The La Jolla Rough Water Swim is considered America’s premiere ocean challenge. For some swimmers, it has become a tradition that has shaped their lives. More than 2,000 participants, from 5-year-olds to 85-year-olds, will flood La Jolla for the 76th swim on Sunday, Sept. 10.
The event features three courses: the 250-yard triangular course for 12-year-olds and under; the 1-mile triangular course; and the 3-mile Gatorman, in which swimmers race to Scripps Pier and back. All the races start and finish in the cove.
The first race starts at 9 a.m. for Junior Girls. Masters Women will race in two heats, beginning at 11 a.m., followed by the men at noon. The Gatorman is at 1:30 p.m., with the Amateur race at 1:35 p.m.
“It’s a madhouse,” laughed La Jollan Jacqui McNally, who has swum the 1-mile for 28 years. “The good swimmers ” and the competition is strong amongst the good swimmers ” they forge ahead and they have you licked. There’s a whole mass of people who try to pull your bathing suit and kick you in the face, not necessarily on purpose.”
A $500 cash prize is awarded to the champion male and female Gatorman swimmers. A grand prize of $1,000 is offered to anyone who competes and wins both the 1-mile and the Gatorman.
Like McNally, many of the long-time swimmers have found themselves hooked by the La Jolla Rough Water Swim. When 76-year-old Bud Schumacher set off from the cove in 1961 in his first ocean race, he didn’t expect to create a tradition that would continue 45 years later. Schumacher hasn’t missed the 1-mile race since 1961, and his extended family now converges on the cove for the event.
When 36-year-old Alex Kostich moved to Los Angeles for a job in the entertainment industry, he was a long-distance pool swimmer who had swum for Stanford for four years but felt burned out from too many laps. He soon discovered ocean swimming.
“It was like starting a new sport all over because it’s so different than pool swimming,” Kostich said. “Unlike pool swimming, which is very precise and exact in a controlled environment, in the ocean you’re in a very unpredictable environment.”
Kostich began routinely competing in the Waikiki Rough Water Swim in Hawaii but was convinced one year to cut his vacation short to participate in the La Jolla Rough Water Swim. He’s never looked back, and in the past eight years he has won the Gatorman four times, including last year in 57 minutes and 50 seconds. In 2000, he was the first person to win both the Gatorman and the 1-mile in the same year.
“Last year when I finished I was really shocked that I came in first,” Kostich said. “I wasn’t even all that aware because I wasn’t sure of my bearings. It’s always a sort of sense of relief, too, because you are in there for an hour and it is indefinitely deep at one point.”
McNally says that she is not a competitive swimmer but she has not let pregnancy or injury keep her from the 1-mile race.
She entered her first swim in 1969 when she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and was three months pregnant when she swam the following year. Sixty-five-year-old McNally has only missed two races in the past 28 years, due to the deaths of her sister and mother.
Last year McNally tore cartilage in her left knee in mid-August and suffered a sore shoulder but was determined to continue with the race even though the injury “hurt like a bear.”
The night before the swim, McNally popped all the anti-inflammatory pills she could take and mixed herself an 8-ounce thermos of margarita. As McNally prepared for the race in the morning, her daughter pulled her over to the emcee stand and said: “This is my mother, look at her: She wears a red bathing cap and wears a brace on her knee and she just drank a margarita and she has a bad shoulder.”
McNally completed the race, but after the first buoy a lifeguard appeared next to her and followed her into the cove.
For each of these swimmers, the Rough Water event holds a nugget of beauty.
Kostich described the experience as humbling. At one point, the kelp beds and wildlife disappear and all that Kostich sees is his “hand passing by an infinitely blue background of water.” Kostich said that he will continue to swim even when he’s not a competitor.
“It’s definitely the most attended open-water swim that I’ve ever been to and ever seen, and that’s really exhilarating,” Kostich said. “It’s so great to run up the beach and to hear thousands of people cheering for you.”
The La Jolla Rough Water Swim originated in 1916 when the city asked each community to showcase its area for the World’s Fair Pan American Exposition. La Jolla chose to display its cove. Seven male swimmers marked the beginning of Rough Water history in the original 1.7-mile race from the cove to the pier.
Last-minute registration for swimmers is available on Saturday, Sept. 9, from 9 a.m. to noon at Washington Mutual Bank, 7777 Girard Ave. Registration costs $40 for the Junior event, $50 for the Amateur event, $60 for the Master’s event and $75 for the Gatorman. Participants in the Master’s and Gatorman must present a photo ID. Participants can sign up on the day at the problem desk but will not receive an official time.
For more information, visit www.ljrws.com or call (858) 456-2100.