Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [57]
During the next week they worked on me. My folks said that I was in great shape and I had a great chance to break the record—why would I pass all that up? Fahmy called me and met with me a handful of times and told me that I really needed to go back again, that I was mentally tough, and that if I didn’t go back now, I would wonder all my life what I could have done. Stockwell and Johnson called to say they would go with me again, that they hadn’t been able to fulfill their promise to me. Montrella also encouraged me. He said that he knew I could make the swim. I was more prepared than ever before.
There had been things about swimming from Catalina Island to the mainland that had bothered me. One major concern was my brother’s world record: I didn’t really want to break it. I knew how hard he had worked for it, and I knew how I felt when I had my English Channel record broken. I also wasn’t excited about having to cross the Catalina Channel again and then swim the distance we had just covered. So I discussed this with my parents and the crew and we decided that I would start at Point Vicente, near San Pedro.
Two weeks after my initial attempt, we set out. The night was perfectly calm, and the sky was filled with stars. We moved quickly offshore, and I broke through the current easily. My pace was a little faster than two and a half miles per hour. The two weeks of tapering had revived me, and I felt very strong. But something happened about halfway across the channel; I lost all motivation and bottomed out. John Sonnichsen, who had been on my previous attempt and had been on other people’s swims, said it was due to low blood sugar, and that I needed to stop to drink some juice.
Calmly I told the crew, “I don’t want to do this.”
“We’ve talked all about this, sweet. I thought you worked through it. Come on, you can do it,” my father said.
“I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t care,” I said, taking off my goggles.
“You’re just going through a bad period right now. Put your goggles back on and keep swimming,” John Sonnichsen said, tossing me a red plastic bottle filled with apple juice. “You’ll feel better once you drink it,” he urged.
I started swimming again, but three more times, I had my doubts about what I was doing out there.
With the crew’s encouragement, however, I finally managed to pull my head together. After I’d been swimming for six hours, Sonnichsen told me that I was on record pace. And then it came back to me: I wanted to do this because I wanted to be good at something, and because I loved swimming. I loved being out on the open ocean with them, doing something so beautiful, risky, and tough.
I pulled harder, laughed, joked with the crew. The crossing took me eight hours and forty-eight minutes, and I broke the men’s and women’s world records. I thought it was so cool my brother had the record in the other direction! I had succeeded and failed, and I had learned things that would become valuable later in my life. And so I began dreaming again, looking for swims that had never been done before.
10
Cook Strait, New Zealand
After five hours of swimming between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, across the mighty Cook Strait, I was farther from the finish than when we’d started. The weather was deteriorating; it had been ever since I’d entered the water, although the weather forecasters had promised winds that would only be light and variable, with no surf at all. They were wrong: the waves were four feet high, crashing headfirst into us; the wind was already up to fifteen knots, churning the strait into chop; and I was physically and mentally exhausted. I had made an enormous mistake. From the onset of the swim, I’d thought this twelve-mile swim would take five hours, at most, to complete.
Months before the channel crossing, I had spoken with Sandy Blewett, the swimmer from