When The Dream Doesn’t Start The Way You Dreamed It

Last week, one of our swimmers completed something that had been on his bucket list for years.

A swim from Alcatraz.

Despite the great swim prep in the months leading up to the swim, the final weeks were not ideal. Firstly, three weeks of travelling with hardly any swimming. A couple of swims in Maui helped a little, but warm Hawaiian water isn’t quite the same as San Francisco Bay. Then add in a long-haul flight, a late arrival, poor sleep, and it wasn’t exactly the preparation he had imagined.

The following morning he found himself heading out towards Alcatraz. As the boat approached the island, the reality of what he was about to do began to sink in. This was no longer a dream, a plan, or something sitting on a bucket list. He was actually there.

Then he jumped in – and almost immediately, everything started to go wrong.

The water was choppy. His stroke felt wrong. His breathing was all over the place. He stopped several times. At one point he even climbed back onto the boat for a minute because, in his own words, his head had completely fallen off.

I suspect most athletes reading this will recognise that feeling.

Not necessarily in the middle of San Francisco Bay, but somewhere during a race, a training session, or a challenge that suddenly feels much harder than expected. We imagine difficult moments arriving spectacularly, but often they simply sneak up on us. One minute we’re fine. The next we’re wondering whether we’re capable of doing the thing we’d been looking forward to for months.

What I loved about his story was that there was no magic solution.

He didn’t suddenly feel amazing. The conditions didn’t change. There wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough moment.

Instead, he did something much simpler.

He got back in the water starting the swim again and returned to the basics. He focused on his catch-up stroke. He started counting strokes. Rather than trying to solve everything at once, he focused on the next few metres and gradually found some rhythm.

And little by little, things improved.

Then came my favourite moment. 

At some point he realised he was halfway across. He stopped swimming for a moment, lifted his head, and looked around.

Behind him was Alcatraz. Ahead of him was San Francisco.

And for a few seconds he simply took it all in.

“Wow. I’m actually here.”

I think that moment says something important about endurance sport.

We spend so much time focusing on outcomes. We think about finish times, race results, qualification standards, PBs and rankings. Yet when athletes tell their stories afterwards, it is often the moments in between that stay with them.

The calm before the start. The atmosphere on a climb. A funny moment during a never-ending run.

Or finding yourself in the middle of a place you’ve seen in photographs for years and realising that you’re no longer imagining it. You’re living it.

Eventually, he reached the shore and finished strongly. The swim that had started so badly became one of the most memorable experiences of his life.

But how different the story could have been.

He could have allowed those difficult opening minutes to define the day. Instead, he worked through them. He accepted that things weren’t going to be perfect and kept moving forward until they improved.

There’s a lesson there for all of us.

Confidence doesn’t always appear before the challenge. Sometimes confidence is built during it. Sometimes the breakthrough comes after the wobble. Sometimes the experiences we remember most begin with a moment when we wonder whether we’ve made a terrible mistake.

So if your training isn’t going perfectly right now, or if you’re feeling nervous about a race that’s coming up, remember this story.

You don’t need everything to feel perfect. You don’t need to feel confident from the very beginning. You just need to keep going long enough to find your rhythm again.

And if you’re ever lucky enough to swim from Alcatraz, don’t forget to stop halfway across and look around.

Have a good week.

Bryan