Eating, drinking, changing clothes and taking bathroom breaks are all part of life, but imagine doing all that in choppy seas in the middle of the sea after swimming for dozens of hours.
For marathon swimmer Penny Palfrey, who broke the world record by swimming almost 68 miles from Little Cayman to Grand Cayman in 40 hours and 41 minutes over the weekend, those tasks that are mundane on land became a challenge at sea.
During the nights, she changed into full body swim suits to protect her from jellyfish and other stinging creatures.
“It takes about five minutes to change swim suit in the water,” explained Palfrey’s husband Chris, who was a member of her support crew.
Palfrey changed her swim suit three times during the crossing. After night had fallen on Saturday and Sunday as she continued her swim, she changed into a long-sleeved and long-legged swim suit to protect her from stings, although she did end up getting three minor stings on her face during the swim.
Two earlier record-making attempts to swim between two Hawaiian islands were scuppered when she was badly stung by Portuguese Man O’War.
“She changes her swimsuit in the water with great difficulty, especially when her arms are that achy and she has to do a movement that is different from the repetitive movements she’s been doing for hours and hours,” said Chris.
Crew and photographers were asked to turn away when she needed to change her suits or take a bathroom break. At night, the railings of the tender boat that carried the kayakers, drivers of the inflatable powerboat and the lookout crew was decked out in glow sticks, as were the kayak and inflatable boat escorting her so she could see them in the dark without being blinded by the boat’s lights. She also had a glow light on the strap of her swim goggles so she could also be seen.
She also had to swap goggles – tinted ones for day to protect her eyes from the glare of the sun on the water and clear ones for night.
Throughout the swim, Palfrey’s team made sure she stayed as hydrated and fed as possible. She had a feeding pattern that involved stopping for a few seconds to eat or drink every 30 minutes. The feeding pattern was repeated every eight hours.
The crew fixed bottles of powdered power drinks throughout the day and night, but supplies were running low as the swim stretched into Sunday night as her husband emptied the last of a banana-flavoured powder into a Flowers water bottle and mixed it with water.
She also ate packets of Gu, a power gel. Her favourite flavour of Gu was coffee. Part of her feeding patten included what she described as her “happy hour”. “She says it tastes like Kahlua,” said Chris.
Late Sunday afternoon, as she entered the last six hours of her swim, her tongue was badly swollen and her lips were severely chapped. At that stage, a Red Sail boat delivered a large tub of chocolate ice cream to the inflatable boat beside her and Chris handed a plastic cup of the ice-cream to the swimmer.
During the swim she was also given bottles of mouth wash to help get the taste of salt water out of her mouth and to bring some swelling down.
She was also taking pain killers to ward off the pain from thousands of repetitive movements and as anti-inflammatories. Initially she was taking Advil, but after some time her mouth was so swollen, she could not swallow those tablets and was taking soluble Panadol instead, Steve Munatones, one of her support crew said.
Early Sunday, Chris said: “I’m sure everything is sore by now.”
Munatones said by the latter part of her second day of swimming, “She’s swimming on muscle memory and sheer force of will now.”
The swimmer had a 25-member team on the water with her, including medics, boat drivers and kayakers. Most of the team were on the Carib Princess tender that stayed near the swimmer. Since the boat had no showers, the kayakers and other crew found novel ways of showering, using five gallon bottles of water supplied by Flowers Water.
They picked up the bottles themselves and dumped the water over their heads, or sat under a bottle with a pump attached and got someone to pump water over them, or stood at the bottom of the boat’s metal spiral staircase while another crew member stood upstairs and poured water on the person below. There were known as “Flowers Showers”.
During her swim, she encountered Oceanic white tipped sharks, a pod of pilot whales, dolphins, flying fish and possibly jellyfish. Three of the sharks that had approached her were killed.
Kayaker Jeff Kozlovich said one dolphin gave Palfrey and the team a fright when it suddenly emerged spinning from the water. “It did a 360 degree spin right in front of us,” he said.
Penny, whose swim lasted the equivalent of an average working week, averaged a pace of 2.3 miles per hour for the first one third of her swim, but her speed fell as she was hit by currents and high ocean swells.
She arrived at the beach outside Morritt’s Tortuga Resort in East End at 10.07pm Sunday to the cheers of hundreds who turned out to support her.
During the nights, she changed into full body swim suits to protect her from jellyfish and other stinging creatures.
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