29 Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

Lesson 2

Lesson 2. Don’t Go Swimming in a Dry-Suit

Swimming in my main sport. I LOVE swimming. I swim on a club team year round and a high school team seasonally, since they overlap at times during the year I have two teams going at once. Needless to say, I swim a lot.

Once high school swimming ends (it’s a winter sport) I usually pick up some spring sport, last year I tried track, but this year I joined the sailing team, a sport I was extremely excited to be a part of.  Where we live on the east coast, spring is really just an extension of winter, just with a more cheerful name. The weather outside is usually about 30-40 degrees so as you can imagine the water is really cold.

In sailing, I learned that in this type of weather it is prudential to wear something called a ‘dry-suit’ not to be confused with a wet suit. (A friend of mine once asked me “What’s the difference between a dry-suit and a wet-suit.” I stared back at them for a minute thinking maybe this was some sort of joke before realizing there where seriously asking this as a question. I titled my head and stared some more “One’s wet and one’s dry.”)

Anyway, on cold day’s it good to sometimes blow a little bit of air into your dry-suit, since the  dry-suit is a seal over your body it traps the air in and as the air heats up you get warmer.

It was a really cold day, on the day this occurred. I was wearing three shirts under my drysuit Under Amor and wool socks. I also was wearing, winter gloves, and hat and a neck warmer. IT. WAS. COLD! Once I snapped on my life vest and waddled down to the docks to rig up the boats, I puffed up my dry suit to warm up a little. 

Our coach was impatient to get started and kept yelling at us from the coach boat. “Come on guys! I could rig that boat up ion five minutes! What are you doing?” We blocked him out and just finished up rigging before shoving our boats off the dock and jumping in.

Right away I was up on the side hiking out and praying fervently that I would make it through the day alive. I had only been on the team for about two weeks now and this was only about my third time being out in fairly strong wind. As if the wind weren’t enough I was also sailing with a skipper who didn’t know how to shut up. Between being yelled at for not tacking correctly, forgetting to bail, or missing the cleat for the jib sheet, I was also trying to keep the boat as flat as possible to prevent it from tipping.

I failed.

We capsized and as I found my suddenly very cold and wet, I tried to listen to what my skipper was saying. The waves were crashing on my head and it was making it hard for me to hear, but I got the idea that he wanted me to swim over towards the boat which had now drifted several feet away from me.

I am going to pause in my story right here. It was several feet! No, problem right? At the average swim practice I swim between 5,000-6,000 yards. YARDS!!! Not feet! 5,000 yards is nearly 4 miles!! Not to mention these swims often involve no kicking, one arm pulling, or just no arms at all! 3 feet with both my arms and legs? No problem!

I wished

As I started to try to move towards the boat I instantly realized the problem. The air which was so brilliantly keeping me warm, was also keeping me afloat. And much like a beach ball I could keep nothing under water. I tried, with no avail, to move myself toward the boat. But my pulling and kicking was futile, I wasn’t moving anywhere. My feet floated on the surface and my arms billowed out beside me , using  a modified breaststroke/doggy-paddle (which I know will call “The Wiggle”) I squiggled forwards slowly inch by inch.t

New observation: If Olympic swimmers really want to step up their game they should train in dry-suits, it works muscles you didn’t know you had!

All the while my skipper was yelling at me to come over to the boat. “Can’t you see I’m trying?” I muttered back. (Of course over the wind this couldn’t be heard). I finally worked my way over to the back of the boat where to my dismay the skipper was standing on the now horizontal center-board. “Climb up” he said. I looked up at my skipper standing on the center board and then around at my buoyant limbs. I struggled to be able to reach up enough to grab the centerboard and pull myself up.

It didn’t work.

Finally with much rolling of the eyes, he grabbed me by the back of the dry suit and pulled me onto the centerboard.

I stared lamely down at my boots, “Sorry?” I offered.

It was after practice that day once we had come in and were de-rigging the boats that the question arose that made this scenario worse. As I knelt on the dock rolling up the sails my skipper nonchalantly commented, “You had some trouble swimming to the boat huh?” I blinked twice and didn’t know what to say, “Yeah?” I said unsurely.

He just nodded his head, “I thought you were a swimmer?”

It’s during moments like this that a serious choice has to be made.

In my case I had to make the decision to sound like a boasting braggart and tell about all the medals I’d won and the titles I’d earned,

Or

 I could be humble and keep quiet, hopefully ensuring that he would pass this off as a fluke or something.

I choose the later.

I’m not sure what he was thinking after that. I was too embarrassed to ask, however, I certainly found out what my mom thought of it when I made the mistake of telling her about it.

She laughed so hard that I thought her brains were going to come out her ears. Needless to say, it was bad.

To end this lessons I will give you two perspective on this occurrence, a good one and a bad one.

First the negative…. Where to start?

A.      I now had lost any respect that my co-sailors had for me

B.      I was scarred for life

C.      My mother now had sufficient blackmail on me that she had no problem sharing to the rest of the world…. Which she did

Now the good side:

The good of this is that I learned a valuable lesson………. don’t swim in your drysuit.