Posted: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:51 PM - 15,526 Readers
By: Pam LeBlanc
Come midnight Thursday, Austin swimmer Katy Dooley will slide into the inky waters of the Pacific Ocean off of Catalina Island. She’ll take a stroke, then another, and swim off into the night.
If all goes well, she’ll still be chugging away as the sun rises. If the currents cooperate, the weather doesn’t whip up, she doesn’t get too cold, the jellyfish don’t sting and a million other things, she’ll wade onto the California coast about 10 hours later. That’s about noon Friday Austin time.
“I’m starting to get the nerves,” Dooley, 44, told me recently. “Not in a bad way. I’ve done everything I could possibly do to prepare. I’m just nervous about things I can’t control.”
If she finishes the 21-mile crossing, she’ll be in rare company. As of last October, just 199 swimmers — among them at least two other Austin swimmers, David Blanke and Lynne Smith — had officially made the crossing. (This year’s swimmers won’t be ratified and added to that list until the end of the year.)
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Dooley will have a team of six crew members, along with two official swim observers, to help her along the way. They’ll be in a motorized support boat, monitoring her health and keeping her fed and hydrated. A kayaker will be in the water at all times, leading her on the way.
Dooley says she doesn’t have a goal time. “For me, getting across will be a great day,” she says.
She’ll likely be swimming through waters hovering at about 65 degrees when she starts. About two hours from the California shore, temperatures typically drop 4 or 5 degrees. That can be a jolt to the system.
She won’t be wearing a wetsuit. A plain old bathing, suit, cap, goggles and a little grease to prevent chafing are all she’s allowed.
And yes, she’s aware of what lurks under the surface.
“I respect the wildlife greatly,” Dooley says. “I did not watch ‘Shark Week.’ I like to call them the S guys — I don’t even like saying the word.”
Honestly, though, Dooley says she has a better chance of getting flapped by a flying fish or stung by jellyfish than she does of getting some unwanted attention from a shark.
“I hear those are pretty alarming when they whack you,” she says of the flying fish.
Dooley, a former University of Texas swimmer and two-time Ironman Triathlon finisher, has been focusing on this swim since last summer, when she swam the 12-mile Lake Travis Relay solo. (And nosed out the six-woman relay team I swam the race with, by the way.) I got to swim on a four-woman relay with her in June at the 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. She’s tough!
Dooley maintained a solid base of pool training through the winter, mixed with cold-water open-water swims in Lake Travis and Lake Austin even when water temperatures dropped into the 50s. To help deal with that chill, she purposely gained 20 pounds for insulation.
She logged several 4- and 6-hour swims, including one swim from Walsh Landing near Hula Hut to the Loop 360 Pennybacker Bridge and back at night, in choppy conditions.
It’s all part of her grand plan to swim the English Channel in September 2012.
As for nutrition during the Catalina swim, she’ll be sipping Carbo Pro sports drinks, lapping up packets of Gu and backing it all up with trusty old M&Ms chocolate candies. She plans to eat a little bit every half an hour.
Her crew will count her strokes. If they slow down too much, they’ll give her more calories.
Dooley vows not to pull herself out of the water, but has instructed her crew to yank her if she gets hypothermia or if the currents push her backwards, making a crossing impossible.
“I am super duper excited. I am incredibly excited,” she says. “This swim will be about adapting to the environment. You don’t get to say how it’s going to be. It’s just an exercise in human resilience … It’s just an incredible feeling. You can either be fearful or you can embrace it.”
Dooley’s Catalina swim will be part of the Colin’s Hope Got2Swim fund-raiser, which is happening in Lake Austin on Sept. 2. She hopes she will be finishing her swim in California at about the same time swimmers here wade out of the water at Walsh Landing.
To donate to the fund-raiser, which supports Colin’s Hope’s efforts to prevent childhood drowning,
go here.
