The ultimate swim, chicken-soup fueled
Tahoe crossing completes teen’s Triple Crown aquatic triumph
Chicken soup, which is good for most things, helped a 15-year-old swimmer do something she couldn’t have done without it.
It got her across the middle of Lake Tahoe on Saturday morning.
“I like chicken soup,” said Angel More of San Carlos. “It tastes good. Gives you a warm feeling.”
A swimmer surely needs something warm when splashing 21.3 miles across a chilly alpine lake for nearly 16 hours, wearing only a swimsuit, goggles and cap. Angel drank a bottle of chicken soup every half hour between plunging in at Camp Richardson on the California side late Friday and stepping ashore Saturday at 12:40 p.m. at Incline Village in Nevada.
As she emerged, she looked pale as a ghost. The white color came from diaper rash ointment she was allowed to wear, under the rules, as insulation. She waded slowly up the beach, plopped down on the sand and, surrounded by a small crowd of fans, began munching a bag of graham crackers in the shape of small teddy bears, a favorite recovery food.
The Lake Tahoe crossing completed Angel’s last leg in the California Triple Crown of Marathon Swimming — she had already swum the Catalina and Santa Barbara channels. She is the youngest person ever to manage such a feat.
“You get a lot of time to think . ... It’s a nice feeling. Especially when it’s over.” Angel More, marathon swimmer
Getting across Lake Tahoe was the toughest of the three, she said. It was longer, higher and colder, and the lack of salt water made her less buoyant and more prone to fatigue.
On Friday night, the lake waters were unexpectedly choppy due to a strong wind, she said, creating some “gnarly” swells.
That’s where the chicken soup came in. It was just the thing. For her Southern California ocean swims, Angel drank orange juice instead. Bad idea.
“The orange juice was too acidic,” she said. “It made me cough. When you’re swimming, that’s not good.”
Long-distance swimming is actually fun and introspective, said Angel, a junior at Menlo School in Atherton. She does most of her big swims in the middle of the night beneath the stars and enjoys watching the sun come up from her unique perspective. Another thing to ponder while swimming for 16 hours at a time: Why am I doing this?
“You get a lot of time to think,” Angel said. “Sometimes I’m thinking of things I have to do, but a lot of the time I’m thinking about nothing. I’m in the moment. You feel like the Earth is a giant marble, and you can sense that it’s round. On land the Earth seems flat, but not in the water.
“I like it,” she added. “It’s a nice feeling. Especially when it’s over.”
Angel isn’t the only one rewarded for her efforts. She also raises money through her swims for Children International, a Kansas City charity that provides food and medical treatment for poor children around the world. Her fans have contributed thousands of dollars.
Training for the Lake Tahoe leg of the Triple Crown took some doing. Angel’s first dip in the lake did not go well — she got tuckered out after just two hours of swimming, because of the thin air.
“I got tired really quickly, and I couldn’t kick that hard,” she said. “After a few days, I adjusted.”
But the Southern California swims were tough, too. She crossed the 12-mile Santa Barbara channel, from Anacapa Island to Oxnard, in 7½ hours in 2017. She crossed the 20mile Catalina channel, from Catalina Island to Los Angeles, in 14½ hours two months ago.
Swimming to Los Angeles, a destination fraught with peril under any circumstances, turns out to be even trickier with sharks and jellyfish involved. The sharks left her alone, Angel said, but the jellyfish stung her about two dozen times. Approaching Los Angeles, she also got caught in a nasty current for two hours and found herself stuck, moving her legs in place and getting nowhere. Angelenos know the feeling.
To train for the recordbreaking attempts, Angel swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco. Not once, but 51 times.
At first it was plenty exciting. No longer.
“After about the 30th time, it started to get a little boring,” she said.
For her final leg of the Triple Crown of California, Angel had to miss the first two days of school. Her teachers gave her a couple of homework assignments to ponder midlake. Write an essay about yourself, said her English teacher. Angel composed it in her head, between gulps of chicken soup.
Even in the middle of nowhere, there are rules. Angel is accompanied on her swims by a green kayak and a motorboat, with a monitor aboard. Angel is not allowed a wetsuit, or swim fins, or to grab the boat. If she does, the swim doesn’t count. Chicken soup is OK, but her crew has to throw the bottle into the water in her direction — she’s not allowed to touch anyone.
So, Angel said, she slurps soup and she splashes and she thinks. The Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe have something in common, she concluded, besides being wet.
“They’re big bodies of water. When you’re in the middle, it’s just you. All alone, by yourself,” she said. “I like that.”