Open water swimming can be a nice change from the monotonous back-and-forth of the pool, but it can also get into your head. This happens to me regularly when I swim in murky water with little visibility. Usually alone. Usually in the early morning. Yes, I’ve seen the movie Jaws many times and know how it starts, and yes, this is irrational thinking most of the time. But it still happens to me, and it probably happens to a lot of others as well.

It does go back to the movie Jaws, which came out when I was a youngster. I spent many summers on a lake in New Hampshire as a boy and, even though it was a calm, fresh water lake, that irrational fear always hit when I was out on my own, in the middle of the lake, looking into the depths and seeing… what was that? A large white shape moving towards me? No, there was nothing there, but my head kept playing tricks on me. Swimming in a group was never a problem, because I always figured a) someone else would get chomped first, and b) whatever was lurking down there was more afraid of the group than we were of it. Some rationality in the irrationality it seems.

Later, when I took up triathlon while living in San Francisco, most of my swimming was in open water. The most popular place to swim was Aquatic Park, where buoys had been set-up and it was always relatively calm compared to the open bay, just outside the cove. But we were swimming, technically, in the ocean, and there were always shark sightings in the bay. And, not too far away was Pier 39 where all the seals and sea lions routinely posed for tourists’ pictures as they sunned themselves before diving back in the bay. Oh, did I mention that sharks love to munch on these critters? I also forgot to mention how much we swimmers wearing wetsuits look like these critters to those same sharks… You see where I’m going with this.

I used to swim a lot early in the morning, before work, just as the sun was coming up. Murky water, you can barely see two feet in front of you, no idea what is down there… remember that opening scene from jaws, the woman swimming in the dark? Yes, that went through my head a lot. It was always better to swim with a buddy, but that was usually in the middle of the day, and there were many other swimmers around. With all that sunlight and activity, it seemed less sinister. But those early morning swims creeped me out sometimes, my mind screaming to get my ass out of the water before I became a local news story. But nothing ever happened, it was all in my head. Until one day…

It was a morning swim like any other, I was several hundred meters from shore, it was probably just before 7am, there might have been a few other swimmers there, the sun was just making its way into the morning sky. I was cruising along and then, something bumped me in the chest. I froze. It was a log, right? I just swam across a half-submerged log, right? “GET OUT OF THE WATER!!!” my mind screamed. But how? I’m several hundred meters from shore, I tried to levitate as much of my body out of the water as possible while not breathing. I tried to become a hole in the water that was not interesting at all. The seconds ticked by sooooo slowly, so many thoughts in my head, is this really how things are going to end? I turned on my back and floated, as I did not want to see that big white body coming towards me from the depths after that initial bump.

It was right about now that a seal surfaced a few meters away, looking at me, I swear he was smiling. With my wetsuit on in the murky water I guess I looked like one of his buddies, and he wanted to play. I was not in such a playful mood. I think my heart started again around this time, so I swam a probably still-standing world record time back to shore and called it a day. Quite a morning, no need for coffee today, I’m awake!

25 years later my mind still comes at me kind of strong when I do an early morning open water swim and I’m the only one there. Like last Friday. But here, in the Canaries, there aren’t any seals, and shark attacks are rare. My mind doesn’t care, because the water is still murky. Anything could be down there, waiting to play.