swimming

The toadfish sits on the bottom of the sea, singing a song of love.

It’s November, and in the seasonal ebb and return of the San Francisco economy that means it’s time for Dreamforce, the annual tradeshow hosted by Salesforce.com.

I was on the third leg of the Dolphin Club’s Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon, and so far that morning I’d already swum from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park (58 minutes), bike to Mill Valley (about an hour), and run as far as Muir Woods. I figured I needed to conserve energy and take the fastest route.

According to the Marathon Swimmers Federation, the minimum distance to qualify a swim as a “marathon swim” is 10 kilometers. By that definition, I guess I’m now a marathon swimmer. Yesterday I joined about 20 others in a 10km (6.2 mile) swim from the Capitola pier to the Santa Cruz pier, by way of a

It’s Spring, since yesterday, and I’m swimming again. The familiar soreness of the arm and shoulder muscles, the cup of the middle ear sometimes retaining water until midmorning, the occasional feelings of wavelike or boatlike “floating” when I’m at my desk, working, hours after emerging from the wa

I have loved the San Francisco waterfront since I first saw it. For years, my commutes have taken me along the Peninsula coastline via Caltrain, and then along the Embarcadero on my bike. I’ve got a folder full of photos of the waterfront. I never tire of looking at the Bay Bridge, alongside it, und

Pelicans stood on the breakwater, gravely watching us as we swam by. I’ve come to think of the shorebirds as different kinds of people, a sort of audience for my swims: The cormorant people, the gull people. It’s clear they’re looking at us as much as we are looking at them. And indeed, I noticed […

Last weekend I entered the water much better prepared than the week before, and managed to swim for two and a half hours. The water temperature varied from 59F-60F, and the morning was fairly calm, overcast giving way to sunny sky. The biggest challenge was the current: We found a significant flood

“We come into temporary harmony with the water, and are fortunate to sometimes be allowed to pass through.” Evan Morrison, open-water marathon swimmer, who notes that it echoes: “The best one can hope for is to come to an agreement with a body of water on any given day.” David Barra

Yesterday I swam around Aquatic Park on a sunny, windy afternoon with shreds of fog whipping themselves away from the Golden Gate and across the blue sky. The wind on the cove gave different textures to water in every part of the cove: Just off the dock and along the buoy line I was swimming […]

I swam for an hour and 25 minutes on Saturday, with my swimming buddy Zina, and it was good. The sun was shining, the water was calm, there were no currents to speak of, and we explored a new-to-us route that took us from the far end of the breakwater guarding Fisherman’s wharf to the […]

I wore my swirly purple Speedo for a two-hour swim in the Bay on Saturday. It was the morning of a joint Pride celebration with my club, the South End, and the Dolphin Club next door. Fifty or sixty of us were going to swim from a bayside beach about a mile away, back to […]