From the Editor
Suzanne Boyd
IS SAID you can never go back but many will never be content unless they attempt to, however mixed the results. This is how I found myself participating in a two-kilometre swim in a choppy sea against the current. It was a trial run – actually a breaststroke – ahead of the main event two days later, a 5K, of the Barbados Open Water Swim. These are waters I had plied as a teenager when I lived on the island in the late ’70s – my memories mostly a sun-bleached haze of surfing days and beach cook-up nights with the neighbourhood gang, the self-dubbed South Point Riders. At one point, after I broke my toes skateboarding and wore too small a bikini, which she later burned, my mother forbade me to leave the house except for school and church. Which is why now, 40 years later, I was blaming her for my predicament as I painfully bobbed my way down the coast. You see, after her edict, to avoid being detected when I did leave the house, I would climb down the nearby cliff and simply swim everywhere day or night, including to Enterprise Beach (where I am pictured above). So when my friend, the PR maven Ann Layton, who represents Barbados, told me she was doing the swim, I blithely agreed to do it, too. After all, how hard could it be, seeing I used to do it all the time?
And what about time in those other senses? With six months to go after I signed up, I made plans to have regular training sessions so that I could prove a thesis – that one could be more fit, strong and fast now than then. But then life (nerve damage from a massage, a bad burn when I spilled coffee on myself) and procras- tination (late-night drinks were always more enticing than early-morning laps) got in the way. But, as the 2K kicked off, I was still sure this was doable. After all, wouldn’t some primordial ocean-going muscle memory of mine surface at some point? Also, I was middle-aged among the competitors, my confidence buoyed by the age of many teams of swimmers 20 years or more older than me floating around in jaunty matching swimsuits and caps. It quickly deflated when one of the “seniors” helpfully pointed out that my goggles were on upside down before racing ahead with a vigorous front crawl.
Given my perception of my abilities, it took me a humiliating two hours to complete the swim. I wasn’t the last one to finish but I was certainly one of the last. Still, one has to have gratitude and I was proud that I actually finished the swim. The bonus? That I came to the blindingly obvious but previously elusive conclusion that there will be a better outcome in any situation if you accept and admit who and where you are, instead of hoping and pretending you are what you were. Then the Universe saved me the ignominy of dropping out of the 5K by brewing up a dark and stormy day, where discretion was the better part of valour for many. Which gives me almost a year to train for the 2017 event, knowing that when the vanity of age met the hubris of youth, I survived.