Pool Pracitce and The Chicot Challenge Part II

Just before lunch, I ran 2.1 miles and did my setups. Then after work, as soon as Twin Rivers was clear enough of kids for lap swimming, I was in and going up and down my favorite lane. I did

1,500
400 kick with fins
100 easy with fins
10 X 100 @ 2:30
400 kick with fins
8 X 100 @ 2:15
400 kick on back/swim with fins
Total: 4,700 meters.

Now for Part II of The Chicot Challenge

The swim started sometime around 9:50 a.m. on June 2, 2012. That day I celebrated my fifty-sixth birthday by wading into the water at the boat landing at Lake Chicot State Park and swimming for almost eight and a half hours. Randy and Robin Bond, both open water swimmers themselves, had
volunteered to crew me, had rented kayaks at the park, and had committed themselves for a day of taking care of me, keeping me safe from boat traffic, and making sure I was fed and hydrated.

I started the swim with the usual nervous energy that comes from months of hard training followed by a radical taper. Several times I had to tell myself to slow down, relax, swim smooth. I was in the water alone for several minutes before my crew got in their boats and caught up with me. Then the fun began.

Training had started in January. I didn’t have this particular swim on my calendar then, but I knew I was doing the Suck again, and I knew I wanted to do a long personal swim on my birthday. My mom’s illness severely limited my training time so I decided to focus everything on swimming. Having access to an indoor pool only twice, sometimes thrice per week meant that big yardage that time of year was not possible for me. But I always did extra swimming after Tuesday and Thursday Masters practice at Delta State University, and I hit the weights with an uncommon vigor in an attempt to toughen my muscles for the larger swim loads to come in the spring and to build sports-specific strength.

February, like January, consisted of Masters Swim Pracitice twice per week. Three thousand yards prescribed by coach Petya Petrova, additional swimming after everyone else had left, tons of weight lifting, and an occasional Friday swim thrown in. In January I logged 45,200 meters of swimming, but in February I managed to get only 33,496 meters.

In late February, I conjured up the nerve to venture outdoors. I called David Rutherford of Tackett Fish Farms and acquired permission to swim J7, one of my favorites from last year. Even with a wetsuit on, however, the cold penetrated my body like a 30’06 slug penetrating a buck deer. But March was unseasonably warm and by the middle of the month I was open water swimming without a wetsuit. That month I got in 56,238 meters in addition to my cross training.

The fun alluded to earlier began a mere 1200 meters into the all-day swim. We saw something up ahead that looked ominously like a large alligator. Randy peddled up closer while Robin slowed and I swam slowly with head out of water.

“Oh my God!” Randy yelled as he pulled up close. “His whole head came out of the water!”

He paddled back to us in a fury and we started discussing what to do. “Are you sure it’s an alligator?” Robin insistently asked.

“I think so,” was his answer. “You better get out and go around on land,” he advised me.

Robin suggested they take a closer look so they paddled cautiously towards the gator while I nervously treaded water. I was sure we were looking at a real monster since I could see the eyes at the back of the beast head. He was huge and two boats and a swimmer didn’t seem to scare him a bit.

When they got really close, Robin shouted, “Get out of the water, Zane! Get out of the water!” The panic in her voice convinced me to waste no time in scrambling up the nearest pier. Once on top of the pier she calmly said, “You can get back in now.”

It was only a log.

The log moved.

The log looked like an alligator.

That’s when I got to pondering the question of God creating logs to look so much like alligators.


Lake Chicot, located in southeast Arkansas, is really nice. The state’s largest natural lake is a twenty-mile long oxbow of the Mississippi River. It’s a beautiful lake of fairly clear water, georgeous homes, and fishing piers and boats all along its banks. Randal Beets is the one who introduced me to it. The Greenville Masters, coached by Brian Ott, scheduled an open water practice there in 2011, and Randy invited me to join them. We were both training for the Suck at the time so we stayed after the practice and did extra repeats across the lake and back from the downtown boat ramp/swim area. Later that summer, I did a 6.5 mile solo swim there pulling a lime-green spine board that held my nutrition. One week before the Suck, Randy and I did a five-miler in Chicot. Robin crewed for us that day, and we swam from the downtown landing to the Visitor Center and back. I’ve had Chicot on the brain ever since.

After the log-impersonating-an-alligator incident, I settled into a good swimming rhythm, and although I had forgotten to tell Robin how often to feed me, she started me at thirty minutes so we kept that schedule for the entire swim. Robin proved to be an excellent crew member. She fed me promptly, was never more than a few feet away, and she never let me get lazy. If I pulled my head up, even if her boat was ahead of me, she immediately asked what was wrong. When I would tell her I was just looking around, she always ordered me back to swimming.

Part III tomorrow.