Deep Dive Into KAATSU Training With Steven Munatones

After a severe heart attack in 2016, Steven Munatones was in a coma for a week. They lowered his body temperature in hopes of preserving function but set expectations with his family that he may have severe neurological damage.

This was part of Steve’s Marathon Swim Story that he shared with us in February of 2021. He also discussed his recovery, use of KAATSU, and return to swimming. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t heard it already!

Today Steve tells us how taking kids to swim in the ocean during the pandemic inspired him to seek out an open water swimming challenge, which led him to SCAR, where he walked away with the coveted belt buckle.

I love how Steve, THE open water ambassador, shares the imposter syndrome that so many of us, myself included, feel at pre race dinners.

It’s a great reminder that we are all human.

I hope you enjoy today’s deep dive into SCAR 2022 with Steve Munatones.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Marathon Swim Stories, where we connect with marathon swimmers around the world to find out how they got started, what makes them tick, and why they keep going. It’s where we explore the human side of the superhuman feats of endurance swimmers, the connections that we have with each other, our support crew, and the waters we cross. If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a body of water and wondered what it would be like to swim to the other side, you’re in good company. I’m Shannon Keegan, marathon swimmer, water relationship coach, and founder of Intrepid Water, where I virtually teach swimming freedom. Freedom to get started, shed the confines of the pool, or your preconceived notions of what’s possible. Find out more at intrepidwater.com.

After a severe heart attack in 2016, Stephen Munatones was in a coma for a week. They lowered his body temperature in hopes of preserving function but set expectations with his family that he may have severe neurological damage. This was part of Steve’s marathon swim story that he shared with us in February of 2021. He also discussed his recovery, use of KAATSU, and return to swimming. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already. Today, Steve tells us how taking kids to swim in the ocean during the pandemic inspired him to seek out an open water swimming challenge, which led him to SCAR where he walked away with the coveted belt buckle.

I love how Steve, the open-water swimming ambassador, shares the imposter syndrome that so many of us, myself included, feel at pre-race dinners. It’s a great reminder that we are all human. I hope you enjoy today’s deep dive into SCAR 2022 with Steve Manatones. Hey, Stephen, thank you for joining me again. I’m so excited to talk to you. It’s always a joy to talk to you. Yeah. The pleasure is mine. I wanted to dig in a little bit to your recent experience before it gets to it’s about a month ago now, right? Yes. At SCAR. I was trying to figure out where we were at the end of your story. I think you were just kind of maintaining swimming just kind of as a part of your day-to-day. So tell us you know kind of what you were up to and what made you decide to do SCAR this year.

Yeah, I think the last hard swim I did was like in 1992 or three. Oh, okay. So we’re talking 30 years ago? Yeah. But I’ve been swimming with the same group of swimmers in the same lane, doing the same thing for the last 30 years. We do about 2,000 yards and we enjoy each other. We’ve seen each other’s get married, have kids, their kids go into college, et cetera. So same group of kids. And then COVID happened. Pools were shut down. So I took my last two children, I have four, but the youngest two, they’re in high school. So I started taking them to the beach as an alternative to doing nothing. This was in March and April, a few years ago. So March and April in Southern California, water temperature is hovering in the late high 50s to low 60s. So 14 to 16 degrees Celsius for us non-Americans here.

So it was a little nippy, but we got used to it, and we had fun, and we had all of their teammates come and join us at the beach. So that continued on and off for about two years. I hadn’t really been in the ocean other than body surfing or other things. And I enjoyed swimming with the young kids. And then I decided I should probably do something. And so I looked at SCAR. Well, actually, I googled, and SCAR was the first thing that came up on my Google feed. So I go, “Okay, I’ll do that.” So wait, it’s been 30 years. Why did you decide you wanted to do an event? I thought it was fun. I mean, I thought it would be fun. I didn’t know what event I would do. If the first thing would have popped up into my Google feed would have been, let’s say, the pier-to-pier swim, around a pier swim, or lake swim. I probably would have did that. But SCAR came up. That was fate.

And again, I knew of SCAR. I’ve written about SCAR. I’ve been amazed about the people who go to SCAR, but I really didn’t look into SCAR, at least for myself. And then I think it was November 1st, whatever the day was to apply, I applied. I can’t say enough about Kent Nicholas. I’ve traveled around the world. I’ve been to pro races, the Olympics, you name it. And what he does and what his small group of people, volunteers, do in those four lakes in Arizona at this time of the year is beyond description, beyond incredible. The logistical nightmare that they have to face with people and kayaks and escorts and swimmers and people who don’t make the swim, people who don’t even want to start. For whatever reason, it is a logistical nightmare, and he pulls it off. So anyway, I committed to myself and I committed, well, entered. And so I had to figure out how to actually swim those distances at that temperature at that altitude.

And that was the fun part. So I enjoyed thinking about how in the world can I, at this point, 30 years of about 2,000 yards a day, get to the point where I could finish a swim like SCAR. And I asked people who had done SCAR before, Ned Dennison, Jamie Tout, last year’s winner, Michael Rice, who actually I used to write about his mother. Is that right? Yeah. His mother was his Gail Rice was his escort last year. He won the race, almost beat Grace Vanderbilt’s record. And I didn’t put two and two together until I was speaking with Mike and how he trains and his sets. And so I sought a lot of advice about people who were there. I read everything I used to that I wrote about SCAR. I read other people about SCAR. So it was really interesting. It was like this giant puzzle piece that I had to figure out, just basic things, how to get stronger, how to acclimate to the water, which I had a little bit because, again, in COVID, I was swimming in the ocean with my own kids and their friends.

So all these things came together, and it was a really interesting thing. Obviously, I love the open water. And I just said, “Okay, I’ve been writing about a lot of people for many years, and now I’ll actually see.” They’ve all inspired me, everybody. It was really cool being on a pontoon boat with Sarah Thomas. And you know I learned more about her and just sitting by the side of a lake and talking with all the triple crowners and ice milers and all these people that I’d written about, but I’d actually never met in person. And just understanding where they’re from, how they train, what they do, what they eat, what they think about was absolutely fascinating to me.

And then, of course, watching from the distance, what Kent does to get all these kayaks and boats in place for this pretty incredible four-day adventure was a real joy. Yeah. Yeah. The camaraderie is amazing at SCAR. You know There’s international people come and they’re just like, I’ve never been to anything like this before because you know you’re kind of like airdropped. You know Not really. We all get there however we get there, but then you’re just immersed in it. And it’s pretty amazing to get that experience. I’m really glad that it came up in your Google search. I’m curious what your search terms were. Open water swimming. And SCAR came up first? Well, you know in my own feed, because I’ve written so much about SCAR over the years, and then I’ve written about many of the people who’ve done SCAR many times. Who knows why? I was really worried. In fact, I don’t remember when.

It was probably two or three months into my own training when I read, I believe, an article about Samaritan Thompson or maybe she wrote it. And she had mentioned that the water was 52 in one of the lakes. So you know 11 degrees Celsius or so. And I said, I can handle for a certain period of time, you know mid-50s, upper 50s, but low 50s is way out of my ballpark. And I don’t have enough time to train to acclimate to that temperature. And certainly, I don’t even want to get at that level. So I wrote to Kant and I said, you know thank you very much for allowing me to enter the race, but I have to pull out because there’s no need for me to go into the race knowing and I know what’s amazing is the mindset of people at SCAR and of your audience is if you believe it, you will achieve it.

You know If you put your mind to it, you will do it, et cetera, et cetera. But there is a limit. There’s a reasonable limit, at least in my book. And maybe I’m putting limitations on myself. But in the low 50s for me, you know 10, 11, 12 degrees is not in my wheelhouse. And he said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Things happen and it was only that it was only cold for a short distance. You can do it. So I’ll see you in I’ll see you in April. And so I mean, it’s that kind of positive reinforcement that we get from everybody. Kent’s volunteers on the boat, his wife, his old high school and grade school friends that come up and do everything from singing songs and playing the guitar at the welcome dinner to hauling kayaks and buoys in and out of the water. So everything actually, it was a perfect storm in a very positive way.

You know I was able to get back into open water swimming. It was a real challenge. I really didn’t know in November when I started training how I was going to achieve those distances. But I would speak with Hank Wise, who’s done seven Catalina Channel Swims and Ned Dennison and all these people. And I got bits of information from them. And I just took off little bite-sized chunks of distance, and it all came together.

During your training between, so was November to April, the one crisis of confidence where you’re like, “I can’t do this. This is going to be too cold, can’t.” And he gives you the, “No, no, you got this.” Was there any other point in your preparations that you just kind of had the cold feet? I want to pull out moments? No, actually, it was the way I looked at it. The thing that Scared me wasn’t the distance, wasn’t the competition, wasn’t anything except the cold water. And I actually got I received a water temperature in Apache Lake, so the third day three.
And at the time I looked, it was 43 degrees. So we’re talking 6 degrees Celsius. And that’s way, way out. And this is a month before. And I remember talking to Hank Wise, who I swim with in the pool. And he said, I go, “Hank.” He goes, “How’s training going?” I said, “Oh, it’s going well, but 43 degrees, you know 6 degrees, that’s impossible. Nobody can do that.” And he says, “Don’t worry about it. Forget it and just keep on training.

Don’t think about water temperature. Put it in a drawer somewhere. Don’t look at the water temperature. And I go, “You know what? That’s a good thing to think about.” And then all my other things, again, I hadn’t done more than 2,000 yards in a long time. And I was adding 500 meters every week or every few days. So you know I went from 22,000 yards to 2,500 meters to 3,000 meters. You know And I was going up, and I remember Hank Wise, his master group has a 100/100s at Christmas. And I was like, “God, if I can get to 100/100s at Christmas, that’s pretty good.” And Hank and I, you know we did 100/100s, and I felt pretty good. And I also learned something else from Hank. Hank, when he was training for Catalina, he doesn’t do any hydration at all. He just trains. And so his longest training swim a few years ago was like five and a half hours, like nothing.

Wow. And I go, “Why do you do that?” He goes, “Well, you know just putting stress on the body.” And he had a few other bits and pieces, and I was going, “Wow.” So I started to train with no hydration, no feeding. In fact, I used to purposely eat dinner, drink some water before going to bed, wake up, and then used to do a three-hour swim. I was so dehydrated. I was so hungry, but I figured, “Okay, maybe I will experience that in SCAR sometime. So if I am dehydrated, I’ll be able to deal with it. If I do get hungry and there’s no food, I’ll be able to deal with it.” That actually occurred one time during the race, and I dealt with it. So as Ned Dennison does, and he was teaching me at the court distance week, I’ve never been there, but I’ve written about it. You know He was always doing this mind-body confusion stuff.

So I was purposely taking Ned’s concept of mind-body confusion and instilling it in my own training, in my own way. And I remember in Apache, about four and a half hours in the night before my kayaker and I, Chris Morgan, from Boston, we had no idea how to get to Apache. All we saw, we were driving, driving, driving, and all we saw was this dirt road. Well, our dinner that night was a Circle K, a gasoline station in Arizona. We had our dinner at Circle K. So I had, I don’t know, some $2 burrito and I think an ice cream bar. And then the next morning before Apache, I think I had some starburst, basically. Oh, goodness. So I was in this Apache and we’re swimming along. And at four and a half hours, I always go, “Ah, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, my body’s giving up.” And I told Chris at that time, I said, “Chris, I just need to do 50 strokes of breaststroke. I can’t keep up this pace, and I need some food.” So he throws me some Starburst. I’ve eaten Starburst probably three times in the last 40 years, but this Starburst tasted unbelievably well. Sugar kicked in, and I was ready to go. So all of that mind-body confusion stuff that I learned from Ned Dennison, I incorporated it and it works.

I was basically depending on the experience and knowledge of the marathon swimming community and just incorporating it into my own training, and it absolutely works. Yeah, I feel like I do something similar to my own search, talking to marathon swimmers. It’s great to have so many people so willing to share their stories with us, right? Yeah. So how about you break a little bit of your prep down and then I want you to take us there. So you said you kind of was this puzzle. It was fun to work out. What were the components of your training that you want to divulge? Yeah. So the first one was strength. It doesn’t matter how fast you go or how slow you go. If you’re going to swim over 60 kilometers over four days, you just need to have the musculature to turn over your arms and kick your legs and turn your head side to side. So your arms are going in a rotation. Your legs are going up and down. Your neck is going side to side. And my body wasn’t prepared for 60 kilometers plus of that.

And so I knew I had to build up my strength to do that. And that’s why every three or four days, or certainly every week, I increase by 500 meters or so. My daily training. So my daily training was started in 2000 yards, then 2,500, then 3,000, et cetera. And I knew I couldn’t get into a 10K swim right away, and I did it very, very gradually. Fortunately, I had some benchmarks, and one benchmark was at 100/100s. My next benchmark was actually 50/200s at a faster pace. And so I had all these different benchmarks. I wanted to build up my strength gradually, so that’s increasing. And I wanted to decrease my swimming time. So I wanted to get faster. So at the same time, I was increasing my distances. I was decreasing my intervals or improving my pace. And that was also extremely gradual. So I would say to myself, “Okay, today I’m going at a 130 pace per 100 meters tomorrow or next week. I hope to get 129. Next week, I have that 128.” And my goal time for the speed distance or the speed part of my training was what I learned from Penny Lee Dean, who had the English Channel and Catalina Channel records way back in the ’70s, she always trained at a 120 pace per 100 meters.

That was her thing. Her toughest workouts were a 36,000 meter swim in a 50-meter pool, which she held a 120 pace entire way. And I thought, I have to have this perfect median between water temperature. It had to be you know because that water temperature, yes, it wasn’t 52, but it started in the mid or high 50s and then it gradually warmed up. So I had to have this balance between how am I acclimated with speed? And I know the faster that I swam, the warmer I would be, but I couldn’t maintain, obviously, a 200-meter pace over whatever, 20 kilometers or however far we were going that day. And so my goal was to be at least at Penny Dean’s pace. Now, I wasn’t going to swim a 36,000 meter workout, and my farthest was 14,000 meters. But every week, fortunately, I had a Garmin watch.

And you know when I used to train way back in the ’70s and ’80s, you just had the old analog pace glove. And everything was in your head. Now everything is in the watch or in the cloud. So it makes it a lot easier, very interesting. And it was interesting for me to see the very granular data, which was very motivating. So it didn’t matter whether in October, November, December of last year that I wasn’t at Penny Dean’s pace because I was getting there gradually, literally second by second. We’re talking about pool, but also the open water. I have a very specific course that I swam at in Huntington Beach where I live in Southern California. And so strength was just swimming the yards, just swimming the meters. Speed was a function of me being able to swim faster and hold it. And all of my workouts, from the time I jumped in the water to the time I got out, I had two goals in mind.

The first goal was to swim the same exact pace except for the last 200 meters. And the last 200 meters of whatever workout I did had to be faster than any other point in the swim. So it was basically, I was finishing with what I thought was a sprint. And I did that throughout. So if I was going at a 128 pace for two or three hours, that’s what I would do. When I got better and better and better, then every single day, I would say to myself, “Okay, today is a 124, today is a 122, today is a 120, today is a 118.” And those were my goals as long as the last 200 meters was faster than any other previous 200 meters. I didn’t always do it, but I held pretty steady. So that was strength and speed. Stamina was a combination of that. So as I was swimming more yards and getting faster, obviously, my stamina was increasing.

I found a pretty interesting phenomenon that’s probably pretty good is I was losing weight. However much I was eating, I was losing weight and my pants would not fit. You know I wish I would have sort of done all kinds of physiological metrics, but like you, I have kids and jobs and everything. You know I can only do so much, but that would have been interesting. But I definitely, my waist size decreased. So I went from a size 32 swimsuit on the men’s side to a size 30. Throughout the day, I kept on having to yank up my pants. And so you know as we get older, I guess losing belly fat is a good thing. So that was a benefit. And then I realized when I was in SCAR, the tremendous advantage that I had living in Southern California, I had a tremendous advantage. I mean, you have people in Boston.

I had a classmate, actually a college classmate of mine, Martha Wood, who you’ve talked to. You know now she’s a ice miler. And of course, she told me she swam throughout the winter in Boston. Unbelievable. And even though she is an eye smiler, there’s only so long that you can swim when the water temperature is under five degrees or in the 30s. And so poor Martha was spending much of her time in a 25 yard indoor pool, whereas I was very lucky, and even though I felt the water was cold many days, I was still able to get out in the ocean. And the other thing that I did in the ocean that was it was fun for me because I’ve been body surfing and surfing all my life is I would swim within the surf zone. So I live on the coast here in Southern California and there’s waves and sometimes the waves are fairly big.

And I swam between the shoreline and the surf break. So I was swimming along the coast and sometimes I had to go out because there’s plenty of surfers. So every 5 to 15 to 18 seconds, depending on the day, there was a wave crashing over me. And it accomplished two things. One, it kept me totally focused because there were some times when I lost focus and a wave would just wipe me out, literally wipe me out. I wouldn’t see it coming and all of a sudden it would crash on me. I’d lose my goggles, I’d lose my cap, and I would get out that day. I remember walking probably around three kilometers. And one day I was swimming along the shore, and I just lost focus for a second. A wave crashed on me. I lost everything, and I just walked back. It was like the walk of shame. I was walking in Southern California with Speedos on a nice Saturday where you know nobody in Southern California walks around January.

Holding my head down. Yeah. Now, if I were amongst marathon swimmers, it wouldn’t have mattered. Right. No, I hear you. Not in Southern California, not in Huntington Beach. So that was good, though. So it got me used to swimming in very, very turbulent water. And because I had heard from the SCAR veterans that there was a lot of turbulence, a lot of oncoming wind, and I wanted to prepare myself for that turbulence. So when I did hit SCAR and there was turbulence, it wasn’t close to what I had trained in. And then there were swimmers, you know whether they came from Ireland or Boston like Martha or other places, who I realized in April or leading up to April, they didn’t have that experience because the water’s too cold or even if they could handle the water like Martha, they couldn’t swim for long periods, and I could. So that was a huge, huge advantage that I had living in Southern California.

What is swim freedom? It’s the freedom to start swimming when you don’t think you have the skill, ability, or time. The freedom to swim with ease. The freedom to enjoy your time in the water. The freedom to swim further than you ever thought possible. What’s holding you back?
Let’s talk about it. Shannon@Intrepidwater.com.

So it’s speed, strength, stamina, variability. Any other components of your training that you were working on? Yeah. So along this, there were two things. There were a lot of things. One was the mindset. So I enjoyed sharing information or asking questions via email or texts, whatever.
Again, with Hank Wise, Ned Dennison, Jamie Tout, Michael Rice, Stefan Renke and Honolulu was a great help. He’s done SCAR many times and he’s done a lot of channel swims. And I realize how mentally tough he is. You know To live in Hawaii where I used to live to and enjoy the tropical water there and then go to the mainland or go to Europe, wherever he’s going, and having to deal with water, for me to deal with 58-degree water, you know that’s in my wheelhouse. For him to go from high 70s or 80-degree water all the way down to that was mind-boggling to me. And I realized what he did and how he did it. So he and I were in the same heat. You know there are three heats in SCAR. And it was at Canyon Lake. That was the second day, day two. People were jumping in the water and they were gassed going, “Oh, it’s cold.” And I was like, “Oh, man.
I wish I wouldn’t have heard that.”

But Stefan and I would always be the last ones off the pontoon boat. And I would wait purposely because I wanted to minimize the time that I’m in the water. And Stefan would be on the boat. He’d be putting on his cap, putting on his goggles, and then he would say to himself, And I don’t think he meant anybody to hear, but I heard. And he was going “cold. Cold. Cold.” He was like convincing himself yeah that he was going to enter cold water. It wasn’t dramatic, it was just a sort of a self meditative mantra. And then he jumped in the water and then he says, “cold.” So it was like, this is going to be cold. I can deal with it. He jumps in the water and then he realizes it’s cold. I’m here. He put his head down and he swam.

And I was like, oh my God, if this guy from Honolulu on the island of Oahu can deal with water so efficiently, so psychologically profound how he was literally convincing himself that it was going to be cold and he jumped in the water and it was cold and he dealt with it and he wasn’t hyperventilating. He didn’t yell out. He didn’t scream. There was no hysteria. It would just, I got to finish this. I got a job to do. I came all the way here and I’m going to get it done. And stuff like that, really small things like that, I observed everybody and it was really inspirational. So when I saw him do that, I was like, “I have no excuse to wimp out here.” So those are the kind of things that that acclimization of the cold, both mentally and physically, acclimization to turbulent water. In my case, it was quite lucky.

And then the last thing, and this is my own technology that I learned in Japan, is a thing called KAATSU. It means additional pressure. I just put these bands on my arms and legs before and after every bout of swimming that I do. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 30 minutes or three hours or after each SCAR. In fact, I kept them in my dry bag at SCAR. And as soon as I finished each race in SCAR, I’d get on the boat, I’d put on my bands. And basically, what it does is it removes the metabolic waste. It removes the lactic acid out of your muscles very quickly, and then the lactate dissipates around the bloodstream. So you feel refreshed very quickly. You’re still fatigued, but you don’t have that sort of lethargic. My muscles are heavy. I don’t want to take another stroke feeling. It’s really a recovery. So I did that before and after every single practice, and I’ve been doing that for years, but this really, really, really helped.

And so all of those things were this puzzle piece that I put together, and it worked. You know I didn’t know it was going to work, but it did work. Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. So take us to SCAR. So I get there, and there’s many SCAR veterans. People have been there before. But I’ve written about these people. Yeah Not that I memorized everybody’s events, but I know many of them. And I walked into the Patty Herman does a very nice, very beautiful pre-swim get-together, a pre-race swim. It’s at the start of the day one lake, and she greets everybody. She gives everybody’s t-shirts and caps. And I am in awe. I am in total awe. I’m like, “Oh my God, you’re the triple crowner.” Or, “Oh my God, you’re the Ice miler.” And it was amazing to me.

And of course, everybody’s talking and everybody’s talking about, “Oh, you know when are you going over to Dover and you know when’s your Catalina? And you know when are you doing the double around Manhattan?” And I’m like, “Oh my God, these people are serious.” Right? Absolutely serious. And here I am going, “Gee, six months ago, I’m swimming 2,000 yards with my buddies, and we’re just sort of sometimes we’re social kicking and sometimes we’re using hand paddles.” And so anyway, that was really intimidating, just meeting and seeing everybody for the first time. And there were some people I had met over the years, so that was nice to see them. But I was basically just very quiet and just looking around just in awe of everybody. And we got in the lake. The lake was comfortable, the first lake. And I go, “Oh, it feels sort of good being out here.” And you know we warmed up the next morning. The logistics of every single swim was beyond. So you generally gather at the end of the race and people buy rental cars, some people are carpooling, et cetera.

I mean, there was one guy who actually camped out at the end of the race in his car, Michael Riley, great guy. So you gather and Kent divides the whole group. There was 61 people who had entered the swim. Unfortunately, some people got COVID. Some people, I don’t know, for a variety of life reasons, didn’t get there, but there’s about 48 people who eventually swam. And we all gather, then Kent divides you up into three groups. And then the three groups get shuttled down the river to a staging area. And this is kayakers and swimmers. Then in the staging area, the swimmers disrobe, put on their whatever, decitin, landlin, put on their cap, goggles, earplugs, stretch a bit. The kayakers do the same. The kayakers have their dry bags. The kayakers have their feeding, put them on their kayaks.

Now, early in the morning, Kent has already taken all these kayaks over there, so his day starts at 2:00 a.m.. Probably, he just doesn’t sleep. He just doesn’t sleep for four days, yeah. Yeah. And so you’re in the staging area, which is closer to the, I would say, maybe 80% to the start. And then the swimmers just in your swim trunks and goggles and the cap jump in a pontoon boat and you’re escorted to the start. And the kayakers kayak to there. And so you do that four days in a row. But in day one, I was in awe over everybody. Day two, I was in awe of the lake because these pontoon boats, they’re not fast, high-speed boats. They’re sort of mosing along very comfortably. And when he goes slowly over the course on a marathon swim course, you’re like, “Oh, my God, how long is this swim?” I didn’t want to look at the course. Just drop me off in the start and let me swim.

But in this case, you literally go very slowly down the entire course. So you know you’re gathering at I forget the first day. Maybe you’re gathering at 7:00 a.m., but the start isn’t till 10 o’clock, in my case, maybe 9:30, 10:00, 10:30. So in that three hours prior to your swim, you are actually doing something. You’re waiting, you’re in a boat, you’re getting ready. There’s a lot of action that’s happening before then. And then you get carted near the start of the swim and Kent says, “Okay, everybody in the water, you jump in.” Every single one of the lakes, the water was cold in the beginning, without a doubt. Now, of course, Martha Wood, Elaine Howley, our Irish friends, for them, it isn’t a big deal. For Stefan Reinke, myself, it was a big deal.

But we were told and we believe that you swim a little bit through the cold and the water eventually warmed up, which it did. It was unbelievable. And then you swim down the first lake, Lake Sawaru, if I’m pronouncing it correctly, I don’t know. And it is beauty the whole way. It’s very much like the same way that I was personally entranced by all of the sights and scenes around Manhattan Island. There was always something to see.

In the four lakes of SCAR, there’s always something to see. There are the cacti, there are the canyon walls. The clarity of the water is poor. It’s silt built up and you can’t see much, but you can see enough. There was never anything that was boring. It was always, “Oh, that’s cool.” Even if it was a mountain ridge that you saw and you would see it for three hours because it could be that long, you saw the different shades of the canyon because as starting in the morning, the sun would rise and then the shades of the canyon walls would literally change. You know they’d go from dark to less dark to a granite color to a reddish color. And then it would go on.

So colors, shapes, the size of the cacti were incredible. I didn’t know cactus could grow that big, but there were 12 meter high cacti out there. And me being sort of always thinking creatively, maybe in a weird way, I always imagine all this cacti were actually spectators. Yeah, I love that. So that was really fun. And there was Apache helicopters from, I guess, a nearby Navy base came passing down really low, and that was cool to see. And throughout the entire swims, most of the time, I could see another swimmer. I never felt it was a solo swim. Yes, it’s a race, but really, it was 48 people who were doing solo swims. But really, there was always somebody in sight. And so you wind down this beautiful, beautiful lake, and you basically go from the start of one end of the dam to the other end of the dam. And that was day one. I finished. It was great. Kent had everything prepared. You get out and there was some breakfast burritos there. There was cookies. There was beer, water, Gatorade, fruit, watermelon, grapes, bars. And he really, that first day was a really, really welcomed experience.

Again, me not doing anything for many decades. And all of a sudden, the first thing you do and the logistics were incredible. The camaraderie was great. The collegial atmosphere of everybody, which is, “Hey, we’re all in this together. It’s going to be fun, very supportive, very motivational, very inspirational. Everybody, all ages, from the young boy who got an Hasty award to people in their 60s. And it was great to see that the kayakers all had various bits of advice. There was a lot of veterans, SCAR veterans there, so they sort of told us what to expect. But until you literally swim through it, you don’t know exactly what to expect. And that was day one. And we repeated that four more days. Each day, I thought the course was even more majestic, more grandiose, more intriguing.

I couldn’t imagine how can you do better than day one? And then we got to day two. And it was, in many ways, more beautiful, more challenging, more satisfying to finish. And I was like, “There’s no way it could be better than that.” And then day three comes along, and it was more challenging, more majestic. There was more camaraderie. How can people become more friendly than they already are? They did. I don’t know how. And then the last day, Lake Roosevelt, that’s the night swim. And Kent did something different this year. It wasn’t a point-to-point. It was a triangle swim. And it was interesting because personally, I don’t like swimming at night. I do swim at night, but I don’t particularly like it. And I remember Kant is giving his last words, always very inspirational, always very educational, and sort of the pre-race technical talk.
And he also wanted to acknowledge everybody, which he did, his memory. And of course, he’s an attorney. So I would imagine he has this skill that he knows all. He’s got names, he’s got dates, he’s got facts and figures at his fingertips, and he’s giving accolades to everybody. And then I’m thinking, “Kent, let’s just start. Let’s just start because right now the sun is out.” And it’s going on and on and on, and the buoys are being sent, and I’m starting to see the sun go down.

I go, “Oh, I got to swim fast in the beginning because I want to minimize the amount of darkness that I have to swim.” Because it’s very much unlike Catalina Channel. Catalina Channel Crossings, you start at night and you swim, if you’re swimming from the island to the mainland, you still see the lights of Southern California. But out in the desert in Arizona, it’s really dark. It’s like they turned off the light and you can’t see anything. And the thing that I always liked was when my kayaker Chris would say, he’d say, “Swim to the light, swim to the light.” There was a light. Well, at night, in this scenario, the light stayed the exact same illumination and I don’t know what they call it, the number of candles, whatever the illumination, and the size 100 meters away or two kilometers away. It stayed the same size. Yeah.

And I was like, and Chris was the first three days, he was very, very accurate on his estimations of where we were on the lake. So he would say, “Steve, we got 2,000 meters to go.” And he was almost spot on. All right, Steve, you know we’re halfway, and he was very good. He had a laminated map that actually Liz Fry’s sister, Peggy, had given us, which I greatly appreciate. So he was always spot on. But at night, I figured, “Ah, Chris, you’ve never kayaked at night. Are you really accurate or not?” And he was spot on. I don’t know how he did it. So that was the night swim. And in between, we had the two lakes. The Canyon Lake was just that was interesting. In Canyon Lake, I always thought in dams, if this is where you’re starting, this is the other end of the dam, I always thought that the water would flow down and then they would open up the flus here and the water would flow out. And the water would always go in one direction. With you, right? With you in the water, not against you.

Well, when we were there, I remember I was the staging area, and I looked in the distance, and I saw swimmers walking on shore. And I go, “Oh, my first thought was, “Oh, my God, it’s so cold. They’ve already quit.” Because I was looking from the staging area to the finish, sorry, to the start. And I saw swimmers walking, and I go, “Oh, I’m not looking forward to this because they’re already quitting. They’re already getting out and walking.” And I didn’t realize, and nobody realized, including Kent, that on this particular day, instead of the water flowing normally and then being released down this part of the dam, what they did was they opened up these flus and the water was being drawn backwards. Oh, wow. So the water was, instead of flowing on my screen from left to right, it was actually going from right to left. And we were starting here and we had to swim against the flow of water. And Kent had warned us, he said, “Oh, you know we haven’t seen this, but it’s going to be really hard and sprint like your life depends on it.” And I was like, “Oh, man.” So even when we jumped off the pontoon boat and we swam to the end of the lake, we were literally I could feel all of our bodies being sucked to the dam. It was nerve-wracking. Yes.

And so that was an interesting start to that swim. So I know in my mind, I was expecting that particular swim, which is traditionally the shortest or a short swim. And I was looking at the data from the last 10 years from SCARs, “Okay, I should finish under three hours, maybe even 2:45.” And boy, 2:45 just went around and we had another hour. But there was so much to see and so much to think about during the swim that time actually went by fast, much faster than before. And same thing in Apache, which was day three, I swam it in six and a half hours. And I haven’t done a six and a half hour swim again in decades. But I was never bored. I was never worried about getting out. I bonked a little bit. I needed the Starburst, but I wasn’t concerned. There was just so much to think about, to look about, to do. And one of the things I remember in Apache, it was interesting to have these beautiful, beautiful canyon walls, just gorgeous. And on that particular day, as normal, the wind was blowing against us. And I saw my kayaker was really digging deep, really digging deep. He was struggling, to be honest with you.

And Kent had told us before in the pre-race meeting that in this particular lake, the winds usually kick up and it’s going to be a very difficult swim, and it’s the longest of the four days. And he said, “But for safety purposes, you have to stick with your kayaker.” There’s no question. Kayaker and swimmers cannot be separated. So I looked over at Chris and he said, “Chris, let’s swim near the canyon walls where I could see the texture of the water was much flatter, much more tranquil than it was in the middle where it was choppy.” And I had instructed Chris or I’d asked Chris before we start, “Let’s go point to point. So let’s minimize our distance.” And he did a very great job taking me from point to point. But on this particular day, in these particular circumstances, I said, “Chris, forget our previous strategy.

Yeah Let’s go where the water is more calm because I wanted him to be able to kayak at the pace that I wanted to swim.” So we moved over. Obviously, we went off the straight line tangent and we created more distance for ourselves. But when we got to the shallow waters, I go, “Oh, the water is much warmer here than in the thing.” So I said, “Chris, let’s just stay here for a while.” So we went zigzagging around the canyon walls. And because they were zigzagging, and because you know marathon swimmers we’re always taught, you know don’t lift up your head, don’t look ahead of us. Now, I’m the first person to always advise that, and I’m the first person to always look up. Always know how much further that I have. Even if I’m wrong, I just want a mental picture. But around those zigzag walls, because it was so comfortable, the water was warmer and it was very tranquil, I just got, oh and I could see the bottom. It was very clear.

And I was like, “Oh, this is so cool.” And bam, I smashed into a buoy with my head. The next time I ran into it with my hand, and then another time I smashed into the canyon wall. Oh, geez. But that you know every time I smash into something, it kept me occupied for another 15 minutes, just thinking about, “God, I’m glad nobody saw me do that.” That would have been embarrassing.
Did you know your kayak support before the event or you just matched up with? Yeah, Chris and I work together. We’re colleagues. And he actually runs two short swims, open water swims in Boston, but he had never kayaked before. Oh, wow. But he’s a coach. So he knew on a theoretical level what he needed to do, but he actually never did it before. But I know he’s a competitive guy. And I said, “Chris, you’ve got to take me on the shortest line possible.” And sure enough, you know he did it, and it was good.

That’s cool. With regard to the competition, did you have your sights set on winning going in, or were you just like, “Oh, we’ll see what happens.” No, no. My goal is to finish. That was literally my goal to finish. Now, after the first day when I finished, because I had passed many people along the way, I thought to myself because I didn’t say, “Oh, that’s number one, number two.” I wasn’t counting. I was like, “Ah, I passed maybe 30 people, so I’m probably in the top 10.” And I go, “Wow, that’s really good.” I was fine with that. I was totally fine with that. I was not top 10. That’s not bad. That’s pretty good. And then that night, a man in California, Southern California, who I occasionally trained with, Steve Sutton, texted me and said, “Hey, great job.” And he saw the results before I did. Yeah. And it was probably 10:00, 11:00 at night. And I looked at the results and they go, “Oh my gosh, I was the fastest.

How did that happen?” But it was a great mental boost. But even on day one, I wasn’t thinking about, for me, it wasn’t a competition. For me, it was a reunion of me and my past as a competitive swimmer. It was very much like someone who maybe does the 200 butterfly at a master swimming at the age of 59. You know Ah, can I do it? And if they finish, they’re fine. If they win, great. That was my attitude. And so day two, I was thinking, “Ah, I know people are just waiting.” Because I had heard people say, “Well, wait for day three. Day three is when champions are made. That’s really where the rubber hits the road.” And I was thinking, “Well, you know if I’m X number of minutes ahead in the first day, I think they’re all banging it. I think they’re just using this. Yeah. And so day two, I actually swam hard. Oh, okay.

Because it was choppy and because they had that backflow issue, I swam hard that day. And then when I finished, again, the results, how Kent get the results out anyway? I have no idea, but he did get the results. And then my lead had increased a little bit. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s shocking.” But it was another huge boost of inspiration, I guess. Again, I wasn’t thinking about winning, but then on day three, to be honest, I was thinking, “Gosh, if I actually just last, I might be in the top three.” And that’s really cool. And then when we jumped into Apache, it was cold at the start. And it was very, very tranquil, very tranquil, glassy, really. And I said, “You know what? Now’s the time to go hard because at some point, Kent had told us and all the veterans had told us that it would be choppy.” So for the first three hours, I actually went pretty hard.

Hard for me is 80 strokes a minute. So I’m turning over pretty quickly, and I’m getting four beat a kick, and I’m stopping every half an hour, taking some water, no food, but just water and no special water. No food at all? No. The only time I took food was toward the end of Apache. And there I had the starburst. And after that, I had some peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches, which tasted really good. I don’t think it’s necessary. I think I was actually just that Starbucks was just a shot of sugar. I mean, I don’t eat candy, but this, 4 Starburst, there’s this shot of sugar. And I think it really kickstarted me and then I crashed. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And so I figured, “Okay, I need more carbohydrates as opposed to pure sugar.” And so we had some Nutella and peanut butter sandwiches I had prepared in a worst-case scenario. So I had that. But other than that, you’re only feeding on water. Water. And then I do take it’s called Quentin. Oh, yeah. Seawater. It’s filtered seawater from the Iberian Peninsula. And that is really good. I’ve been taking that for years, and it’s just these glass vials.

And I always take one before every workout and every SCAR swim. And it’s got all the minerals and vitamins of the deep sea filtered water combined with the algae tablets. I do take a packet of algae tablets before, and actually it sustains me. I don’t get hungry. Now, when I finish, like mentally, I go, “Huh, I haven’t eaten in a while. I should eat.” But when I’m swimming, these two things are really good for me and my body. And again, I was training that way. So it was very good sustainability. And if you think of seaweed and this filtered seawater, combining that with just pure water is perfect. I think defizz Coke, not any kind of the commercial electrolyte drinks.

I think that combination with seaweed tablets, et cetera, I think that would have been a little iffy if you hadn’t prepared. But just pure water and what I was taking before the swim was a really good mixture for me. And so I wasn’t wasting much time. This would hand me a water bottle and I would suck it down, not much, and then I would continue on. And so on day three, the late increase. And by day four, I go, “Ah, I can actually get the SCAR buckle. That’s pretty cool. I haven’t won a race or a trophy or a medal or a ribbon or whatever in a long, long, long time.” And I was like, “Huh, I felt like a little kid.” That’s so cool. But at the same time, I was thinking, “I can’t screw this up.” I got to swim reasonably well, but because in the open water, you never know.

I mean, I could have stopped especially in the dark, right? In the dark. I mean, Chris could have had a problem. I could have had a problem. There’s could have been all number of things that went wrong. And that’s why on the last day, when I’m liking a kid, I’m like, “Oh, I can get my blue ribbon.” I didn’t want anything to go wrong. And that’s why when Kent we were not delaying the start, but we were waiting until the sun was going down, I’m thinking, “God, I got to swim fast in order to do what I have to do to win this buckle.” And so I remember in the Roosevelt Lake as we were at the shoreline, and he said, “Go.” I mean, I took off because I knew that we had about an hour, maybe an hour and a half of daylight or at least sunlight, and then it would turn dark.

And so I think that swim was it was over two and a half hours. So over half was in the pitch black, at least for me. And then it all ended up well, you know I finished.. the ribbon.. and hand me the buckle, and it was really cool. And it just turned out. It was like this beautiful end to a beautiful event that the women’s winner was Laura Wilhelm from Northern California.
It just so happened that she and I had sat together in the same table in the welcome dinner. Oh, wow. She and I had shared our common fears and our worries. Here we were two, to be honest, rookies amongst all these veterans. And you know she told me how she trained. I told her how I trained. And we’re both thinking, “Oh my God, you know this is like beyond our capabilities.” And it turns out that you know she won the buckle and I won the buckle.

And it was just you know when I saw her finish, I was like, “Oh, this is so cool that I didn’t know her from anybody.” And we just so happened to sit on the same table and she had two kayakers, her kayakers and my kayakers, total rookies. So you had all these rookies sitting together worrying about just finishing, you know worrying that was our preparation sufficient? And it turned out it was sufficient. She’s 40. She’s an art teacher from Reading, California. And I saw her swim, and I was like, “Wow, she’s going to go places and do things.” And you know she has her English channel swim scheduled. And so it’s great to see someone like that sort of jump into sport at a relatively older age, not that 40’s old, but relatively speaking. And you know she came out smiling. Her kayakers came out smiling.

You know The only bad thing about SCAR, the only bad thing is at the end of the four days, it’s dark. Everybody’s tired. And then basically, everybody goes home or goes back to the hotel. Yep But you know Laura and I were able to share our thoughts about the swim and everything. And Kent was again, I don’t know how Kent does it. If there is a race director or there is a person who wants to run a race, they would be well served to visit Kent and be part of his crew. Because how they handle everything in that swim operationally, logistically, emotionally, sleep deprived, darkness. Because again, we swim, for the exception of Roosevelt, in the light. But Kent is driving kayaks, placing kayaks, arranging buoys in the dark for all the days. And if someone wants to really know how to handle emergencies, contingencies, unplanned events. Kant is the man who absolutely understands this is an adventure. It really is an adventure. If people are looking for something really out of the ordinary and fun, something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, adventure, truly adventure.

I mean, I read in magazines, I hear podcasts about all these adventure races with runners and rowers and triathletes, et cetera. But man, SCAR is absolutely up there in terms of adventure. I’ll give you one hint, one indication of the things that Kent deals with. So Kent rents two large U-Haul trucks to transport the kayaks from point to point. Well, in Apache Lake on day three, the U-Haul truck just stops. It’s not working anymore. But Kent has 50% of the kayaks in that U-Haul. If Kent doesn’t get those kayaks down to the lake, we’re not having the race. So what does Kant do? Fortunately, it’s stalled on a hill. Engine’s gone. Nothing can do. Kent puts it in neutral and just coast down this dirt road. That dirt road is something to behold, too. Yes. It is a pot-filled dirt road that’s about this wide. I mean, Kent has like one meter tolerance or else he’s tumbling over. And he’s in neutral engineism running and somehow he gets the kayaks there. Oh my gosh.

Again, if there’s a race organizer, I mean, it doesn’t matter whether it’s USA swimming, US master swimming, Waikiki Rough Water Swim, you know New York Open Water Man, Kent has to deal with so many issues, and he does it with a smile, he does it with professionalism, and it’s remarkable. So if you want an adventure, like SCAR is it. Yep. Yep. Will we see you at any more events anytime soon? I’m going to do some swims. I volunteer for the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation. So I wanted to be an observer. So I’ll observe a few swims. But it was funny. In the observer training, Forrest Nelson and his crew were teaching us about Catalina Channel Crossing and the different finish points along the California coast. And he had a great marine chart of the various finish points.

And I grew up in Southern California, but I never realized, “Oh, what a great place to swim.” And so it’s called the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Depending on how you measure it, it’s probably 25 to 30 kilometers around. And so in that meeting, as I’m volunteering to be an observer, I was thinking about, “I got to swim around that peninsula.” So I’m going to do that in a few or I’m going to attempt that in a few weeks. And so, yeah, I mean, I’m not going to do anything. I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. It was a very cool challenge. I mean, I turned many, many shades darker than the sun, and it was fun. I did it safely. You know Whether I wanted to SCAR buckle or not, I finished and that was my goal. I met a lot of really cool people. I saw firsthand how Kent and his volunteers organized this event. Incredible. I checked off all the boxes that I needed to.

But because I met all these people, you know what? I need to volunteer more. And so that’s why I’m going to be helping out with the Catalina Channel Crossings. And you know I’m the low man on the totem pole. So if they need a pace swimmer, I’ll jump in. If they need a kayaker, I’ll get the paddle. If they need somebody to count strokes or mark, that’s what I’ll do. Very cool. Thank you so much for sharing with us, Stephen. I appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure.

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