by Jessica Kieras
After Amy Gubser finished her 17 hour, 29.6 mile swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands, the mainstream media celebrated along with the entire marathon swimming community. Writing on the MSF facebook page, Evan Morrison said the swim “has a reasonable claim to be the toughest marathon swim in the world – with typically cold, rough water, ripping winds, swirling currents, and “interesting” marine life.” While many stories have covered this unprecedented feat of human endurance, this post focuses on some of the details most relevant to marathon swimmers hoping to learn from Amy’s extensive experience and mental training skills.
One thing that stands out about Amy is not only her capacity to physically handle both cold and distance, but also her incredible mental toughness. She worked hard to develop these skills over decades. As a collegiate swimmer at the University of Michigan from 1986-1990, she surprisingly identified as a “head trip”. “I trained hard always, but I couldn’t taper and execute,” she said. Her coach, the legendary Jim Richardson was the first to identify her as a distance swimmer and she began training in the distance lane. She told me she “would cry at every practice” not from the grueling physical challenge of these workouts but from the emotional toll of self-doubt.
Working as a fetal cardiology nurse, crewing for other’s swims, training with “The Beast Pod”, and completing over twenty five marathon swims over the past nine years has helped her develop the following mental skills, which stood out to me as we discussed her swim.
Training Hard
Amy trained for this swim over and over, year after year, due to being postponed each time. She currently trains with a small group of swimmers in the San Francisco Bay area, known as “The Beast Pod”. According to Amy, the name came from Evan Morrison, a member of the group, “because we train hard and get the job done!” The group includes swimmers of a variety of speeds, so the faster swimmers swim ahead and then turn around to circle back with the others. An essential skill for ultraswimmers is not getting too attached to our paces or distance covered. Having to stop, turn around and swim back to check in with other members of the group is excellent mental (as well as physical) training for ultras.
Coping with Uncertainty
One of the things marathon swimmers struggle with frequently is the uncertainty of whether or not our big swims will happen or not. In Amy’s case, her swim was planned and postponed for five years (four times for weather and once due to the pandemic) before she finally was able to attempt it this year. With a swim that has this many variables: weather, currents, tides, water temperature and wildlife risk, she had to train and plan and train and plan again and again, until the ocean finally gave her an opportunity to give the swim a try.
She coped with the continual anxiety and disappointment by framing it all as part of the challenge of ultraswimming. “To be able to stay fit, healthy, and focused while all these variables come together in perfect alignment to make for a great swim is our swim challenge. There is no way to deal with this other than trying to find that zen space we go to while we swim.”
Flexibility
Amy’s preferred date this year was weathered out, but she had planned the entire tide window with alternate dates that included substitute crew. She was able to schedule her original crew for a different date, but her boat was no longer available that day. Luckily, she was able to arrange for Capt. Chad Dahlberg of the Pacific Rival to escort her to the islands and the swim was on. The day turned out to be foggy with a red tide, causing low visibility both above and below water. Her carefully planned start time– to take advantage of the tide and arrive at the islands before dusk– was derailed when a tanker delayed their start by 45 minutes. Her capacity to move forward despite not all factors being perfect was developed from the years of having to cancel and re-plan. She noted she had learned to broaden her perception of which factors constituted acceptable swim conditions.
Another way she developed this skill was through crewing for other swimmers on their swim. “This is a team sport and to be perfectly honest I have learned more by being crew. You learn how to pivot and adapt to fight for your swimmer to succeed.”
Compartmentalization
Amy is truly a master at the ability to quickly move on from adversity without getting stuck in further thought about it. She was able to compartmentalize the dangers and various unforeseen obstacles of the swim and focus instead on what she could do to be successful.
Near the end of the swim, an upwelling caused a sudden drop in the already frigid water temperature. Amy describes this as the most difficult part of the swim. The water went from 48f/9c to 43f/6c suddenly and stayed there for two minutes, before returning to 48, according to the observer log. The last three hours of the swim were by far the coldest, with most temperature readings under 50. These very low temperatures are much easier to cope with early in a swim when the body is rested, which is one of the reasons that previous swimmers have started at the islands and made their way to the bridge, rather than the reverse.
Sharks were a major concern on this swim for both Amy and the team. The crew turned on their shark shield, a device that dangles from the kayak and generates an electrical field strong enough to interfere with sharks’ ampullae sensors and deter them from approaching. They spotted a half eaten sea lion as they approached the islands. Amy had chosen members of the crew taking into account that a major medical emergency could occur. She wanted to have people she felt confident could handle a crisis. Yet, she was able to disengage from all of this awareness while she stroked her way toward the home of some of the largest great white sharks in the world.
Although neither Amy nor her team saw a shark, she says she felt their presence and was actually glad the red tide had produced no visibility beyond the tips of her fingers. “If I saw anything I would have just freaked out!”
Attentional Control
Amy was able to selectively attend to thoughts she knew would help her endure and continue on. In psychology, we call this “attentional control”, the ability to notice your thoughts and choose to engage ones that are helpful while disengaging from those that are unhelpful. “You have to feed the thought you want to succeed,” Amy said.
She chose to ponder how it wouldn’t do for the commemorative t–shirts she made to go to waste, how she could score “cool mom/grandmother points” by finishing, “you can do hard things”, and how she’d waited five years for the chance to make the attempt, and it could be another five years to get it done if she stopped then.
Humorously, she says she also remembers hearing the voice of another coach, Jon Urbanchek, who coached the men’s team at University of Michigan from 1982-2004. “I adored Jon,” she said. “Jon died the day before my swim-I heard him in my head with his accent, ‘back to work you pieces of dog shits!’”
She continued to pay attention to thoughts like this that spurred her on, while ignoring and disengaging from any unhelpful thoughts that popped up. Onward she went until her triumphant finish at the buoy.
Attentional control is a difficult skill to develop and takes time, experience and perseverance. Amy attributes her skill with both attentional control and compartmentalization to her work as a fetal cardiology nurse. She said she’d be working hard to save someone’s life and “then shifting gears to help someone die.” This took an incredible ability to, as she says, “physically/mentally and emotionally compartmentalize all of that and be current and present.”
The marathon swimming community was overjoyed at her successes, as was Jim Richardson, her former coach. “We are still close. He is so excited-and says, ‘there you go-that is what I saw many years ago.’” Major newspapers in every city on the west coast and others across the country picked up the story and suddenly Amy was something of a celebrity. She did an excellent job representing our sport to people who may never have heard of anything like it before.
Amy recommends this swim for “anyone who has a desire to push their limits to the fullest extent!!! To be comfortable with distance/cold/animals is the main component one needs to be able to mitigate.” Full documentation of Amy’s epic swim to The Farallons is here.
