This morning my triathlon training group did our first open water practice swim, in Lake Anza in the hills above Berkeley. The day did not get off to an auspicious start, when heavy summer fog rolled in (not till June! okay) and blotted out the sun. It was 52 degrees out when I got up, and the sun was just peaking above heavy fog when we met at the lake. Luckily for me someone brought a spare wetsuit for me to wear. That made all the difference in terms of staying warm.

I am not a particularly good swimmer, but I’ve been working hard to improve upon that over the past few years. The fact that today I actually PUT MY FACE into a MURKY BROWN LAKE and swam, like a real swimmer, mind you, crawl strokes, not just a doggy paddle, demonstrates that I’ve come a long way. Oh, I had all the requisite swim lessons as a child, and as a result, I’ve always been perfectly comfortable splashing around in the water, even deep water, and I could doggy paddle myself wherever I wanted to go, pretty much indefinitely. But I never really took to swimming, proper. Three years ago I decided that I could maintain some cardio fitness over the long Chicago winters if I learned to swim. At the time I was working directly across the street from the University of Chicago gym/pool (dude, I almost just wrote aquarium, which I think says a lot about how I feel about swimming). At lunch hours the pool was enormous, and empty. I often had the pool to myself, 10 lanes and hardly the sound of another splash besides me. The winter sunlight would stream in the floor-to-ceiling windows, onto the water’s surface, where it would bend slightly as it illuminated a path to the bottom of the pool. Utterly peaceful. And no one but a bored lifeguard to witness my humiliation. As I gradually became more adept at the crawl stroke, I realized that the truth of the matter was that I’ve really never been comfortable putting my face into the water. (Which, frankly, seems logical to me. We can’t breath underwater. It’s like ducking when someone throws a baseball at my head. You might argue that I’m bad at baseball, but I’d argue that my self-preservation instincts are more finely tuned than the average jock’s).

But still, it’s amazing what it takes to master an instinctive fear reaction. You might understand it, but it takes a long long time to desensitize yourself. You can’t logic your way out of something that’s built into your DNA. Or at least, it takes a steel will in addition to the powers of logic. I wouldn’t call it second nature, but after three years of on-again-off-again swimming in lap pools, I’ve grown pretty comfortable sticking my face into the clear, chlorinated water of a lap pool, where I can see straight to the bottom to neat rows of tiles.

But swimming in a lake? That’s a whole other story. Not only are there the perfectly rational fears of 1) putting my head underwater, and 2) accidentally swallowing a gulp of lake water, complete with god-only-knows microorganisms, but there’s a whole set of completely irrational fears, too, including 1) lake bottoms, and 2) murky water preventing me from seeing said lake bottom. “It’s just a lake. You’ll be thrashing around so much that nothing would swim up to you,” said Ben when I confessed this fear to him. But his powers of logic were no match for the strength of an irrational fear. I’m not afraid of anything so practical as a school of freshwater piranhas that just might happen to be breeding in Lake Anza (though now that I think about it, that’s pretty scary, too). It’s the fear of the unknown. Seeing down to the bottom of muddy lake bottom, murky in the dim light, objects distorted, covered in moss, half consumed by the mud and muck. Or grazing the bottom with my foot unexpectedly, the depth changing without warning, and wondering what mushy thing I just touched. Ugh. Just…ugh.