who suggested another pond for me. At 8:06 a.m., I waded into a 22.2 acre pond just north of Moorhead. For awhile the water was OK, but it quickly heated and swimming became an act of survival. I pulled off 6.44 miles of swimming, and 4.45 miles of running. After all that, I just tossed in the towel. I had hoped for at least seven miles of swimming, but really hot water sucks the energy and will right out of you.

Below is the first installment of my write up of my birthday swim.



The Chicot Challenge Part I

When God Created Logs

By Zane Hodge

When God created logs, he made them look a lot like alligators. This was one of the things going through my mind as I stroked along moving at what seemed like a snail’s pace towards the state park which seemed to be a continent away. Funny what will go through your head when you’re freed from the burden of counting laps. Such is one of the joys of open water swimming: freedom.

But now I didn’t feel so free anymore. I felt like Sisyphus, condemned to swim for eternity towards a destination that could never be reached. I had been almost eight hours in the lake, and the fatigue was as much mental as physical. I was tired of being face down in the water, tired of feeling that pain in my hands, and I was ready to do something else. Anything else. Root canal? Sign me up. Scraping the house for painting? Give me a ladder. Jumping into a pit of snakes? Show me the way.

Then I saw something that I hadn’t seen when we passed that way earlier on our out-and-back course.

“What’s that?” I asked Robin.

“A boat dock,” she answered. I wasn’t referring to the boat dock, but to the inlet of water which surprised me. I was wondering if it had a name, if it was a creek or something, and why I hadn’t noticed it before. “Just keep swimming,” she shot back. That was her manner for the day: professional, curt, whip-cracking.

I put my head down and resumed my steady stroking towards the elusive state park. A few minutes later, I picked my head up again when it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere.

“Are we moving?” I asked.

“We’re moving Zane. Just keep swimming.”

I put my head back down and resumed what had started as a fantastic adventure but what now had become a dull task.

It’s hard to say where all of this started. You could lay the blame with finishing last year’s Swim the Suck Ten-Miler that left me with a hunger to go longer. Or you could go back to 2007 the year I did That Dam Swim, a twelve-miler. Or you could say the real source of my compulsion, my desire to complete a really long swim goes all the way back to my childhood when I was about two years old and I snuck out the back door, lost my diaper on the stoop, and took off up Tenth Street in Greenwood, Mississippi running nekkid and free. This “running free,” in one manner or another, has characterized most of my life and has become something of an obsession in my adulthood. But really, I blame it all on Randal Beets.