Beluga Sevruga in Magical Realism

This year has been grating on me so far. For various reasons I cut way back on travel, my brother got married, and I’ve been working way too much. At least six of my friends’ parents died in the first weeks of January.

This weekend we flew to Hong Kong for a marathon swim and we had a beautiful high rise hotel room with balcony, convenient direct flight, seamless logistics and beautiful scenery for the swim. On the flip side, I was uncomfortably cold the whole time, stung by exotic jellyfish, came in dead last, and felt completely miserable for a good chunk of the swim. Barely made the cut-off time, feeling like crap, too little training, too much drinking, hadn’t been sleeping and we’ve been eating poorly. I stumbled up onto the beach, so ungracefully, and of course they were filming me live. I went to shower and it was cold, managed to dry and dress myself, remove zinc, and look fairly human again.

Awards ceremony went okay, weird to be in one of the few swim events in the world where I didn’t know many people. Then they took us out afterwards and it was amazing, such interesting people from all around the world, great conversations, terrific food, but after a couple hours A was about to fall asleep at the table and I wasn’t too far behind. I got an Uber for us and a Tesla picked us up, which was unexpectedly cool.

Shower and wine and intense sleep until it was time to pack and head out to airport. Woke up with horrific jellyfish stings on all my limbs, sea lice everywhere my swimsuit covered, and nasty chafe on my neck (I never get this, even after 10 more hours in similar conditions for the English Channel, so think my skin was compromised from the jelly irritation. Or I am defective.) Airport lounge drinks and noodles and then 16 hours of sleep on the plane punctuated by more wine and Game of Thrones re-runs.

Didn’t try to do work on the plane but the emails hit me as soon as we landed. We got in an hour earlier than expected but work was crazy so I ended up working from about 4pm to midnight anyway. Fairly productive day working from home today alternating Neosporin and Aquaphor on my lesions but still feeling super low. Seeing awful photos of myself coming out of the swim didn’t help. I wouldn’t mind looking like Ursula the Sea Witch if I could at least swim well. Or steal people’s powers and souls and shit. Need to get my life in order.

Maybe writing will help.

Last updated February 06, 2018