Anne Schuster had been in Dover nearly five weeks, waiting.
Her hopes rested on Mike, the salty ship captain she had approached two years before about a solo swim across the English Channel. He told Schuster he would pencil her in.
Mike is one of only eight pilots sanctioned to escort swimmers between the shores of England and France, and those eight ships act as guides for only a few days a month during neap tide, when the least amount of water is flowing through the channel, meaning fewer swells. If the weather is bad, however, the boats can go an entire neap tide without ever leaving shore. And summer 2007 was one of the most horrendous in channel history. Mike told Schuster the rate of swimmers making it across would be lower than any previous year.
Even though she signed up two years in advance, Schuster wasn’t at the top of Mike’s list. Her tide needed three good weather days before she even had a shot. Nervous about those chances, Schuster left her Lakewood home in mid-July, thinking that if another swimmer came down with the flu or came up short a crew member, her prospects would improve.
No such luck. When she arrived at those fabled white cliffs, swimmers who had missed their shot in June because of the nasty weather were still waiting around in July for a fortuitous opening. Schuster had no choice but to wait.
She bided her time with long swims every morning in the 58-degree water, 10 degrees more chilly than a “cold” shower. After failing Mike’s “pinch test” (in which the sea captain grabbed a handful of Schuster’s side and told her there wasn’t enough to hold onto), Schuster followed each morning swim with a full breakfast of two sausages, two pieces of bacon, two fried eggs, a piece of fried bread, a fried tomato, yogurt and a candy bar — her treat for making it through breakfast.
Other swimmers advised her to bulk up with the local fare — beer — so Schuster spent many an evening at the White Horse, a pub whose walls chronicle the finishing times of successful channel swimmers, penned right after completion. Schuster spent weeks gazing at those walls. She watched swimmer after swimmer head down to the beach to conquer the frigid waters — some returning victorious, some retuning to fight the battle another day.
If her chances for starting the swim were bad, her chances for finishing were even worse. Schuster knew the statistics: 80 percent of solo swimmers don’t make it, and of those who don’t, 80 percent give out sometime during the last mile. She knew that even some of the most fit and determined swimmers never reach shore because of forces beyond their control, like contracting hypothermia, vomiting saltwater, and weather taking a turn for the worse. But Schuster had put her entire life on hold for two years and swum 2.3 million miles training for this cross-channel journey.
All she wanted was her shot.
Schuster’s first crack at the channel’s whitecaps was 2005, when she lived in England and a friend talked her into swimming one-hour legs in a five-person relay. One of the swimmers “just freaked out in the water,” she says, so the relay team didn’t make it across. Schuster swore up and down that she would never try it solo. But as she watched the individual swimmers and marveled at the stamina it took to spend 12, 15 even 25 hours straight in the water, the channel began to get under her skin.
With her 40th birthday just around the corner, Schuster decided a swim across would be the perfect present to herself. And with her “if I say I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it” gumption, once she told family and friends that she intended to conquer the channel, there was no turning back.
Schuster threw herself into training. Her first big competition was in October 2006 — the 20k Lake Travis relay in which she swam solo. Her experience was nightmarish. At the end of the race, Schuster staggered out of the water in extreme pain. Still reeling from the experience, she was approached by a man who introduced himself as Chris Dirks. He had heard about Schuster from one of her coaches at Dallas Aquatic Masters, and told her he thought he could help. When Schuster went home, she Googled Dirks and discovered his fame as an open water swimmer.
“It was basically like Lance Armstrong telling you he can teach you how to ride a bike,” Schuster says.
She immediately called Dirks and agreed to meet him at Grapevine Lake at 6 a.m. the following Sunday. The first thing Dirks did was more than triple the length Schuster swam during training. A regular swim practice is 3,000 meters; one of the combinations Dirks asked her to swim was not one, but two sets of 5,000 meters. Schuster’s research consulting business requires quite a bit of travel, and she often found herself gazing at a hotel pool, trying to figure out how she would swim 8,000 meters in a space only 20 yards long. She reeked of chlorine, and wore out bathing suit after bathing suit.
But she never flinched.
“I don’t charge for my time, so I don’t volunteer my help unless you really want it,” Dirks says. “I’ve wasted it on a lot of people who don’t want to spend the time or effort. But Anne never made an excuse for anything. Everything I told her to do, she did. She was willing to make all the sacrifices.”
That included sacrificing social time, which was difficult for a woman who claims to “live for parties.” But Schsuter’s training schedule dictated that she be in bed by 9 p.m. every night so she could wake up at 4 a.m. to hit the pool. The training required almost as much sacrifice from her husband, Duncan Wilcox, because it left Schuster so exhausted that she couldn’t muster up the energy to pitch in. Every single night for an entire year, Wilcox made dinner, cleaned up the house and did the chores.
He also supported her decision to leave home and spend six weeks training in the San Francisco Bay. Schuster would wake up at 2 a.m. to dive into the 55-degree water. Guided by her pilot, she swam from the airport up toward the bay bridge, around the back of Alcatraz, then all the way to the Golden Gate — and back. Schuster’s six months of Dirks-style training culminated in her first open water race since her Lake Travis failure, the 24-mile marathon between Tampa and St. Petersburg last April.
She won.
“And I won that race as a 40-year-old — a 40-year-old who didn’t swim in high school or college,” Schuster says.
She was ready for the channel.
It didn’t look promising. Sunday was the last day of Schuster’s neap tide, and on Saturday morning, Mike set sail with a man from Australia who was just ahead of her on the list. The weather was perfect, and Schuster didn’t expect to see Mike again in time to make her swim. Her hopes sunk, and Schuster began facing the reality of traveling home without even having a chance to make it across.
Then she received the best news she had heard since arriving in Dover: The Australian swimmer had bailed only five hours into the swim. Elated, Schuster told Mike she would meet him on Sunday morning at 8:30.
From the beach at Samphire Hoe, Schuster set off. The rules of the swim did not allow her to touch or receive help from the boat traveling alongside her, so its passengers — including her husband and a friend who had previously made the swim — regularly fed her by tube. It funneled a concoction called Spiz, a high carbohydrate drink that Schuster says “tastes like chocolate milk” and that she swears is “fantastic.”
While everyone on the boat donned winter coats, hats and gloves, Schuster wore only a bathing suit and an American flag cap that a friend had bought. Not neoprene, though — that wasn’t allowed, nor was any kind of wetsuit. Her crew had greased Schuster up with a petroleum jelly-type substance before she took the plunge, but that didn’t completely prevent the salt burns.
Otherwise, however, things were going swimmingly, until about three hours in. Schuster had struggled with a weak shoulder throughout her training, and suddenly a wave caught it the wrong way. Her mind became consumed with thoughts of how much longer she would need to swim until she could start swimming with one arm. And then she wondered if this is where it would all unravel.
She remembered a book she had read during training called “Touching the Void,” the story of a man who fell from an ice ledge after reaching the summit of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes, and with a shattered patella and bones sticking out of his leg, managed to climb out of a deep crevasse and survive.
If he could do it, Schuster thought, so could she.
“I really, really, really wanted to make it. I just was not going to get out unless I was unconscious or dead,” Schuster says.
Eleven hours and 53 minutes after leaving the English shore, Schuster reached France in total darkness. She climbed onto the huge mossy boulders, then made one final swim toward the boat where her friends were waiting with blankets. Then she puked.
One of Schuster’s first acts after returning to Dover was heading to the White Horse to add her time to the wall. Then she wrote the time of her mentor, because the pub had been under renovation when Dirks made the swim in 2001. Schuster claims she was able to make it across the channel only because of him.
“She doesn’t realize this, but it did just as much for me as it did for her,” Dirks says. “I was much happier for her making it than I was for myself. For me it was anticlimactic. I’ve done so many of these swims, so I was like, whatever. But when she was done, I had a quiet moment for myself and was really happy, and glad she included me in her dream to do it.”
Schuster was the 285th woman to ever make it across, and her swim took place on Aug. 26, almost 132 years to the day after the first channel crossing on Aug. 25, 1875, when Capt. Matthew Webb made the journey “sustained by sips of champagne,” as his monument in Dover reads.
Overwhelming relief washed over Schuster once the reality of her accomplishment sunk in. During her time in Dover, she met swimmers who had been trying to make it across for as many as 11 years. It was liberating to know that her only reason for returning to the white cliffs would be the annual gala for those who had battled the channel and won. “Welcome to the club,” read the congratulatory notes Schuster received from others who had gone before her.
The main question asked of Schuster since her return is: So what’s next?
Nothing, she insists. She’s now free to do all of the things she loves and missed out on during her two years of single-mindedness — free to return to her social butterfly schedule, free to spend time with her husband (and give him a well-deserved break after he picked up so much of her slack).
“I just want to be a normal human being again. I love golf, tennis, cooking, running … When I was swimming, there wasn’t really one spare moment for any of that. Now I can go out to dinner with friends and don’t have to worry about being home by 9 so I can get up at 4,” Schuster says.
“There is no encore. This was it. This was the real thing.”
To read more about Schuster’s journey, visit her blog at swimlong.com/blog.
