The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Getting half-way there

Part 1 can be found here. 

To make this story a little bit more comprehensible, let me share this map of my journey…

2013-09-02_1253-swim

Swimming from Kamari to Perissa began uneventfully enough.

My cousin and his two sons showed up at the beach

ready to support me on my adventure. The presence of fish bait, fish nets, and hooks worried me a little bit. So I told my wife that if Kostis showed up with a fish that had hair to be very suspicious of its provenance…

Kostis just smiled…

Standing at the edge of the beach, staring at the distance in front of me

I pondered this moment…

Before we started this adventure, I told Kostis that we would call it a day if I was swimming after 45 minutes and I still wasn’t in sight of Perissa. After all, something horribly wrong would have happened if it took me more than 45 minutes to swim less than 1400 meters.

The first three minutes until panic point were going to be a desperate attempt to keep my adrenaline level down. I needed to go slowly and methodically. Keep my breathing under control and pace in line with what I needed. So with a throaty cheer and a salute to Poseidon,

I jumped into the water.

And swam.

 

After about three minutes, I crossed panic point,

paused for a moment, and then started my real swim.

Off in the distance of this picture, you’ll notice a point in the water. And from this angle it would appear that once you got there, you reached the turn for Perissa, but no, you would be mistaken. Like many false peaks, this point was also a false finish…

One my personal daemons is that swimming in the water is nerve-racking. If you looked to the left all you saw was the open sea

and if you looked in the water all you could see was the unchanging blue water.

And so I started to swim, remembering that this wasn’t so bad, it was after all only 1400 meters…

For the next 30 or so minutes, I would just swim, and the distance I covered increased. And yet, the progress seemed so marginal. One piece of rock

 

looked indistinguishable from another piece of rock.

All I could do is swim, and swim and swim.

While I was swimming we passed a gentleman fishing on the rocks. And he saw my cousin’s boat moving slowly, and he was cross because the boat was disturbing his fish. And then when he saw me he was startled, his eyes bugged out. As for me, I just noticed him breaking the endlessly monotony of the rocks.

After about 15 minutes, I took a break. Without a GPS, without a map, and with no visual clues, I had no idea how far I had gone. All I could hope and pray was that my swimming was moving me at the pace I was accustomed to…

My original plan called for me to swim pretty far from the mountain cliff, both for safety reasons, and to avoid the cross current the waves caused when they bounced off the mountains and to minimize the distance. Once I started swimming, the foreboding deep blue waters caused me to swim a lot closer to the cliffs.

I don’t really know how to describe what it felt like to swim in the deep blue waters. The waters are not that deep, but the color is a very dark deep blue. The isolation and quiet is very disturbing for a child of the 20th century. You feel like a speck of life suspended in space, only one terrible accident away from death. There is a perfect stillness and perfect fear. Every stroke you make in the waters propels you forward, or so you hope because there is so little to indicate progress. The rocks don’t change that fast. And the water is an endless void.

Swimming in that blue water, in that perfect stillness was too intimidating and so I hugged the cliffs desperately to avoid that feeling of isolation …

Even seeing an infrequent fish was a pleasant reminder that I was not alone…

At some point, I finally made it past that edge of the mountain I had seen from the beach …

And then I moved into true open water. The cliff edge of the mountain ended, and shot straight down into the sea, and I was now swimming in the dark blue expanse or the section I call The Deep Blue after the Luc Besson film…

At first I panicked. This was scary. I wanted to call out to Kostis and beg him to pick me up, but then humiliation and fear and stupidity took over. I wasn’t going to quit now…

So I embraced the moment, I let myself go and swam.

The thing about this part of the swim is that the water was different. For the first time in my life I was swimming in true open water. I wasn’t swimming in water that was sheltered by some mountains, or so shallow that you could see the bottom or in a bay. These were waves and currents that started in Crete creating powerful, deep, mystical movements. And my body felt so powerless and connected to the sea in that moment.

That portion of the swim was a moment of pure serenity. When I need to find my center, my sense of peace, I go back to that moment in the water.

Every stroke, every motion was both pointless and full of meaning. I couldn’t see any progress being made, I couldn’t feel myself moving, and yet I knew I was moving.

I was a small speck of life in the cosmos, alone and yet part of everything…

For about 19 minutes straight I just swam…

And then reality set in… At around the 35th minute, I was kind of like – d*n, this was supposed to be over like 10 minutes ago…

Somewhere in the middle of The Deep Blue section of water, I ground to a halt.

My arm started to hurt from the waves slapping against them – boy did the water sting. I was tired. And the far edge of the blue section did not seem to be coming any closer. And the serenity I was feeling was starting to retreat …

Floating in the water, I wondered about what to do next, to go forward? To stop? To quit?

I looked at Kostis, who was  looking at me with a worried expression on his face. Something had gone wrong, something had gone wrong with my plan… Was the current worse than I had anticipated? Was I somehow going slower than I expected? What the hell was going on?

Turns out I was a little bit off on the distance…

2013-08-31_1949-swim

Because of the depth of the water, and my decision to hug the coast line, the distance turned out to be 2500 meters, not less than 1500. 2500 meters was going to take about 1 hour not 30 minutes. At the 35 minute, I was a little bit more than half way done.

This was a bit of a problem. I hadn’t eaten enough for an hour-long swim, nor had I prepared myself mentally for an hour-long swim. My body was ready to stop…

Off in the distance, at the edge of The Deep Blue, I saw two rocks framing a window… And I said, I wasn’t going to stop until I went through that window, even if I had to stop every two to three minutes …

Part 1 can be found here.

The rest in part 3.

 

 

2 thoughts on “The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Getting half-way there

  1. Pingback: The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Preludes and Nocturnes | midlife crisis triathlete

  2. Pingback: The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Swimming towards apotheosis | midlife crisis triathlete

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