Beach to Beach the Queen of Meech

It was Saturday morning, 10 degrees Centigrade, windy, and the water was choppy.

Not ideal conditions, but this was the window of opportunity. Sandwiched between commitments last weekend in New York City and the next weekend in Toronto, I was here and Kristin was helping me fulfil this summer’s goal to swim Beach to Beach at Meech.

We drove separately to the deserted O’Brien Beach parking lot, put some clothes in my car and then drove in her car to Blanchette Beach parking lot. On the way to the other beach, we left water, Gatorade and cheese strings in a bag near the boat dock we’d pass at 1,000 metres. We figured we’d be taking a long time, and we’d be hungry.

I had my car key pinned to my bathing suit.

At 9:10 a.m. we entered the water at Blanchette and began swimming. Kristin pulled "floatie buoy", the red flotation device she’d given me for my birthday a few years ago, to enable me to even consider swimming in a lake. (Actually, in the waves, floatie buoy appeared to be pulling her.) I could wear it and hang on and rest if necessary – to save her having to rescue me. And I was wearing my other great support – without whom none of this would be possible – my thick, tattered, pink and black wetsuit purchased from the TriRudy rental collection after my first Try a Tri.

Through the waves we chugged along to the boat dock, and then kept going, to keep warm. The amazing thing about that swim was the variety – the waves got higher, the sun came out and then hid, the water was clear and then cloudy, we saw the fronts of all the cottages we’d driven past on the road.

It was so exciting to see the lifeguard chair of O’Brien Beach in the distance, and then the lifeguards huddled in fleece on the picnic table. There were no swimmers in the water or on the sand either. The lifeguards asked where we came from.

When I’d considered doing this, I’d envisaged a restful swim in glass-like water, on a sweltering hot day, with lots of rest stops. That’s the way Kristin had done it a few years earlier, and the way she’s proposed it to me. It had to be a weekend day, because in any case, I’d be too slow to do it before work.

But the way it actually happened turned out to be an even more wonderful challenge. I get motion sick in cars, but when I began to get woozy and throw up a bit from the waves, I felt like Marilyn Bell and Vickie Keith, not the swimmer wannabe that I was. What an amazing feeling to have progressed to this.

I was over the moon the first time I was able to swim around the island from Blanchette last year. I couldn’t imagine swimming any further.

I think Kristin was even more excited than I was for me, because she remembers the quivering, hyperventilating, bowl of jelly I was the first time I dipped my timid toes in Meech Lake and panted my way to the birch trees a hundred metres along the shore. Then I had to rest on a rock before the swim back. She remembers when my swimming to the red boathouse was an impossible goal.

And I remember her accomplishing a Try a Tri and thinking that was the pinnacle. Yet this summer she did an Olympic Tri and I did Meech Beach to Beach.

Time to make goals for next year! This is so much fun.