Pebbles Down My Pants

I found this video recently kicking around Facebook and the Interwebs, and it's dead on. It's all about putting pebbles down my pants, a major goal for every Channel swimmer I've ever met.

Karen Throsby, another Channel swimmer who is conducting research on motivations and swimmers, also sent out a call for images of our mementos, either in pebble or tattoo form, that she's posting on a neat website here. Mark took a couple photos of my growing pile of stones from various swims, and they came out quite arty. I pick up one stone at the start and another at the finish to mark both where I have been and where I ended up.

In the Catalina Channel, I ended up swimming with that small, white start stone down my suit for the first 45 minutes until I stopped for a feed because I was so wound up and terrified that I didn't want to stop and hand it off to Mark in the kayak.

In the Memphre swim, I failed to pick up the start stone at the beginning, and that's probably a good thing, given how rough it was. I realized this halfway to Magog, so selected the big brown rock from the bottom sometime mid-morning during the swim. My crew thought I was having a problem because I suddenly disappeared and dived down about 7 or 8 feet to retrieve the stone from the bottom.

The huge beige stone from Le Petit Blanc Nez was the biggest I could find at my feet in the dark after arriving on Wissant Beach. I couldn't see much, and this one was the biggest reflector of light in the small halo from the flashlight my pilot had pointed on me, so away it came with me. It's heavy, and that seems fitting for the stone from the end of my English Channel swim.

To keep all these various rocks and pebbles straight, Mark uses a paint pen to mark the swim, the date, the time, and whatever else he can fit on them. They're all lovely in their uniqueness and their significance. A weighty pile of mementos, most of which have been down my suit for a spell.