🌊 This is Like That: Confronting Fears of Fish and Drowning 🏊🏻‍♀️

Photo by Mario La Pergola on Unsplash

The starting foghorn blows, and within seconds I feel like I’m drowning. This is nothing like what I practiced.

I’m swallowing huge gobs of choppy lake water. A flurry of feet kick at my face, launching the swimmers they are attached to ahead. A tangle of arms pound the water around me, like an angry super octopus. I am already out of breath, struggling even to dog paddle.

My form is all wrong. Panicked, I try swimming the way I had practiced, but between keeping my eyes on the orienting buoy ahead and the other swimmers, the crick in my neck creates resistance, my legs sink too low, and my arms are doing all the work. They’re tired before I’ve barely even begun.

I can’t complete a stroke to save my life.

And I will need to figure out a way to save myself—at least from this situation—ideally without giving up and turning back.

This is exactly what I was afraid of. Well, this and my irrational fear of fish. Why am I the only one who sees a dark, dingy lake as an oversized bucket of bugs? I don’t like sushi or snorkeling.

I don’t know what’s worse: getting pounded by whitewater and people at the starting line, or feeling whispers of tiny fish (or is it seaweed? eels?) brushing against my legs once I am separated from the pack. Don’t even get me started on those “pedicures” from schools of tiny red garra fish that nibble off dead skin. 🤢

I never thought I could complete a triathlon because, aside from my irrational fear of fish, I never liked swimming in the first place.¹

The smell of chlorine as a kid made my stomach flip; sometimes, it still does. My mom drove us to summer swim lessons in her white Subaru station wagon while we listened to the same twenty-four golden oldies from the 1950s on a double-sided cassette tape. A subtle foreboding accompanied me the whole way to the community pool, week after week. It never subsided, no matter how much progress I made.

Oldies, chlorine, kickboards, fear.

To this day, when I hear those classics, I smell chlorine and fear—the fear of drowning.

So it seemed prudent that in 2009, I rectify the situation by confronting this fear. I signed up for a triathlon with my friend

Julie Clow

, the See Jane Tri event at Shadow Cliffs Park in Pleasanton, California.

For four months leading up to the event, I practiced in the resistance pool on Google’s main campus before and after work. It didn’t matter if it was cold or dark—I put in my daily reps, despite my other fear of coworkers seeing me in a swimsuit.

By the end of those training months, I was proud of my progress; I could swim for thirty unbroken minutes now, much better than only two when I started.

Did I ever practice in open water? No, I did not. See above: bugs in a bucket.

Ignorant bliss: me and Julie at the See Jane Tri event in 2009, scoping out the swim at sunrise. My smile indicates I had no idea how badly I was about to screw it up.

On race day, I learned just how irrelevant my practice had been. One arena had nothing to do with the other.