Wind Against Current

By Vladimir Brezina

Each summer, NYC Swim organizes a series of shorter and longer swims in New York City’s waterways. The premier event is the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim (MIMS), a 28.5-mile race around Manhattan. Along with the English Channel and Catalina Channel swims, it is one of the three swims in the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming.

Each swimmer is accompanied by a kayaker (as well as a motor boat). So on Saturday a week ago, I kayaked around Manhattan with swimmer Katy Dooley. Katy already knew all about swimming around Manhattan, having swum in MIMS in 2011 as well as 2012—but in both cases as part of a relay. This was going to be her first solo round-Manhattan swim.

This year’s MIMS turned out to be interesting, to say the least. Due to a cascading series of problems, some traceable all the way back to last year’s Hurricane Sandy, others to the unseasonably cold water, and still others to the heavy rains in the previous couple of days, only 11 of the 39 solo swimmers completed the entire swim unassisted.

But Katy was one of them! She powered through, finishing 5th (and 2nd woman) in 7 hours, 44 minutes. And by completing her swim around Manhattan, she became only the 69th swimmer to join the elite club of Triple Crown open water swimmers. A major accomplishment on a very difficult day—and inspiring to watch from close up!

I’ll write more about the swim in a future post. (My writeups of MIMS 2011 and 2012 are here and here.) But in the meantime, here are some of the photographic highlights of MIMS 2013.

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