Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [69]
Later that day, Dr. McCafferty met me outside the lab, at an overlook above Goleta Bay near Santa Cruz Dorm. He was tremendously excited about the preliminary data the research team had gathered. From it, he saw that my body performed differently than those of all the other research subjects he had worked with in the past. My core temperature had increased by a degree at first; ten minutes or so into the experiment, it had dropped only a couple degrees, then stabilized. All the other subjects he had worked with were in water temperatures in the sixties, but they had continuously lost body heat. Dr. McCafferty was fascinated that, in forty-two-degree water without any training, I had been able to stabilize my core temperature.
I didn’t understand why he was so excited, so he explained that by training in cold temperatures, there was a good chance that I could adjust enough to stay in the water for a longer time period and maintain a normal body temperature.
This meant that there was a good chance that I could swim across the Strait of Magellan, and he, Dr. Drinkwater, and Anne Loucks offered to accompany me off and on during the training program and to continue gathering data. For two months, I trained in fifty-four-degree water. During one workout in fifty-degree water, Dr. Drinkwater took my core temperature. It was 101°. None of us knew what would happen to me in the Strait of Magellan if the water temperature was in the forties, but I decided I had to try.
12
The Strait of Magellan
When John Sonnichsen and I arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile, we were welcomed into local people’s homes and shops. And whenever John and I walked on the street, people came over to us and wished us mucha suerte—much luck. Having their support made me feel very welcome and happy, and at the same time, I felt the burden of expectation. No one had swum across the Strait of Magellan, and it seemed that everyone in the entire city of Punta Arenas knew that this was my goal and wanted to show their overwhelming enthusiasm and support.
The pressure of expectation increased considerably during my first day training in the strait. The water temperature that day was forty-four degrees. It was so cold that I was able to get into the Atlantic Ocean only as far as my knees. For twenty minutes I stood there thinking, How in the world am I ever going to make this swim? Granted, in a straight line, the distance across the strait is only a mile and a half, from the tip of Chile to the island of Tierra del Fuego. But before we even started on this adventure, John and I knew there was no way I would ever swim in a straight line. The currents and tides could be as strong as ten knots, faster than a rain-fed river after a torrential downpour. This swim, we predicted, would take me at least an hour.
John and I had just traveled to the other half of the Americas; we were tired and jet-lagged, and I told myself to take that into consideration, to give myself a break. Still, that initial dip was very daunting; I just didn’t know how far I could push myself
The next day, pushing negative thoughts and feelings aside, I slid my feet in and walked into the icy water again, this time to my shoulders, and made myself stand there for twenty minutes.
On one level, my progress was incredibly slow; yet at the same time, I realized that I was doing something that had never been done before. Everything I attempted had to be performed cautiously, in small steps. I had to allow time for my body to gradually adapt.
Little by little, over the course of the first week, I managed to extend my training time in the water so that I could swim for up to an hour. My big reward came after every workout. There was a family named Fernandez who lived in a large home on the beach near my training area.