The Final 2013 Chicot Challenge Writeup

I was only about three miles into the swim when I realized it was going to be a long, long day at the office. The wind was quartering from my rear-left producing an annoying chop. I felt like a fishing cork bobbing in the bouncing water, and my shoulders already protested the strain. Three miles down, thirteen to go. WHAT?!? The day was June 1, the event The Chicot Challenge 2013.

Randy getting things ready just before the start.

Planning and training for this ultra marathon had started early, almost immediately after the Chicot Challenge 2012, a 13-mile birthday swim that I turned into a fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association. For that day, June 2, I had announced a 13-mile swim but actually swam 13.94 miles on my fifty-sixth birthday in beautiful Lake Chicot at Lake Village, Arkansas accompanied by my crew of Randy Beets and Robin Bond. On the first Challenge the weather was glorious, the mood adventurous, and the swim a success. I did tire in the latter miles and suffered from hand pain early on, but I was strong for a solid ten miles, made the distance, and raised $1252.00 for the diabetes charity.

Two of my goals for the 2013 swim were to swim farther and come up with a new course that avoided the terrible-for-me mental challenge of an out-and-back event. To accomplish these ends, I started by exploring the idea of swimming in a different lake. At the top of the list was Ross Barnett in Jackson. I did some Internet research, made some phone calls, and took a day trip to the lake to look, to measure, to scheme.

My measurements were disappointing and the lake looked way too swampy on the upper end. It just looked like alligators, and I later got reports from one of my friends, Wilson Carroll, who had a couple of bad encounters with a huge reptile at the exact spot, Old Trace Park, I was thinking of starting a swim. Consequently, Ross Barnett fell out of the running.

I ended up making a day trip back to Chicot to measure and come up with another route. I hatched the idea of a course that would start at the State Park, go down lake to Ditch Bayou, then dip below the bayou a mile or so before crossing the lake then heading back up lake to the County Park finishing there.

Early in the Challenge

On the training front, I was determined that I needed to solve the hand pain issue. I diagnosed myself as having a strength imbalance between the muscles on top of my wrists and the muscles on bottom of my forearms. To rectify the problem, I began to stretch the top of the wrist muscles and work on strengthening them with reverse wrist curls. I spent a year doing that. It worked. Although I did have some pain in my left hand, it started much later on the 2013 swim, and the right hand was pain free for the entire event. Success!

Another thing with my body I wanted to fix was some muscular pain adjoining and just under my right scapula. For a whole year I made sure that for every set of bench presses I did, I also worked the opposite side with the main exercise being one-armed bent rows. I purchased heavier dumbbells every time my wife and I made a day trip to Jackson. No muscular issues on, in, or around my scapula. Success!

As swim day approached, I eagerly checked the weather forecast. I don’t much trust a weather prediction beyond five days, but once within that window, the Weather Channel was calling for no rain but a bit of wind. Because of the predicted stiff winds out of the south, I decided the day before to reverse the route and swim from the County Park. This decision involved some logistical issues of transporting kayaks, (one of which I owned and the other two were property of the State Park), and having at least one vehicle at each park. Saturday morning, just before start, Randy and Robin returned from the State Park and said the water was like glass on the other side of the causeway and that we should go straight uplake and make the distance up in the smooth water north of the bridge. I was OK with that so at about 8:40 am, I waded into the lake and started stroking that direction. Besides Randy and Robin, I was also accompanied by my son, Forrest, who crewed me twice at Swim the Suck and on numerous training swims. An experienced crew had I.

Knowing early in the year that I would be swimming 16-miles in 2013, I tried every time I got into the water to swim at least a little farther than the same time last year. I ended the year of 2012 with 521 miles. From January 1, I was looking at last year’s training diary every week, sometimes every day, and trying to beat the previous year’s total for that week. Most of the time I did.

Randy and I even took to swimming outdoors in the winter. We swam outside in every month of the year. These winter swims were normally short affairs that involved a lot of shock getting in and even more shivering getting out of our favorite catfish pond. Despite our cold-water swimming, the spring was almost more than I could endure and it affected my preparation severely. At one point in March, the water temperatures were twenty-five degrees colder than the same time the year before. I could and did get in the water and swim, but I was not able to stay in long enough to build endurance I needed.

After a little over two hours of swimming, Randy asked if I was ready to cross over. We had been on the east side of the lake and now we could see downtown Lake Village. At that point, I knew they wanted to stop on the other side. I didn’t mind. We stopped there last year at the little water from in downtown Lake Village. It is a neat spot with two piers, a swimming area and an amphitheater.

Randy paddled ahead and was on the pier taking pictures when I swam up just behind Robin and Forrest. Surprisingly, Paul and Penny were there having ridden by at the right moment and spotted the bright yellow T-shirts the crew was clad in. It was nice to see them. We ate and just relaxed for about thirty-minutes. The bad news is I was a bit tired and we were only at 5.45 miles which put us two miles behind this spot last year when we had come from the State Park. We had some serious making up to do on the other side of the causeway.

When we started back, I was feeling it in the bad way almost instantly. Somewhere around mile seven, Randy asked me how I felt, and I confessed that I was struggling. Last year I remember being very strong for the first ten miles. Unlike last year, I didn’t look at the causeway often because I remember thinking then that it was like a picture painted on a wall: it seemed stationary, never to draw closer. Just before we got to the bridge, the weather shifted in a moment. The sky grew black, the wind picked up, and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees in a literal minute. The crew made their way for the bridge just as it began to rain, and they all wedged their kayaks between the bank and the pilings. Tying to follow them, I came to the realization that I was almost stationary despite that I was swimming fiercely. The wind had not only picked up but shifted and was blowing a current through the small channel under the bridge.

Finally, I grabbed somebody’s kayak and pulled myself out of the current and climbed onto the bank. A glance uplake revealed an angry looking body of water inhospitable to swimmers and kayakers. Randy and Robin started checking their phones and making calls to try to get some clear and accurate Intel on the weather. Robin pulled up a weather radar map that showed a tough-looking storm hovering directly over the State Park. We debated what to do. At first, I suggested we forge ahead to the park, although it would be a tough go. We are only four miles from the landing, I said, and frankly I was looking for a way out. Robin, however, responded that I couldn’t quit until I got 16 miles and if I tried to touch her boat while I was swimming, she assured me that she would hit me with her paddle. She meant it. If we go uplake, she added, we might get caught in hail or lightening and have to pull you from the water. At the time, that didn’t sound like a bad outcome to me, but she was having none of it. I was tired, a bit discouraged, and daunted at the prospect of swimming almost another eight miles.

Robin suggested we go back to the County Park. That meant the full 16 miles plus, but I wasn’t sure I could do it. Furthermore, it meant ending with the kayaks, two of which belonged to the State Park, on the wrong end of the lake. We sat, watched, and thought. Finally, Robin said, “It’s your call, Zane.” I pondered a few more moments and then chose to turn back.

When we resumed our journey down lake, it was raining but no lightening was evident and the water was pancake flat. For the first time all day, I found my rhythm and felt strong in the water. The rain, which didn’t last long, was kind of neat to swim in. I remembered thinking of a book Robin gave me, Young Woman of the Sea, about Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel. Ederle's favorite weather was rain and her favorite activity in her favorite weather was swimming. I could see why.

My strength only lasted a couple of miles before I began once more to fade like a flashlight with a weak battery. At this point my mental strategy was just to make it to the next mile. “How far are we now?” I asked Robin every few minutes. My pace was fading with my energy, the swim had become a grind, and I just wanted to be done. I had been here before; I knew it would happen; I just didn’t know it would happen so soon.

 

For gels, I used mostly PowerBar  because of their viscosity, or lack thereof. I have a few five-ounce squeeze bottles and I fill them with gels which makes feeding easy and fast. For me, Gu tastes much better but is too thick to come easily out of the little squeezes. I also had in my bag of calories a few packets of Cliff Shot gels which I packed in case of flavor fatigue. I asked Robin for one at around mile twelve, I think it was. I felt a kick from it and swam harder for a little while. Robin told me a few days after the swim (with no prompting on my part) that she could tell a difference in my body when I took the gel from the packet. Cha-ching!

Now I am rethinking my whole nutritional strategy. Randy has gone on a pizza kick and swears by the stuff. So does Robin who did a full ironman on the delicacy. I plan to experiment with that some but it strikes me as being a bit chewy for the water. One thing I did pull out of my bag of tricks learned on the bike was a mixture of Red Bull and Gatorade. I only brought one bottle of the rocket fuel, however, and that was a mistake.

I was desperate to make it past the 13.94 miles of last year. Robin asked me, as we neared that mark, what last year’s time was. When I told her, she replied that I was going to beat that. When the 13.94 milestone passed, I felt both relieved and aggrieved. I was relieved to have made my longest ever swim. I was aggrieved, however, to be moving at what was by then a snail’s pace. I was too close to quit. I was too far from the finish to enjoy it. Slowly it began to dawn on me that when I made sixteen-miles, I was still going to be a mile or more from the landing.

Those last miles seemed to take forever, and it was almost dark when Robin announced the completion of 16 miles. “Grab hold of my kayak,” she added, "and I’ll pull you in.” Randy then volunteered for swimmer-pulling duty and paddled the mile or so to the landing with me in tow hanging on to the back of his boat. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to be done.

 

All in all, though the swim was difficult, it was a success. This year instead of raising funds for the American Diabetes Association, all donations were, and still are, being given to the Diabetes Foundation of Mississippi. And despite the day being terribly long, the crew is already discussing next year so the plan is to be back with better training, a better nutritional strategy, and a better set up for the crew. The distance and course are undetermined at this point, but anyone interested in keeping up with my training and plans can follow them right here.