Wide Open
March/April 2008

What happens when an Olympic event is introduced that is virtually extinct in the United States? Anyone could be a contender. By Cristina Opdahl

Swimming in the ocean is fun!” yells open-water swim coach Steve Munatones. He dives into the water and starts stroking, inviting his students to join him. It’s day 1 of a select open-water instructional swim camp held by USA Swimming, the organization that oversees the U.S. swimming and diving national teams, and 20 of the fastest freestyle distance swimmers in the country follow Steve into the Gulf of Mexico near Fort Myers, Florida, albeit tentatively. Most of them begin swimming with their heads craned out of the water. The waves lap against their bodies. They are out of their element.

These swimmers earned their stars swimming back and forth in the clear, disinfected water of swimming pools, following straight painted black lines on the bottoms. They’ve posted their career bests in natatoriums painstakingly engineered to eliminate waves and chop, separated from their competitors into their own strip of water by lane lines. “Go ahead and swim with your head down,” Steve calls out. “It’s okay! And it’s beautiful down there!”

It’s June 2006, and USA Swimming brought the swimmers here for more than just sightseeing. In October 2005 a new event—the 10-kilometer open-water swim—was added to the Beijing Olympic schedule. Looking at team prospects for the United States, the field was anemic. So in Fort Myers on a clear, sunny day, the nation’s governing body of the sport of swimming invited the fastest distance swimmers to forget the pool and take their speed into the great wide-open water. Many of the swimmers (though not all) respond to Steve’s instructions and begin stroking with their faces in the water, pulling their heads out every few strokes to see where they’re going. They head away from the shore and into deeper water.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when open-water events became organized into a World Cup and World Championship run by the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), U.S. swimmers dominated and often took home big prize money. But in the 1990s, Russian, German, and Italian teams pumped up their open-water programs and their swimmers began to win. Open-water events in western and central Europe became popular and multiplied, and the sport soon drew top athletes from those countries (one open-water swimmer was put on a Bulgarian postage stamp).

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, aside from an occasional world championship medal, the U.S. athletes rarely made the podium at open-water events. At the time of the Beijing announcement, open-water swimming was largely an obscure sport in the United States, practiced by fanatics who coat their bodies in lanolin and put on 20 pounds to brave the cold waters of the English Channel. The Americans excelled at pool racing, with such phenoms as Michael Phelps, who won eight medals at the previous Olympics, and Kate Ziegler, who currently holds the world record for the women’s 800-meter freestyle, the longest-distance event for women in the Olympics. But in June 2006 the U.S. swimmers were not looking strong in open-water swimming.

“We were very lucky,” Steve recalls. “The water was warm and clear. If the weather is bad, you’re out in the elements and kids generally get turned off to it.” Among the pack was Kirsten Groome, 15, from Shreveport, Louisiana, who trained most of her life in a backyard pool in Birmingham, Alabama, and recently placed second in a national championship. Chloe Sutton never swam in the ocean before, but she was invited based on her top-10 finishes in national distance events. At age 13 she was the youngest swimmer there—and perhaps the one who most found herself right in her element. “I’m explaining what we do in open water, and I look out at the kids at this very serious, select camp and I see Chloe’s feet!” remembers Steve. “She’s down underwater, looking for starfish. She’s very comfortable with the ocean. That’s very important. You have to be comfortable with not seeing the bottom.”

Over the following three days of camp, the swimmers learned to raise their heads to site their direction without dropping their hips and losing their form. They practiced swimming in a pack, elbow to elbow with one another, turning around the course buoys with a defensive stroke to block the inevitable elbows and knees and feet that are thrown during the turning frenzy. Once he sensed that they were comfortable in the water, Steve swam up to them and pulled on their legs and bumped them. They tried rolling on their backs and squeezing a gel pack into their mouths during just one stroke and grabbing a cup of sports drink from an extended stick at a mock feeding station. They also practiced coping with the great wide-open water, not being able to see the bottom or a wall or where they were going. They tried not to panic when they knocked against a plastic bag or piece of wood and their brain instantly thought shark!

“It was wide open. It was exciting. I just felt so free,” Chloe recalls. Until then her swimming career was not shabby—she generally placed in the top eight in national distance freestyle events. She was only 13, and she was held back from world-class status partly by her flip turn, which wasn’t as explosive as it needed to be. But in June 2006, Chloe saw stingrays and starfish and schools of fish as she swam, and she fell in love with open-water swimming. “There is nothing to stop me out there,” she says.

On day 3 of the open-water swim camp, the swimmers competed in the U.S. Open Water Nationals 5 K event. For most of the swimmers who entered, this was their first open-water race. Kirsten and Chloe quickly pulled ahead of the pack and swam side by side. To their surprise, they were in the lead, and they held on to it throughout the race. While turning around a buoy near the final stretch, they collided. Chloe’s goggles were knocked off and her nose was scraped, but near the end she saw a dolphin diving down and soaring up next to her. (Another swimmer in the water saw the dolphin’s fin and panicked.) Kirsten won the race, and Chloe placed second. It was the first open-water competition for both of them. Many swimmers stayed for the 10 K National Championships held two days later. Again, Chloe’s excitement about the open venue propelled her to lead swimmers who beat her in the pool, including Kalyn Keller, who placed fourth in the 2004 Olympics. This time Chloe became a national champion in her second open-water race ever.

Micha Burden, 24, was invited to participate in the instructional open-water camp. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she swam in high school, winning a state championship in the individual medley; then for Golden West Community College in Huntington Beach, California, where she earned a national junior college record in the 500-yard freestyle; and eventually for the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in international studies. Her best national performance was third on a relay for the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships. In the summers, she worked as a lifeguard at Huntington Beach, and she frequently entered and won short sprint ocean races and lifeguard rescue competitions there. In 2004 Micha graduated college. She would have loved to become a professional athlete, but it didn’t seem to be in the cards.

By the early spring of 2006, Micha was working part-time at Saks Fifth Avenue and taking classes that would lead to nursing school. She swam three times a week with a local master’s program to stay in shape. When she heard that the Beijing Olympics would include an open-water swimming event, she mentioned it offhandedly to her father. He called her back and offered his financial support for a shot at the team.

Micha phoned an elite swim club known for turning out top distance swimmers, the Mission Viejo Nadadores, and asked if she could join the team. “I said, ‘No. What makes you think you can just call up and join a national team’?” recalls Bill Rose, its head coach. “A couple of weeks later, she called again, and said, ‘I really do want to swim. Can I just come and swim a day?’ We said, ‘We’ll allow you in the pool but don’t expect to stay long.’” One day turned into a week, then into months. Coach Rose was impressed by Micha’s drive, and eventually let her stay on the team. “She was a pleasant girl with a lot of determination and she wouldn’t allow me to say no to her,” he says.

Micha also joined a distance program nearby and started trying to get into the kind of shape you need to be in to race in a 10 K. A few weeks later, she competed at the Open Water Nationals that Chloe and Kirsten won, having barely qualified for the event during a time trial in the pool. “I knew I wasn’t in good-enough shape to race both of them, so I swam the 5 K pretty slowly, just to see what the course was like,” says Micha. “In the 10 K, I tried to be as competitive as I could. Obviously, I couldn’t keep up with the top girls. They just kind of took off.”

Their discovery of open water was a revolution for Chloe and Kirsten. After the National Championships, each tried to
find a program that could prepare her for the new venue and a shot at the Olympics. At Chloe’s Virginia swim club, one of the assistant coaches purchased a kayak and began paddling with her on open-water days in the Chesapeake Bay, while her mother watched nervously from the shore. But Chloe didn’t connect with the coach, so within a few months she moved to another swim club, near Sacramento, California. When that coach announced his retirement a year later, Chloe moved again, this time to southern California to train with the Mission Viejo Nadadores, the same program that Micha had joined a few months earlier.

Open water suited both of them for different reasons. “Chloe’s forte is the fact that she can maintain speed over a long period of time. She starts out well and just stays fast,” says her coach, Bill Rose. For Kirsten open water’s grueling distance suited her work ethic.

Although most top-competitor swimmers are cultivated in a handful of elite swim clubs throughout the country, Kirsten trained alone for most of her career in her own backyard pools, first in Birmingham and then in Shreveport. Before the open-water instructional camp and the U.S. Nationals, she had attempted to find a swim club she liked in Philadelphia, then Baltimore. After winning the Open-Water Nationals, Kirsten returned home to her 25-yard backyard pool and began traveling to Houston every few weeks to meet with a coach there, but, as always, she was largely coached by her parents and motivated by her own drive.

“She works extremely hard,” says her mother, Joyce Groome, who helps her train most practices. “She is the hardest worker I have ever seen. She doesn’t have a good stroke—it’s sort of like a windmill; she just flings her arms—but she just wants to train hard.” For open-water training, Kirsten took occasional swims in Houston’s murky Twin Lakes.
Because finding safe open-water swims is logistically difficult, open-water swimmers do most of their mileage in a pool, which lets them control their distances and work on speed. But while the pool can get them in good physical condition, there are a host of other aspects to open water that the young distance swimmers were just starting to learn. “Open-water swimming is swimming in its purest form, where athletes compete against each other and against the elements,” says Steve. “The sport requires the ability to navigate in open water, to take a punch from a competitor, to draft and race tactically. They have to be able to handle cold water, warm water, jellyfish, and other aquatic inhabitants. They brave hypothermia, hyperthermia, currents, winds, and waves. Racing experience is as important as conditioning.”

The August after the U.S. Nationals, Chloe competed in the Pan Pacific Championships (where during a practice swim the fog grew so thick that the course had to be closed) and won. In early September Kirsten competed in the 5 K at the 2006 Open Water World Championships in Italy and was disappointed with her finish. “In Italy you had these experienced girls who were 25, and they had been doing this all their lives,” recalls Kirsten. “I ended up getting my cap knocked off, and I got out-touched for a third-place medal.”

At the 10 K World Championships in Melbourne, Australia, in March 2007, Chloe learned perhaps the hardest lesson of all. On the morning of the World Championships 10 K women’s event, a giant flotilla of large blue jellyfish landed in Port Phillip Bay and decided to stay awhile. “They were about 18 inches in diameter. They were big and they were blue and they stung. You could see them really well in the water, and it was really scary,” recalls Chloe. Worse, she lost her goggles somewhere near the first feeding station. “I was kind of still getting used to how exciting water was,” says the young swimmer. “I got too close to a competitor, and she didn’t like it and she knocked my goggles off.” Chloe had to tread water until a worker threw her another pair. For the rest of the race, she swam behind the pack through stinging jellyfish, came in twenty-eighth, and emerged from the water in tears and covered in welts.

While Kirsten was landlocked in Louisiana, Chloe competed in some small open-water races in southern California throughout the summer of 2007, but she just left the packs behind and swam the races alone—hardly giving her the experience she needed to compete internationally. In the summer of 2007, they both attended two World Cup events to cut their open-water teeth among the world’s best. They were elbowed and kneed and scratched until they bled. “You can just count on getting hit or kicked some,” says Kirsten. “There are referees there, but they can’t see what’s going on underwater. I’ve never been in a race and not had my leg pulled.”

“You kind of learn what swimmers to try and stay away from,” adds Chloe.

In a race in a rowing basin in Seville, Spain, Chloe mistook a white referee boat for a white buoy and almost swam into the side of the water channel. “Anything can happen in an open-water race,” Chloe explains. “Every race is different; every course is different. That’s one of the things I love about it.”

Gradually, they learned tricks: how to lube their ankles with Vaseline or lanolin in case they get grabbed. Kirsten started duct-taping her swim cap to her forehead. Chloe taped her goggles to her head and carried an extra pair in her suit. They figured out the best places to tuck gel packs inside their suits to down in case they bonked or missed a feeding (the number of feeding stations is up to the race director, and it varies from two to 10 over a 10-kilometer course). They learned to sprint early when approaching a turning buoy to snag an inside turning position.

Both Chloe and Kirsten also learned that the best way to cope with the violent maw at the start of the race was to get out of it as quickly as they could by sprinting to the front of the pack and holding the lead for as long as they could. The strategy served Chloe particularly well. In May 2007 she won the U.S. Open Water Nationals in both the 5 K and 10 K distances. In July 2007 she won the Pan American 10 K event. Just over a year before, she was placing in the top eight in her sport and now she was a breakout star.

While Chloe Sutton was winning national championships and the Pan American Games, Micha Burden was gradually allowed to stay at Coach Rose’s Mission Viejo club. “I’d never trained in a distance program, so I had to adjust to 8,000- to 10,000-meter workouts. But at first Coach Rose had to kind of adjust it to me, and I had to do a bit less, which was a little discouraging at times,” says Micha. “It took me pretty much a year before I was starting to feel like I was really getting a grasp on things.”

Micha rented a room in a house to cut expenses and continued to train twice a day with the Mission Viejo Nadadores. She didn’t qualify for the Pan American Games, but with her father’s support she traveled to World Cup races in Brazil, Dubai, and London and, though she couldn’t keep up with the lead pack all the way to the finish lines, she became a student of race strategy. “I felt like in Dubai and Brazil I was kind of a spectator rather than competing. I would be swimming, and I was trying to pay attention to everything that was going on. I kind of forgot to pay attention to everything I was doing and just race.” In California she entered local races and competed in lifeguard competitions.

Because open-water races can accommodate fewer than 20 swimmers each, and a 10 K race takes days, even weeks, to recover from, the Beijing Olympics will not include an entry from every country. Instead, organizers decided, the top 10 finishers at the FINA World Championships in April 2008 in Seville will qualify to race in the Olympics. USA Swimming announced its plan for open-water trials: the top two swimmers at a 10 K qualifying race in October 2007 will get to compete in the Seville World Championships and thus get a shot at the Olympics.

Micha continued to practice and study race strategy and hone her plan for the October 2007 trials. In August 2007 she competed in a state park lake in Indianapolis at an Open Water Grande Prix with the top swimmers in the United States, including Chloe and Kirsten, and couldn’t keep up with the lead pack. Kirsten won the race, and Chloe placed second just eight seconds behind her. The 1,500 freestyle world record holder, Kate Ziegler, tried her hand at open water and placed seventh. Micha placed eighth.

To closely approximate the Beijing open-water event, which will be held in a rowing basin, the U.S. World Championships selection event took place in a lake rather than the ocean. October 20 was a rainy day on Lake Miramar near Fort Myers, and Chloe, Kirsten, and Micha all tapered for the event. Eighteen months earlier none of them thought she would be looking at a solid chance of going to the Olympics, but in a short time Chloe and Kirsten were looking down the pipeline at a possible Olympic berth. Micha had been working for the past year and a half to take a Hail Mary shot at it.

When Chloe and Micha’s coach, Bill Rose, was asked about the event, he expected that the coveted spots for the Seville World Championships—the international Olympic qualifying event—would go to two of four swimmers: Chloe; Kirsten; Kalyn Keller, the 2004 distance freestyle Olympian; and Erica Rose (no relation), a longtime open-water swimmer who started competing in the longer 25 K events. “You can call Chloe a front runner, a favorite,” said Bill.
A couple of nights before the race, Micha approached Bill: “She said to me, ‘We need to come up with a race plan for me to win because that’s what I’m going to do,’” he said. “I said, ‘OK, but understand the closest you’ve come is eighth place. You are a dark horse.’”

At the beginning of the race, Chloe, Kirsten, and Kalyn distanced themselves from the pack, and Micha was able to keep up with the leaders. Chloe stayed in first place. At the first feeding station, she was unable to get a sip of sports drink but quickly squirted a gel pack into her mouth and maintained her position. Kirsten, who was in third, chose to skip the first feeding station
to improve her position, and she moved up into second place.

Until the introduction of open water to these distance elites, the longest event they competed in was just 1 mile, roughly one-seventh the distance of a 10 K. The 10 K is another animal altogether, one that takes roughly two hours and requires feeding stations to hydrate. Still athletes often can barely walk at race’s end. “In a pool event, you have a lot of lactic acid built up, and you’re breathing really hard,” explains Micha, “but I find that within a couple of minutes I’m fine. The [open-water] 10 K is different because no matter how hard you try to feed, you’re going to be really dehydrated. My hip flexors get really tired. My feet cramp. You don’t really finish the race completely out of breath, but you maintain the fastest level that you can.”

In Lake Miramar, Micha got a good drink at the first feeding station, and Chloe and Kirsten remained in front, occasionally switching the lead, although Chloe stayed in front most of the time. At the second feeding station, Kirsten and Micha were able to get a good drink, but Chloe had a hard time getting her cup out of the holder. She continued to stay in the lead where she was comfortable.

One piece of advice that coaches often give swimmers is to “swim your own race.” In open water, however, elbow to elbow with a pack of other swimmers, swimming one’s own race becomes nearly impossible. “It’s easier for the European mind that is used to watching the Tour de France,” says Steve, who has looked at the top World Cup finishers over the years and concluded that almost every one has drafted throughout most of the race to save energy. “That strategy makes no sense for the American athletes, who are more likely to think, I’m going to take control. I’m more physically fit than anyone else. It is not second nature to them. But you can save up
to 20 percent of your energy by drafting.”

By the last turning buoy before the final 2 kilometers of the race, Kalyn dropped behind the pack, and Micha passed Kirsten and was swimming side by side Chloe. As she and Chloe moved around the buoy, they turned too sharply, then corrected, locked arms with and collided. Kirsten swam around them. Chloe recovered quickly and chased her down, while Micha followed, finding again her position on their heels. At 1 kilometer to go, she began to sprint, and after a race spent in third and fourth place in the wake of Chloe and Kirsten, and after nailing each of her feedings, she began to pull ahead of Chloe and Kirsten. “I knew I was ahead of them and I was too afraid to look back and see,” says Micha. “I was really tired, and I was kind of shocked that I was actually pulling it off. I kept telling myself that they were right on my feet.”

Micha came in first. After Chloe and Kirsten battled for second place for several hundred yards, Kirsten pulled ahead and took the final berth for the 2008 World Championships, which could likely lead to a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Chloe was named alternate. “As heartbreaking as it was to not see Chloe make it, it was equally heartbreaking to see Micha win,” mused Steve a few days after the race. “She was not a competitive swimmer 18 months ago; she was a nursing student staying in shape by swimming two or three times a week. That’s open-water swimming. Anything can happen. Any other day would have been Chloe’s day. On the other side, you have the young lady who did win. This is her shot. If she doesn’t do it here, she goes back to nursing school.”

In the weeks after the Fort Myers competition, Micha signed with a sponsor and got back to work in the pool, logging 10,000-Meter practices. Kirsten returned to her backyard pool and began to focus her regimen on the Seville World Championships to be held in six months. Chloe, who had yet to win a sponsorship and found herself an alternate for a shot at the open-water Olympic team, soldiered on.

“Everything went wrong,” said Chloe, “but I’m not going to let that one race define what I’ve accomplished.” Less than a month after her loss in Fort Myers, Chloe took 12 seconds off her pool time in the 1,000-yard long distance freestyle and placed second in that event at a national meet. Suddenly, again, her hopes of making the Olympic team were renewed. “I’m definitely still an open-water swimmer, but I used to think I was just an open-water swimmer and that the pool wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Now I think that I do have a chance. I think that, after Florida, I’m going to make it to Beijing in the pool.”