Swimming in the dark is a special experience, and a very different way to explore your relationship with the water. I've been training for night swimming more lately because many of the long solo swims I have on my bucket list start at night and end during the day, and I need to figure out how to become comfortable with it.
I used to think that training for night swimming meant I just needed to overcome my fear of dark spaces and control my overactive imagination, but I quickly learned there's a lot more to it than just that. Swimming in the dark can also be an intense sensory experience, which can be a lot to take in at first, and on long solo swims you also have to deal with choppy water and bobbing lights on a boat for hours on end. Have I mentioned I get motion sickness easily? Train all the things.
Light up the dark
I use adventure lights for dark swims, most swimmers do. They are waterproof, long-lasting, durable, the battery is replaceable. Pull out one side of your goggle straps and thread the strap through the sides of the light and voila! I have also used a glow stick clipped to my back straps but I don't like the feeling of it bouncing around.
For my Search solo marathon swim, we used 2 different coloured lights. I wore my usual green one on my goggles and sewed the red light in place on the back support band of my swimsuit. Why two different colour lights? For direction at night when it's dark, so the support crew can be sure what direction I'm facing while I'm swimming, they need to be able to tell if I get disoriented. We also clipped a light on my feed bottle so that I could find it easily. The batteries on all lights were swapped out with brand new ones the night before to be sure they wouldn't lose power during the swim. You can see how bright they were!
Swimming far from shore and supported
As part of my training for The Search, my first solo marathon swim 40km, I had to put in 3 hours of dark swimming as a pre-qualifier beforehand. I've done a lot of swimming in the wee hours of the morning as dawn breaks, but up until The Search I'd always stayed close to shore. Not only did I need the pre-qualifier, but I'd also been told by other swimmers that the lights bobbing up and down on the support boat might be hard to handle in the dark, and I might get headaches, nausea, vertigo. So I needed to test things out and see how it all felt, and then figure out how to manage any impact to me.
My dad and sister supported me in a boat, and while it was much smaller than the support boat used on The Search, it did the trick. My dad wore a very bright headlight, my sister held a very bright lantern, I swam pretty close to the boat on purpose - it was overkill, on purpose. , to see how it would affect me. The lights were annoyingly bright, and I got a headache pretty quickly. We didn't have much chop, that's the only thing I would have liked to have experienced as well, but there was a little and the bobbing up and down of the lights did make me feel a little queasy. It gave me an opportunity to see how lights in the dark affected me, and that's what I needed.
Are lake zombies a thing? Can't really be sure they aren't.
I was surprised at how tired I was the morning after this swim, I could barely get out of bed. It wasn't the exertion, I think maybe the sensory part of it was a lot. It was like swimming through space, my thoughts were all over the place at first, everything felt more intense.
It's taken A LOT of work for me to get to a place where I swim calmly in the dark. I like to joke that I was a kid raised on horror movies in the 80s, and if you know my family, you know my dad's love of horror, sci-fi and action movies was imparted on us at an early age. And I have a very active imagination, so...what's lurked at the bottom? Lake zombies? Lake sharks? A wayward piranha? Jason, visiting the east coast of Canada? I won't even describe the stuff I visualize sometimes, I can't help it, but I did need to learn to control it.
There was no magic trick for me, I still get the willies, but what worked really well was just getting out there, sitting in the middle of that fear and just dealing with it. And going out repeatedly in the dark. Having a support boat on the water during the training swims really helped, knowing they were watching me. Over time, I stopped thinking about my fears quite as much and started working on refocusing my mind to other things. I've been working on flow state in my daytime training, which is freaky amazing, it feels like meditation and is very calming. But that's a post for another time. Other ideas for turning your thoughts elsewhere are counting games (as long as you're not counting lake zombies), singing games (as long as it's not the theme song to a horror movie), visualization techniques (as long as you're not visualizing something reaching up to grab your foot). I told you. Active imagination.
Here's more, if you're interested:
Meds?
I haven't needed to take any meds for nausea on a swim yet, but I do have a couple of options with me at all times now. Best to talk to a doc about your options.
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