Quick post as the day of reckoning is nigh!
I had a work trip in the midwest last week, and I had a chance to take a quick dip in the water there. Where exactly? The Ohio St. Beach, on Lake Michigan, in the city of Chicago. See what I did there? Yeah, not that clever.
The point is, it was a wild experience. First of all, where does a lake get off having waves? Second, in what bizarro world do lakes have large, sandy beaches and are sea-green like the ocean? I’m more used to the glacier-carved black lakes and ponds of New England.
The thing that caught me off guard the most though was what happened when I dove into the water. Just to recap: everything about Lake Michigan (at least at the Ohio St. Beach) looks and acts like the ocean. I waded into the water, adjusted my goggles and checked my watch as I always do, waiting for the next minute to tick off before starting to swim. When the new minute arrived, I dove in and to my utter surprise, there was no salt taste!
“Well of course there isn’t, you idiot– it’s a lake,” I told myself. I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other, but nonetheless it was so strange to taste…nothing. Really strange.
I swam north along the seawall, picking off orange ladders one at a time. And man, the waves were rough! I don’t know if I hit it on a particularly choppy day, but it was a harsh wake-up call. This seemed a lot more like what the open ocean will feel like– swells so high you can’t see over them when taking a normal breath, and taxing, rather taxing.
The water stayed fairly shallow (6-7ft?) and it was clear. Most of the time I could see the sandy bottom and only encountered an abandoned barrel and one dead fish along the way. It was warm, too; about 70 degrees according to the website, and I could feel the difference, which is good.
All said, it was fun to have notched another open water location and good to have been smacked in the face, literally and figuratively, with the waves.
The other fun thing was that I stayed at the Chicago Athletic Association, previously a “university club” type of old-school athletic center, part fitness facilities, part leather-chaired smoking rooms. They’ve redone it into a hotel, and have maintained the history of the building, right down to the indoor bocce court and adding low pommel horses as benches at the end of the hotel beds. Fun fact too– the Cubs’ logo was originally the CAA’s and for a time they actually shared the logo. Imagine doing that these days?
Another touch they preserved was the indoor swimming pool (pic below). They’ve filled it in, but the border of the pool is original as is the room it’s in. This struck a particular cord with me since I just finished listening to “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World”. Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel and did it at a time when the idea of women swimming–at all– was still a novel idea (circa mid-1920s).
She got her start on the Jersey shore, but more formally her training began in a pool not too dissimilar from this one. Seeing it in person really evoked a sense of connection through the years, and it left me hoping I’ll be up to the task in a week or so, allowing me to join in the long line of swimmers that make up the Channel swimmer community.
