Episode 4: Marathon Swimming: The Inner Experience with Jim Clifford

“My mind was racing with a thousand thoughts. I was not sure how I would deal with the long, dark hours to come but I soon noticed that each hand pull stirred up the bioluminescence in the water and broke up the darkness below. After I mentally adjusted to the dark space below me, I turned my focus to the night sky and the universe on display in the stars. I had rarely seen a night sky so bright and so full of stars…I got lost in the stars for several hours and the time passed as if I was time traveling…I realized that the whole ocean below me had lit up with its own show of bioluminescence…below me as deep as I could see, there were star-like dots of light, mimicking the night sky. I felt like I was floating in space, suspended between the sky and the sea. It was humbling and at the same time, felt primal on a level that is hard to articulate…it was the ultimate experience…time melted away in the largeness of it all.” (Jim Clifford, Catalina Channel night swim)

Jim Clifford, attorney, farmer, and senior citizen shares how he trains his body and mind, the psychology of open water swimming including "the zone", how he manages his mind during the many continuous hours involved, his experience of two contemplative values silence and solitude when swimming alone for hours at a time, and transcendence in nature.

https://openwaterswimming.com/2015/11/jim-clifford-thrice-as-nice

https://www.clifforddebelius.com

Jane Goodall https://awaken.com/2020/05/mystical-experience-of-jane-goodall-ph-d/

All Things Contemplative Blog 

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Greetings. This is Ron Barnett, the host of All Things Contemplative. I want to welcome you to this episode where we're exploring, as we do on each episode, the contemplative dimension of life, the diversity in which it expresses and the different people who it is expressed with. Our guest is Jim Clifford, and I'll introduce Jim in a moment, but before I do, I wanted to, as I always do, mention that if you have an individual, a person that you would like to see come on the podcast, please contact me and make the suggestion of who that might be, and we'll see what we could do with getting them on. So Jim Clifford. Jim is a practicing attorney, and he also heads a law practice here in Montgomery County, Maryland. Internationally, he is more well known for his swimming than his legal accomplishments. To mix some sports metaphors here, Arnold Palmer once said of Jack Nicholas, “he plays a game of golf with which I'm unfamiliar”. While I swim for exercise, Jim’s swimming is one with which I'm unfamiliar because Jim is a long-distance marathon swimmer.

Jim swam for the University of Maryland in college, and then he eventually stopped for a number of years until at about age 55, he took up open water long-distance, ultra-marathon swimming. At the age of 63, Jim held the world record as the eldest person to complete the triple crown of marathon swimming, having swam continuously 28 miles around Manhattan Island, 21 miles from Catalina Island to the California coast at night, nonetheless, and 20 miles across the English channel. Moreover, in the English channel crossing, Jim set a record for those over 50 for the channel Swim, the fastest record. Having said that, what Jim is, what is not Jim, what isn't Jim? Well, Jim has not authored a contemplative book. He's never at least knowingly given a contemplative talk, and he's never been a contemplative teacher. Yet Jim is intimate friends with two contemplative values, the silence and the solitude that comes with marathon swimming. In this episode, Jim shares how he trains body and mind for these swims, the psychology of open water swimming, how he manages his mind during the swims and his experience of extended periods of silence and solitude. So Jim, welcome to all things contemplative.

Speaker 2:

Good afternoon. Right.

Speaker 1:

I think a good question perhaps to begin with is what's it like to swim 20 miles in open water in some sort of continuous way?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's definitely challenging. It's a great experience because you're testing your mind and your body. I hear a lot of people complain about the loneliness of open water swimming. That's not my experience. I believe that if you're in the right zone, there's a time compression that takes place and what might be a 12 to 14 hour swim will seem more like a two to four hour swim. Because of this, you kind of go away into this zone and you live there for a while, and then when you come back you're getting close to finishing and you kind of get re-engaged intellectually. But it's a wonderful experience and it's something I thoroughly enjoy.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. You mentioned a zone several times. Can you describe that a little bit? What is that zone like?

Speaker 2:

I think I'm prone to zone, so to speak, because anytime I do anything repetitive, I do sort of turn to another level, and the zone is basically where you lift yourself out of the drudgery of what you're doing, and the pain may be and the discomfort and the annoyances and your mind just goes to a place where you can enjoy it a little bit more. I think football and baseball players refer to it as the game slowing down, that as they become more and more professional, their mistakes become less and less and they see the game from a different perspective, from above the game. They can look down on what they're doing. And I think marathon swimming and possibly running, I don't know, is like that you sort of lift out of your body and you're at another level and you're doing something different while your body is operating on muscle memory.

Speaker 1:

I see. I read somewhere where you said that the mind has to trust, underline the word trust has to trust that the body will do what it's been trained and prepared to do.

Speaker 2:

That's correct. Yeah. It's be a great disappointment to come out of the zone and find out that you're off your pace or you haven't been performing up to what you are capable of. So you train. So that level of performance is there, whether you're conscious of it or not. That's what I must've meant.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Interesting. So to go back to the zone, it sort of sounds like you sort of shift into a different state of consciousness or a different awareness where there's you that's aware of what's going on.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

And then you, that's executing the strokes, the kicks or whatever. Is that kind of the way it is?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think so. One of the things about marathon swimming is that if you're swimming for 10, 12, 14 hours, you have to have a regimen of feeds. Nobody's allowed to touch you. You're not allowed to hold onto anything. They literally just throw it at you and you drink it or eat it and then let it go, and then it's on a line and they bring it back. That part of open water swimming I don't like because those are interruptions. I mean, I'm in the zone. I'm swimming, I'm happy. I'm somewhere other than there. And not that I don't love being there, but it's what happens to me naturally, and those are interruptions that are a little frustrating. And I can remember coming swimming in Catalina. I was at night. It was at night, and I was having such an extraordinary spiritual experience swimming at night with no moon and all stars and this wonderful bio underneath me that I didn't want anybody to bother me. I didn't want anybody interrupt me or ask me for anything or give me anything. I just wanted to swim. But you can't do that realistically. You've got to feed, you got to take nourishment.

Speaker 1:

So just to clarify, there's a boat that always accompanies you on these swims, right?

Speaker 2:

In that case, you have a boat in Catalina, you have a boat in a kayak, you're swimming at night, and they want you to be between the two. And it's a fairly predatory environment. I mean, off the ocean, off California, there's a lot of things in the water with you.

Speaker 1:

Are we talking sharks?

Speaker 2:

Well, sharks are part of it,

Speaker 1:

Jellyfish.

Speaker 2:

There are other things. I had a friend who kept getting nudged by a porus. It must've been a young male, and he just decided he was going to taunt her a little bit. So things come up and they deal and you deal with it. But if you're in the right place with your head, those things aren't, they don't distract you. It's all kind of white noise.

Speaker 1:

Just keep moving.

Speaker 2:

Keep moving.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So this spiritual experience you had at night, the universe, the stars above bio luminosity below, was that something that lasted very long?

Speaker 2:

It didn't last long enough. I mean, the swim took me about nine hours and 43 minutes or something I think it was, and you start 11 o'clock at night, you dive off the boat over in Catalina. You leave the dock in California around eight or nine o'clock at night, and you go across, make the crossing, and then they turn on a spotlight and you jump in the water and you swim to the shore. You swim to the shore and you have to come out and clear the waterline and they have a spotlight on you so they can see you. And then when you raise your hand, the clock starts, the timing starts. And I knew that I had pretty good likelihood I was going to break the record for the fastest swim by somebody my age, and actually I was the oldest person to never do it. So that was another thing. But

Coming off the shore into the water, there's kelp beds and things, and there's a lot of stimulus there that's not necessarily positive a lot. You get the willies, and I hadn't done night swimming, so I was very, very worried about being overwhelmed by it all. And a dear friend of mine from South Africa called me just before I left shore and said, Jim, don't think about what's underneath you. Think about what's above you and look for Orion. If you see Orion, then think about me and another good friend of ours. We'll be the three stars, you and us. We'll be the three stars and think about us and think about what's above you. I did, I found Orion probably within 30 minutes of my swim, it was pitch dark out, and so

Speaker 1:

They turned the light off of the,

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, the boats. Everybody has to go dark because other than a leg glow, stick on the kayak because the Charles predators.

So you start swimming and you look up in the sky and you'll see stars. You've only heard about, I mean the Milky Way. Everything is just extraordinary. And there was no moon. It was just a sliver of a moon, no lights from la. It was just pitch dark. And so the sky was giving me its best, it had to offer. And so I found the stars and I was swimming and taking a look at that every time I turned my head to breathe. Then after a few minutes, I started to notice that my hand was creating a commotion with bioluminescence, and so I could see the thing, the water lighting up with my hand stroke. And then about two hours into the swim without my interruption, the whole sea below me caught fire with bioluminescence. And it mimicked so much the sky that the impression or the feeling was that you couldn't tell the difference about whether you were looking below or above the surface.

It was giving you the same sensory experience. So you felt like you were swimming in space. And it was unbelievable to me, and I loved every minute of it. I remember somebody saying, you'll pray or sunrise. By the time the sunrise comes, you'll be so glad to see it. Not the case. For me, I was so disappointed when that sun came up. It was spectacular and it was wonderful, but I was so in the zone and so much enjoying the natural impact. I mean, it was so primal and I felt so much a part of everything around me that I didn't want it to end. It was overwhelmingly positive.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it sounds like it. It was very joyful.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it was wonderful.

Speaker 1:

Highly joyful. Some people might be curious to know, Jim, given the poignancy of that experience and the powerfulness of it, whether it sort of had downstream effects in your life in any way, when you think about that about, I know you're a really busy guy, you've got a lot of commitments, big family, but it's like how does that little, that experience fit into the larger?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think it gives you a certain degree, an assurance. I guess you could say that that is out there waiting for you. All you have to do is go out and get it. I mean, what was different about it? There was only that I didn't have a choice. I was totally captivated by my environment and was able to tune into it. So it kind of, for the first time kind of woke me up a little bit about what powers we all have to be able to tie into that. And

What it made me think about of times as I was growing up where I had a similar experience, maybe a small version of that, I've always been a big hawk, a raptor observer since the time I was about 12 in Boy Scouts. I became enamored with hawks and raptors and looking for 'em in nature. And everywhere I went and I raised my kids to, I would say, I'll give you a quarter if we're driving somewhere, give you a quarter. If you can spot a hawk, they're everywhere. You buy it, you go buy 'em a hundred times a day and you don't see 'em. But if you tune yourself, if you change your mind a little bit and you look for things a little differently, all of a sudden all these things in nature are right there. You just weren't stopping long enough to tune in. So I think it kind of reminded me that I've always had this superpower of being able to reach down and have that experience. It was certainly the biggest version of it I ever had, but it reminded me I had had little versions of it. And there's something very reassuring about knowing that all you got to do is stop, and you could be almost anywhere. I don't know why you couldn't be in Manhattan and not see things that you never stopped to see before. They don't have to be natural. They don't have to be life, wildlife, it's power We all have. And I can assure you, it's wonderful

Feedback

Speaker 1:

And a great way to connect with nature as part of nature. And what it reminds me a little bit, as you know, I'm a photographer and the training that I've gone through is really doing the very thing you're describing, learning to see the visual world in non-automatic, non-mechanical ways and fresh. It's like fresh seeing. You would see a hawk freshly. So that's amazing. And I agree with you. We seem as human beings to have this capability. I think we're raised, we're socialized not to pay attention to it, but it's certainly there as a potentiality.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a wonderful safety valve or I don't know what else to call it, but it just, it's a flotation device that's out there for you if you slow down long enough. But there's a discipline to it, and there's a skill to it. The more skill you acquire doing it, the better you are at it. I've taught my boys to see things in nature, whether they're in a car or in a building or wherever they are, and they're teaching my grandkids that now. And I think they perceive that this is a great skill to have.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful. It

Speaker 2:

Could be a mushroom, could be a snake, it could be a hawk,

Speaker 1:

Could be anything. It

Speaker 2:

Could be stars.

Speaker 1:

It really, yeah.

Speaker 2:

In the Catalina Swim, I saw something, I'm sure I would never have seen or thought of or realized it was even there. And that was a few hours into the swim. No, no. I guess it was, I think it was more at a point in time when the sun might've been coming up, there was a jellyfish type creature that was about the size of your index, the top of your index finger from the last joint to the tip of your finger. It was totally clear. I mean, you could see right through it. And there were hundreds of them, and they were just sort of working their way around me, and they just came at a great time. It was kind of a distraction from the fact that I was getting ready to lose my night swim to the sun was just, I'm not sure I would've seen that if I wasn't in the place that I was in.

Speaker 1:

That you were in. Yeah. Amazing. I just recently read some of Jane Goodall's autobiography where she describes something very similar that happened to her in one of the forests in Africa where she kind of went into a transcendent state and experienced the chimpanzees, the trees, the leaves as sort of all one thing. And she sort of lost, and I don't know if this occurred for you, but in a way, she sort of lost her own sense of identity of being a self that she sort of merged with everything. And if folks are interested, the book that she wrote is called Reason for Hope and describes it in much finer detail than I just did, but I would highly recommend that. And she then went on to say that when her life became troubled or she ran into disappointments, she would often think back to that experience and that it gave her a great uplift to dealing with whatever it was she was dealing with in her life. So you were talking about a little bit about being prepared. How do you prepare body and mind for these swims?

Speaker 2:

Well, I've been accused of over-training, but what it does for me, it allows me to leave my body and have my muscle memory and my training and my conditioning do the hard work while I'm off playing in the stars. And that requires a lot of work. It really does. So a lot of my friends, I think including yourself, often wonder what's going on in my head as I go lap after lap after lap. And they'll be surprised to find out that I probably have my eyes closed for the most of it, and clearly out of tune with what's going on around me, and I've left gone to that place. That's the zone I like to go to. And

Speaker 1:

So even in practicing, you go into the zone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's part of the skill or the training to go there. That's why I don't wear music devices, ear things. I don't have any gadgets on me at all. I never wear anything like flippers or hand paddles or anything that would distract me from my swimming.

Speaker 1:

You're not listening to the all things contemplative podcast, I take it.

Speaker 2:

No, I'm listening to anything but my own thoughts. That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1:

Your thoughts. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

There's another trick to this, and I can't say I understand the importance of it, but when I swim in a pool, there's a cadence involved in what I do, and it's me counting. I count every lap. I have a system I use to count laps, so I never fail. I never make a mistake. I always know exactly where I am, and then I check it with my time. But that cadence became something that came through pool swimming. What I realized when I got into open water swimming is that I didn't have that crutch of the cadence. And so I invented a cadence. And I think from an article you read that that might be sort of a two line prayer, or it might be a mantra that I just repeat over my head, in my head over and over again. But it's done at a cadence, and that cadence helps me set up for the first couple hours the pace I want to be, because my pace always begins much quicker. It's not the kind of pace that you take when you're trying to save yourself. I take a pace that I want to finish with

In the beginning,

And that was advice given to me by a very famous swim coach, Olympic coach guy by the name of Doc councilman Jim. Councilman told me, start your racing when I was in swimming pool swimmer. Start the race the way you want to finish it. And so that means you have to develop the pace you want. And I found the cadence became a crutch for how I did that. And so I had to replace my lap counting with something. So I replaced it with, maybe it's a one line of a religious hymn, or maybe it's just a mantra I made up myself. But I'll say it a thousand times in the first two hours, and I'll say it in a cadence that gives me not only a spiritual lift because of what the message is, but it also gives me a practical lift of having my pace set. And then once I've got that pace set, then I can leave.

Speaker 1:

Interesting.

Speaker 2:

And that's when I go

Speaker 1:

To the zone. To the zone zoning out. That's right. That's right. So would you say, Jim, that that's actually how you sort of deal with all the thoughts that I'm sure are running through your head as you swim, is you sort of bring it back to whatever that phrase is or that scripture or the hymn? I think I read you used a

Speaker 2:

Hymn yes.

Speaker 1:

About the Lord is

Speaker 2:

No, this is the day the Lord has made blessed to be the Lord and

Speaker 1:

Say that again.

Speaker 2:

This is the day the Lord has made blessed to be the Lord. And if you think about it in the terms of being in an open water scenario with beauty all around you, I mean the English Channel, all you ever think about is rough, cold, terrible. It's rough, it's cold, it's terrible. But if you get to go above it a little bit and you look around, it's also beautiful. And when you start at the English Channel, depending on what time of day, I started about five o'clock in the morning, so I got to watch the sunrise, then I got to watch the sun go all the way across the sky, all the way to almost setting. I was in the water for 10 hours. And you get to watch the progression. And if you're in a zone every once in a while, you check back in and you see, oh, now it's here. Then you go out and then, oh, now it's here. And

Speaker 1:

Well, I have to ask you because part of the triple crown that you held was to swim around Manhattan Island, which was what, 21 miles? 28. 28 miles.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's a current assistant, but yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So it was as you went up the East River down the Hudson, did you see any beauty?

Speaker 2:

Let me tell you.

Speaker 1:

Did you experience beauty?

Speaker 2:

It's very hard to be in a zone or when you're swimming around Manhattan Island because there is so much going on. There's planes landing in the water, there's ferry boats, there's carnival cruises, there's traffic on the shores, there's million things going on, plus boats and everything else. I got run over by a boat as a matter of fact. So yeah, it's very hard to do it in the heart, especially in the Harlem River, but it's necessary. That's one place where it's necessary. You really want to go out of body when you're swimming around the Manhattan island.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Necessary to be in the zone or

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of things to be worried and concerned

Speaker 1:

About, can think about.

Speaker 2:

That would not be a positive energy boosting

Type thing. So I can't say, I can tell you exactly where my head was when I swam Manhattan. There were a lot of things interrupting me. I didn't have a kayaker for one thing that was a mistake on the part of the race director. So I had a lot of bad things happen there. I got stuck in the Harlem River right at Eastgate, actually at Hellscape, and I was stuck in place for one hour, actually. It was a race. That's the only one that I did that was a race. And I was winning or tied for winning with a girl from Ireland. And she had a kayaker who ushered her over to the sea wall to avoid the current. And I didn't. And out I stayed right out in the middle of the river where I wasn't supposed to be fighting a current and put me in the path of a boat that I had to get my hand up. It'd be able

Speaker 3:

To

Speaker 2:

F the boat off from me. But even still, even with all of that, if you are good at it and you've done it and you've developed that skill, you can find some level to go to. It might not be Catalina level, but I still got somewhere with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, interesting. So Jim, to go back a few years, why did you get into this kind of swimming? You were relatively an elite swimmer in college, the University of Maryland, then you quit swimming for what, 15, 20 years. Then all of a sudden, what was that impetus that got got you? Back

Speaker 2:

When I was 14, my swim coach in Philadelphia lied to me. He said, I've entered you into the national championship of open water swimming. It's a two mile race in Chicago. I want you to go out there and do the best you can. He didn't tell me the water was going to be 62 degrees. He didn't tell me that it was four and a half miles, not two miles. He didn't tell me that. Mark Spitz and the whole Indiana swim team and everybody else that was out for nationals had entered into it. I think he knew in his heart that maybe that's where I belonged. In some ways, I was a pure distance swimmer. I mean, I could sprint and I did relays, and in college I was able to do the sprinting you needed to do in division one. But my heart and my soul and my mind was out of an open water swimmer before I knew it. He knew it. So he lied to get me to do it,

Speaker 3:

And

Speaker 2:

I went out and that experience, I got hypothermia. I only weighed 128 pounds, so I was frozen solid through It took me from Illinois to about midway through Ohio before I could feel my fingers and move. But I loved it. I found out that I loved it and that I could do it. And as

Speaker 1:

A young, can you say a little bit of what you loved? I assume you still have that love.

Speaker 2:

I think the uniqueness of it. Number two, I found that I had the tools to do open water swimming. When you come out of an experience like that and you don't hate it or you don't question why anybody in the world would do that, you probably have an indicator that maybe you were right for it. But 14 years later, or excuse me, at age 14 that happened, age 14 or 15, the very guy that gave me the advice, doc councilman who told me how to do a distance swim, became the oldest man of swim English channel. He weighed 300 pounds if he weighed a pound, oh boy. He put on all this weight, he put on all this love sheep lard. He did it kind of in the old style, and he did it. It took him 14, 15 hours and he did

Speaker 1:

It. What age was he?

Speaker 2:

He was 53.

Speaker 1:

53.

Speaker 2:

And he broke the record for the oldest guy to do it. And I always had a lot of respect for doc councilman. He meant a lot to me. He was a superstar in coaches, and he spent time with me when I needed somebody to spend time with me to validate that I was doing the right things. And so I thought, that's cool. He did that. I want to do that. And so you get married, you get a career going. You go to law school, you graze kids, all this stuff happens and you sort of lose who you are. And I was always a swimmer. I grew up from the time I was six years old, that's who I was. And my wife didn't even know it. And here I am, I'm married, I got kids and they don't even know I'm a swimmer. So I just decided, okay, enough muscle atrophy, enough of everybody else. It's time for me now. And the kids were launched and off.

Speaker 3:

So

Speaker 2:

I got back to it. It took me three years of hard work to regain my form and my confidence. My daughter-in-law's sister was an All-American swimmer at Maryland. And she said, Hey, old man, why don't you do the bay with me, the Chesapeake Bay, which is a four, 4.4 mile swim? And I said, yeah, people have been trying to get me to do it for years. And I said, yeah, I'm going to do it. And so I did, and I loved it. And I said, you know what? I never thought I always wanted to do the English Channel because of Councilman. So it was always my goal, but I didn't know how to get there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So Jim, would it be true to say that what you love is that experience of being in nature, maybe number one. And number two, the challenge that as you said, that you had the skills, the constitution, whatever to do, open water, long distance swimming. Anything else you would add to that that was a strong motivator?

Speaker 2:

The key to motor swimming is that you're not in control. Nothing's predictable and that you're tested based on whatever nature decides to throw you at you that day. I love that. I have a lot of friends that do the same swims over and over again. I have a friend right now who's on her 37th crossing of the English Channel. She's done it 37 times from Australia. I have absolutely no interest if once I do a swim and I've tested myself, it could change a little bit. The weather could change, the currents could change. You could get a different feel for it.

But if you come at it the way I come at it, you want a total different experience. Every time I swam the Gibraltar Straits last year, and I did that for two reasons. You swim from Spain to Africa, it's about a five hour swim. We did them four hours and something you get to swim with somebody else, which is very unusual for usually their solo crossings. And so a friend of mine from Maryland, and I did it together, but also you're swimming from one continent to another. You're swimming from Europe to Africa. That's pretty cool. Hadn't done that before. So that interested me. The other part of it is, is that the currents and everything in the straits are very different. There's an experience there. And the last part is I wasn't ready for it. I hadn't trained the way I always trained. There were a lot of interruptions. And I had at some point decide whether I was going to do it. I wasn't properly trained. And I decided this will be my experience to do it in what I call a gut swim, which is basically what do you do when you got to do something and you're not prepared to do it? Do you have the mental discipline to manage it? Anyhow? And

I wanted to have one of those under my belt because it kind of gave me a second sense of another sense of confidence that I always used to think, if a plane goes down and I'm on it, can I get to shore? You always wonder, well, can you get to shore if you're not ready or not if you're ready or not? And so this was my gut swim and I wanted to try it, and I did.

Speaker 1:

You did.

Speaker 2:

It was more difficult. I had harder time getting to the zone. My body was demanding that I return to suffer with it. But that was a

Speaker 1:

Different experience. I understand. You had a little interesting experience when you reached Alger. The customs people came on board with camera or something.

Speaker 2:

Well, what happened was as we left, you touch a rock, you leave from a rock and you touch a rock at the other end, and then you swim back to your boat, you get on and you're supposed to come back and the boat has your passports and you have for all this. It's all set up by a federation. So we were surprised when the Moroccan Coast Guard came up in this great big inflatable and stopped us and everybody's talking Spanish, so I have no idea what's going on. And then finally the captain said they stopped us because they wanted to meet the old guy,

Speaker 1:

The old guy,

Speaker 2:

The old guy, because they'd heard the old guy was doing the swimming. They wanted to meet me.

Speaker 1:

What were you at? 64?

Speaker 2:

65, 65?

Speaker 1:

No,

Speaker 2:

No, I was older than that. That was last year. So I'm 69. I was 67 or 68.

Speaker 1:

67 or 68. Yeah. So what have you got in your cross hairs now given that you like novelty and new challenges and adaptation?

Speaker 2:

I've never swam at altitude. And one of the toughest altitude swims is Lake Tahoe. It's over 5,000 feet above sea level. All my friends that have done it have gotten violently sick. They've swung it. They're tough. These are tough people. And especially the women, they're the toughest people you'll ever meet in your life. And they all did it throwing up the whole time. And I'm not anxious to get into the water and throw up for 10 or 14 hours in this case because it's about 24 miles and there's no assist at all. But I do want to know if I can do it. And so I was lined up to do it this August, and the Covid kind of killed it. So I'd like to be telling you what the swim was like, but I still don't know. So I'm going to go back in the end of July if I can get back into training the way I need to. I'm going to go back in July and do that swim. It's about a 14 hour. I always train as if it's 14 hours. I hope I'll do it fast.

Speaker 1:

Any advice for anyone who wants to get into open water, swim, swimming?

Speaker 2:

Don't avoid somebody that's as passionate as I'm about it. If you want to do it, you're going to end up doing it because of them. They are going to make you get excited about it and passionate about it. And I trained in Ireland with a group of about 35 other, they're swimmers from around the world. It's cold water, it's in the fifties, and you have to learn to swim in cold water. There's no wetsuits. You're allowed to wear a hat, a cap, but you don't have a wetsuit. And your suit has to be just a normal Speedo type suit. So you have to train and you can train for anything. So in addition to training your mind, you have to train your body to get used to cold. And in Ireland, we'll go into hypothermia. We swim twice a day for two hours at a time, and we go into hypothermia each time. And you have to train your mind to accept hypothermia. You don't get it, the worst effects of it until you come out of the water. And then within about five to 10 minutes, you go into a shake that's uncontrollable and your temperature, your core temperature drops and you're pretty much responsible, no for nothing. Everybody has to take care of

Speaker 3:

You.

Speaker 2:

We train in Ireland like that with 35 other guys or people, women who are in the same mindset. So you hang around with the wrong people and you'll do crazy things.

Speaker 3:

You'll do.

Speaker 2:

So if you want to get into open water swimming, you've got to get in with open order swimmers.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting, Jim, that you're obviously a highly respected attorney here in and

Speaker 2:

Farmer,

Speaker 1:

Huh, and farmer, but yet there's this whole other side of you that's a major risk taker and adventurer and I guess they balance each other.

Speaker 2:

I guess they do

Speaker 1:

In some way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I never thought about it, but yeah, I remember as a young man, I used to tell my mother, if I don't risk my life once a year, I'm not living. And she didn't want to hear that,

Speaker 1:

Of course.

Speaker 2:

And of course that was a young man's point of view, because you're immortal when you're young.

Speaker 1:

Right, right. Well, you certainly have a strong will because you've been working on me to do an open water swim for I'm going to get how many years now? Yeah, 15 years. I, I'm faint of heart, I'm

Speaker 2:

Afraid.

Speaker 1:

But keep trying.

Speaker 2:

I will.

Speaker 1:

Anything else, Jim, that you want to share with our listeners or about really anything?

Speaker 2:

No, I do think that what the experience I'm, I'm describing about going into the zone and seeing things that your day-to-day life would ordinarily ignore is something all of us can do in times like this, especially in times covid where there's so much isolation, you could lift your spirits and lift your mind by taking a walk outside, down a trail, a path, and just start noticing things. It's wonderful. So I mean, if you're intellectually curious and you fall into that idea of looking for something, you can want to know everything you can about it. So when you see it, it's something familiar to, it's a great way to live.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Good, good. So Jim, we can't end this interview without you saying a word about this barn that we're in. I had meant to bring this up at the beginning, but I don't want to end without you mentioning something about our setting here.

Speaker 2:

Alright, sure. 20 years ago, I decided my clients were mostly farmers. I'm a land use attorney, but I pretty much specialized in agricultural items issues. And my clients talked me into being a farmer. They thought I'd be a good fit. So I bought a derelict farm out in Upper Montgomery County in the Ag Reserve and started to work on it. It was a labor of love. The last project on the farm is a very old farm, was a barn. It was built in 1894 and that barn was getting ready to fall down. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where barns were prevalent and important and I couldn't see letting it fall down. All the farmers told me to take it down, but I finally decided I was going to do something about it. So I hired the Amish guys out of Pennsylvania. They came down, spent three months, one summer restoring it back to its original barn condition. And I gas them to give me two warranties. One is make it last another a hundred years. And number two, keep the damn birds out. I don't want any birds inside. And so far I will never know whether they'll honor the first warranty of a hundred years. But the second warranty is no birds.

Speaker 1:

Yes. Well, it's a beautiful renovation reconstruction on the website. I'll post a photograph of it if people can see what we're talking

Speaker 3:

About. Sure.

Speaker 1:

And I also know that you loan it out to people for weddings. As far as I know, you're not charging a dime. There's a yoga class I think that meets here. We have a little monthly swimming group. We have breakfast here. Sometimes

Speaker 2:

Had bat mitzvahs, Eagle Scout ceremonies, community meetings. Last weekend, a very dear friend of mine whose husband had died, who was a good friend of mine, got remarried at age 73 and she had her wedding reception here. Then the following day, a local girl had a baby shower here,

Speaker 1:

Baby shower.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we've had a lot

Speaker 1:

Of fun. Well, it's an absolutely wonderful gift that you give to the community. I can't wait to see what lies ahead in the future too.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Well Jim, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and I wish you well. We'll be looking forward to hearing how that Lake Tahoe swim goes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Get, if I can get trained

Speaker 1:

At the elevation.

Speaker 2:

That's right. That's right. I look forward to your future podcast too.

Speaker 1:

Thanks. Thanks. I'll keep you tuned in.

Speaker 2:

Alright, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Alright, bye-Bye bye. And with that, this episode of All Things Contemplative comes to a close. I hope you found it interesting and informative and will join me for the next episode piece.