Officially the First Indian/Person with Dystonia to swim 10 kilometres and celebrating New Years on a different high! This is just the start!
What if I told you your life can change and unexpected things can happen?
There is something about being a loser, being that nobody who is picked on by everybody and turning it 180 degrees just for yourself. Being that underdog, Rising like a Phoenix! Hell yeah! Life has weird ways of rewarding you for your resilience!
Believe! Keep at it!
Let’s take you through the prep for this event, I have no coach for swimming like professional swimmers or national level swimmers but I yet like to compete with them in open middle / long distance swims. I am not that far behind them when it comes to resilience and grit. I wish I had someone to just guide me to get faster in the water, regardless I am pretty damn quick for someone who was told it might be difficult to walk in the future.
ALARM! Wake up at 5:30 am eat a banana and off you go to the pool to swim for the longer swims mostly over the weekends. Now these long swims use to be challenging because of constant chlorine exposure (which use to make your teeth powdery and gives you a dirty aftertaste) and I use to carry some hydration gels just to keep me going. So, you start from 6 am and finish at 10 am. Yeah that’s crazy long but that’s exactly what was needed for me to complete my 10 km swim. I use to have shorter swims in the Evening /night which lasted for 1-2 hours where I use to do drills and better my form. I also like swimming a mixture of freestyle and breaststroke. I am lucky that both my strokes are strong but for some reason my breaststroke is more powerful and faster. I guess freestyle will need a lot more practice and patience to master it which sometimes I don’t have.
Before this massive distance I had only done a couple of 2.5 km swims and max distance of 3.8 kms in open waters. I was going into the unknown here, first of all the distance and then with my condition……no one has pushed their body so much as I would with dystonia over this distance in the ocean.
Swim Day:- It’s a loop of 500 meters one way and 500 meters back. Really well organised with nutrition on both boats. I was pumped but the event starts 45 mins late. There are flags in between to sight
Let’s just say only 4/12 Swimmers finished the distance and I was one of them, they were my able bodied compadres who I respect and look up to from the bottom of my heart.
I draw this comparison to tell you’ll how difficult the swim was. At a point I just wanted to stop swimming and felt like giving it all up.
The first 5 kilometres were as smooth as applying butter on bread except my ocd turning up its heat with the weird negative repetitive thoughts.
All of a sudden, the sea starts getting choppier with crazy tides. How much ever I swam I felt stuck in one place, the same way many do in their marriage.
Then bam these flashbacks start: –
-Getting beaten up for no fault of my own.
-Getting verbally abused by teachers and my so-called friends.
-What a loser / wannabe /pile on!
-A bad influence to society.
-The list goes on.
At this point I was like it’s going to be do or die. There wasn’t going to be quitting!
This is why I forgive but never forget, I use it as fuel to prove myself that I deserve this more than anyone. I had to prove that I was not this misfit in these flawed norms of Society which were dumped on me.
I got cut by a boat anchor on the 8th kilometre on my foot but I wasn’t going to stop swimming, I felt it but realised later. My Dystonia was acting up and getting really bad at this point due to exhaustion. There were times the organisers and volunteers were asking me if I wanted to call the swim off because of the conditions being really unfavourable.
I was hungry, I was hungry for much more! From the 8th to the 10th kilometre, I felt that it’s going to be impossible.
After the 10 th kilometre I ran to the beach and I realised that I have done the impossible for someone like me! I wasn’t only the first Indian with my condition to do what I did. I also realised I was the world to do what I did with my condition, fingers crossed for me being the first there too. I felt like jumping like a small kid getting his favourite toy but I was too exhausted.
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