Hellespont Dreams: Cross-Training with Lord Byron

I’ve been running for thirty years. That’s a lot of miles even if I only rarely did a 50 mile week. I did 10Ks in the 70s, marathons in the 80s, 5Ks in the 90s. I had fun, yes, I did. But I’m not getting any faster. Let’s be more precise. I’ve gotten slower. Much slower. In the fall of 1999 I was back in training for the traditional seventeen mile mountain trail run that I usually do each fall, when I became seriously annoyed at how tough it had gotten running up this certain hill on our usual Sunday morning course. Between gasps for air I put it to my Sunday morning running partners huffing up the hill with me: “Why shouldn’t I gracefully discontinue this running business in the new millennium?” Now this all happened early in a Sunday morning long run so they had plenty of time to formulate arguments and analysis and to talk me out of it. But they had nothin’. “Keep running because that’s what you do and how could you not do it?”—pretty much sums up their response. So I kept running but I also kept thinking. I finished up the old millennium by skipping the seventeen mile trail run and realizing that I could expect some severe Y2K running problems. The year 2000 is now one third over and my running buddies have not seen me at any of our running club’s recent events. I am also the rare attendee at our Sunday morning long runs—and if I show up I’m always at the back of the pack and, after a mile or so, I drop further back and eventually disappear from the sight and consciousness of the regular group. Ah, but don’t think I haven’t been training. Because I have. And now I have a date with destiny and a dead poet. So, its now a little after 10:00 a.m., on May 3, 2000. It is one hundred and ninety years to the day, to the hour, and even to the minute that George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron to his admirers and imitators, waded into the waters of the Dardanelles Straits, to swim from Europe to Asia. I also am dangling my toes in the same murky roiling waters, Speedo and goggles on, ready to follow in Byron’s footsteps—well, okay, I guess more in his wake, actually. I empty my mind of twentieth century cares, silently recite my favorite ByronicCup stanzas, and slip into the chilly water and begin to stroke for Asia— visible as only a dark margin along the horizon where the water seems to merge into the haze. Well, okay, to be precise, I can’t actually see Asia and the water isn’t actually all that chilly or murky and roiling. And its only really the same water in the sense that all water is water, after all. I’m actually in the pool at the Pullen Aquatic Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I’m making my first flip turn. There. I push off, glide and come up for air. One lap down, 140 or so to go. You know I don’t have the time or the money to go to Turkey and do the actual swim. I’ve got no hereditary estate like Lord Byron did in 1810. I’ve got a day job. And besides the Dardanelles is supposed to be so horribly polluted these days that no sane distance swimmer would be caught dead in it (so to speak). But still, it’s the right time (if not the right place), it’s the right distance, it’s water, and I’m in the proper Byronic frame of mind. So let’s call it the Hellespont, okay? Work with me here. I do another flip turn, much as Byron himself would have done had he trained in an Olympic size pool like Pullen. I can sense the great continent of Asia drawing nearer. I’m making good time. Byron considered himself an accomplished distance swimmer. In 1810, at the age of twenty-two and on his way to Istanbul (then Constantinople), Byron challenged Lieutenant Ekenhead (an officer of the ship on which Byron sailed) to a swimming race across the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles). Swimming the Hellespont also appealed to Byron because of the Greek legend that Leander swam the Hellespont nightly to meet his lover, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite who lived on the other side and had to be visited in secret (Note: after each of these assignations Leander presumably re-entered the chilly water and swam back to Asia; like Byron, I concluded that a one-way Hellespont paddle was sufficient challenge; according to legend Leander did ultimately stop his nightly round trip swims after he drowned one night on one of the legs). Byron finished the swim in an hour and ten minutes but Ekenhead finished in an hour and five minutes. On the day of the swim, Byron wrote that the distance “is not above a mile but the current renders it hazardous, so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise.” Byron was very proud of his swim (he is said to have never allowed his friends or the public to forget about the accomplishment), and the achievement apparently grew in his mind as he recollected it. Several weeks after the event

Byron wrote: “The whole distance Ekenhead and myself swum was more than four miles the current very strong and cold, some large fish near us when half across, we were not fatigued but a little chilled. Did it with difficulty.” So was it a mile or a four mile swim? I’m about a mile into my swim across the Hellespont. I think I’m about half way so I look for the large fish but see none. A couple of large lap swimmers slide by in the adjoining lanes. From the looks of them, they will never make it to Asia. I keep stroking, having hit my stride … uh, I mean my … uh, stroke. I’m swimming freestyle— the old Australian crawl—and in an hour and ten minutes I expect to cover about two miles or about 140 laps in the pool. I figure that must be about the distance Byron covered—not including the distance he was pushed by the current. In 1810 there was no Australian crawl. Byron and Ekenhead swam breaststroke all the way across the Hellespont. They may have been strong breaststrokers but they did not breaststroke four miles in 70 and 65 minutes respectively. I’m thinking my freestyle is about as fast as Byron’s breaststroke. I’m doing flip turns after all and freestyle is acknowledged to be the fastest of the strokes. But I don’t want to stop short of the Asian shore and drown. So I guess I’d better swim at least an hour and fifteen minutes and maybe do two and a quarter miles. I’m still looking for those big fish. At a mile and a half I feel pretty good and decide to increase the effort and try to catch Lieutenant Ekenhead. I can make out his head bobbing about a hundred yards ahead of me. But the effort proves a bit much. I decide that it would fit the spirit of the swim if I do a few laps of breaststroke. Then I decide that Byron probably also threw in some backstroke so he could meditate on the sky and savor the moment. So I do some backstroke and watch the ceiling of Pullen Aquatic Center move stately by. I’m slowing down but I switch back to freestyle and make two miles at an hour and fifteen minutes. Five minutes later I touch sand with the fingers of my stroking hand. Asia, at last! I gather my legs up under me and stand in the thigh deep water. Pulling my goggles up to my forehead, I walk stiffly out of the Hellespont and onto the Turkish shore. As the waters of the Bosporus drip off my body, I turn to look back across the strait toward Europe. As I gaze across the murky, roiling water, I dip my head slightly in mute salute to and acknowledgment of Leander, Lieutenant Ekenhead and, of course, Lord Byron himself. Then I turn to the lifeguard who is looking at me curiously. There are no other lap swimmers left in the pool. “All done,” I say, smiling and realizing that the lifeguard hadn’t been on the stand when I’d started swimming so he couldn’t know where I’d started from or just how far I’d come. And I won’t tell him. I turn away, put my arm on Byron’s shoulder and walk with him to the showers. So now that I’ve swum the Hellespont, what’s next? Disneyworld? Reenacting the 1808 footrace between Mountain Man John Colter and warriors of the Blackfoot tribe where the braves captured Colter, stripped him naked, then gave him a head start and chased him for 200 miles until he reached the safety of Fort Raymond? Hmmmm. You know, I’m thinking that it would be rather Byronic to start training for one of our upcoming local 5K running races. I may need to show up at the next Sunday morning run and ask my buds what they think? Lord B. would have understood, I think. As he said, or might have said, in one of his poems: So we’ll go no more a-swimming, So far across the ‘pont, Though these arms be used to stroking, On that legendary jaunt. But my Speedo grows a-faded, and my pool pass expires in June. So it’s back to 5K races, Throw my goggles at the moon.