Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [23]
Bending over, I grabbed my knees and stretched my back. If I had kept swimming, I don’t think I would have had any complaints, but now my sides and my neck ached.
Together we swam at an excruciatingly slow pace. I slipped water with my hands so I could stay with them.
Ron waved me to go ahead. I sprinted forward with Stockwell and Johnson. The cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula towered above us. We waited. We only had eight hundred yards to go, and I just wanted to finish. There were people parking cars on the cliffs, scurrying down a steep embankment to the rocky beach.
Stacey was dropping back. She was about two hundred yards behind the boys, and she looked bad.
When Andy and Dennis reached me, they were too exhausted to talk. Grimly they took long sips of lukewarm tea. We waited for five minutes, but we were getting very cold. Stockwell and Johnson told us to swim four hundred yards and then wait for Stacey.
We crawled slowly forward, and then a current sweeping around Point Vicente slammed into us. The water temperature suddenly dropped to fifty-five degrees. It was so cold every muscle in our bodies stiffened up.
“I’m freezing,” Andy said.
“Me too,” Dennis said.
“Let’s just finish now,” Andy urged.
“Look, she’s not that far back. She will be here in only a few minutes. Remember, we wanted to do this as a team,” I said.
“I can’t wait any longer,” Andy said, and Dennis joined him.
I waited for Stacey and swam with her to shore.
Dennis and Andy finished the crossing in twelve hours and twenty-six minutes, ten minutes ahead of Stacey and me. We became the youngest group of teenagers to swim across the Catalina Channel. It was a huge achievement, and it awakened a dream that had been sleeping within me: I wanted to swim the English Channel. And now I knew I could make the distance. Both swims were twenty-one miles in a straight line.
While we were rewarming in sleeping bags on the beach in Palos Verdes, I overheard Andy talking with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. He said that he and Dennis were very happy that they’d finished so strongly and that they’d sprinted into shore ten minutes before the girls. That made me angry, but I didn’t say anything. At that moment, I decided I was going to swim the English Channel and I wasn’t going to wait for anyone. I would try to set a new men’s and women’s world record.
As soon as I got home that morning I drew a hot bath. I must have sat in it for two hours, and I was so tired I went to bed immediately afterward.
Within a week after the Catalina Channel crossing, I asked my parents if they would support me on a swim across the English Channel to break the world record. They agreed to help. My mother suggested talking with Ron Blackledge to see if he would be willing to coach me.
None of the swimmers who had completed the crossing with me had any desire to make another channel attempt. They returned to pool swimming. If Ron coached me, he would have to do it on an individual basis, and my parents would pay him for his guidance. We discussed the idea over the phone and he asked if he could think about it, talk it over with his wife, and get back to me. Coaching a swimmer for any channel crossing was a huge commitment, and although he immediately said he wanted to do it, he knew that it would impact his time with his wife.
I’m not sure what I would have done if Ron had said no, but when he called and told me that he would coach me, I was excited and happy. Fifteen years old was considered