|
Greetings!
RANIE
PEARCE - Elite Endurance Athlete / Open Water Swimmer / Cold Water Swimmer
For those few of
you who don't know, Ranie Pearce (a six AM OAM swimmer) is a world class open
water swimmer. How did this all come about? Well she was kind enough to share
her background with us and to also answer a few questions.
"I didn't start
swimming until 1988 on the verge of getting married. I was just looking for a
way to get some exercise. I found the Tsunami Master's Swim Team in SF. I wasn't
very consistent, but after a few months several swimmers invited me to swim Lake
Berryessa. I swam the two mile, and was so happy, that I swam the one mile as
well. I swam that event for the next 24 years! I joined Orinda Aquatics Masters
in 2008, but again I wasn't very consistent. I did a lot of the PMS open water
events over the years, and finally swam Alcatraz and found the South End Rowing
Club. I joined the SERC in 2009 and never looked back.
With the help
and encouragement of OA and the South End, I swam The Straits of Gibraltar in
2010 (10 miles) and The English Channel in 2011 (21 miles). In 2012, I swam
several 10+ miles swims including the Portland Bridge Swim, the Bay to Breakers
and Capitola to Santa Cruz. But this didn't satisfy my big swim hunger. So I
signed up for and swam Catalina in 2013 (20 miles). I went to Cork, Ireland to
train in Ned Denison's Distance Camp which was a magical experience where I swam
100K in three weeks in some of the most beautiful, wild places. But I also
realized that I was not ready to tackle the North Channel, yet!
This past spring
I went to SCAR in Arizona. A four day stage event where you swim the 9.5 miles
of Saguaro Lake ( each one end to end), 9 miles of Canyon Lake, 17 miles of
Apache Lake and finally 6.5 miles at night in Roosevelt Lake for a total of 42
miles in just under 25 hours. This was my training for MIMS the 28.5 mile swim
around Manhattan Island.
I like to tell
people that I am an overweight, over 50, suburban housewife, but in truth, I am
an elite endurance athlete. I am both! I wish I was a better swimmer, but that's
one of the things I love about swimming: everyone can do it, and everyone has to
work at it to be good at it. There is always more to learn and ways to improve.
Becoming a channel swimmer has enriched my life and opened me up to some
unbelievable experiences. The most recent was the opportunity to visit Argentina
as a representative of the USA at the International Winter Swimming Festival. We
were allowed to swim in three different locations in increasingly colder water
culminating in a swim in Patagonia in a glacier lake in 37 degree water!
Becoming a Winter Swimmer has exposed me to a whole new world of swimming. I
started in a pool with Masters, found the Open Water community only to be pulled
into the Marathon / Channel community, and now I have found a new small intense
subset of "cold water" or Winter Swimmers.
My next
adventure is to go to Tyumen, Siberia this December and swim in an Ice Pool
where they cut a hole in the ice the size of a pool, insert lane lines and hold
races. I kind of thought that the images of this on the internet were
photoshopped. But now I will get to go see and experience it for myself. I would
like to swim an Ice Mile this winter (swimming a mile in water temperatures
between 0-5c). I am a Triple Crown Swimmer having completed the English Channel,
the Catalina Channel and Manhattan, and a member of the "Half-Century Club"
since I did all three of them after turning 50. So that's pretty good. I am
content. But I am always looking for my next swim. This is an expensive hobby
but my life is more interesting when I have something to train for...it makes it
easier to get up at 5:10 am to hit the pool!
Hope this is
ok,
Ranie"
Well that's more
than OK, Ranie! Thank you!
And here are a
few questions she answered for us:
You
work at Campo, right? I am an aid in the
Special Ed classroom at Campo. I primarily work with Freshmen this year.
Married to Jorge? We have been married for over 26 years. Met fall term,
freshman year at CAL. He doesn't swim, but we both ski together. Have two daughters? I have two daughters that swam rec swimming for Park
Pool. Katharine just graduated from UC Davis in BioChemistry and Molecular
Biology, and Coco is a sophomore at UCLA in Mechanical Engineering. They could
both swim faster than I can by the time they were 6 (I am not
kidding). Where are you from originally?
I am from the East Coast. My parents split
when I was young so I lived in both NYC, Hanover New Hampshire and I went to
Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school in Massachusetts. Scariest thing about what you do? I can't really say what the scariest thing about
marathon swimming is, because it doesn't really scare me. I don't think I would
do it if it really scared me. I worry about whether I can succeed, but that's
not scary, just challenging. People always ask about sharks, but I truly
believe that a shark attack is about as likely as my winning the lottery. And I
don't play the lottery so I don't expect to win. My kids worry about the
sharks, and that by the sheer volume of time that I spend in the water, I am
increasing my odds, but it doesn't feel that way to me. The water is where I am
happiest. EVERY time I dive into the ocean, my whole body relaxes, like I
am "home". The water feels soft and inviting. Even in the Glacier Lake in
Argentina where the water was 37 degrees, it was still just water, and it
invited me. It was so cold that it was painful, but it was still swimming, and
I loved it. I think Perito Moreno (the Glacier) was the most "dangerous"
swimming experience that I have had, and it was very life affirming. The allure
is huge. I will be exploring very cold water this winter! How
often do you train and what kind of training is
it. I train too much, but it is
only because I prefer the water to land based activities. I swim in the pool
with OA 4 days a week and then swim in the ocean both weekend days. If I am
training for a channel, I make sure that I swim that distance every week and
build to swimming double that distance each week. I swim over 50 miles a month,
regularly, and up to 100 miles in the two months before a big swim. I set my
goal to swim 1,000,000 meters this year. You
are an inspiration!!! I like to tell people
that I did not swim in high school or college, but in the last five years I have
achieved every goal I set for myself. It's empowering to learn at this late
stage in life (53), you really can do anything you set your mind
to.
|
