When The Tide Turns | Anna Wardley | TEDxGosport

Key Concepts

• Endurance Swimming: The act of swimming long distances, often in challenging conditions.
• Hypothermia: A dangerous drop in body temperature.
• Mental Deterioration: The decline of cognitive functions due to extreme physical or mental stress.
• Support Crew: Individuals who assist an endurance athlete during their event.
• Tide: The rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth.
• Suicide: The act of intentionally causing one's own death.
• Grief and Trauma: The emotional and psychological responses to loss and traumatic events.
• Resilience: The ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant sources of stress.
• Empowerment: The process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights.

The Isle of Wight Swim: A Test of Endurance and Resilience

This account details an extreme endurance swim around the Isle of Wight, a 55 nautical mile (over 100 kilometers) circumnavigation that took over 26.5 hours of non-stop swimming. The experience was characterized by bone-shattering cold, searing shoulder pain from an estimated 87,000 strokes, and significant mental deterioration due to hypothermia.

Physical and Mental Challenges

The swimmer describes the frigid seawater penetrating her exposed body, clad only in a lycra swimsuit and silicon cap. The repetitive motion of swimming led to intense pain in her shoulders. The sheer scale of the swim meant the tide was inevitably going to turn against her, hindering progress.

As core temperature dropped, mental functioning deteriorated significantly, leading to hallucinations. The swimmer questioned her support crew about a submarine and why they had carrots stuck up their noses, which were figments of her cold imagination. To assess her cognitive state, the support crew posed questions such as "What's 2 + three?", "What's your dog's name?", "What's your post code?", and "What's the name of this massive island you're swimming around?". While answers were delayed, they were still provided, allowing her to continue.

The Battle Against Darkness and the Tide

The swim took place through the night, with darkness closing in hours after the start. The swimmer lost her sense of self and location, struggling to maintain consciousness. She actively concealed her deteriorating state from her support team to avoid being pulled out, having trained for months in Gosport.

Shorelines, initially a reference point, became indicators of being pushed in the wrong direction by the tide. At 2:00 a.m., after 16 hours of swimming, a cloud cover obscured the moon, diminishing her spirit. The plummeting temperature intensified the icy cold. The rhythmic splashing of water induced a trance-like state, making it difficult to resist the pull towards oblivion.

A Near-Disqualification and a Moment of Clarity

A shrill whistle jolted the swimmer back to reality: "Stop, Anna. You're swimming straight at the boat." Her support crew's panic stemmed from the fact that any touch of the boat would invalidate the entire attempt. Amidst the urgency, a voice from "another realm" encouraged her, "You're a warrior, Anna. You've got this." Her arms continued to move on autopilot, "Schlip, sch slap, sch slip, slap, slip, sch slap," as she drifted back into the abyss.

The Deeper Motivation: Proving Worth and Childhood Trauma

The swim's goal, the need to prove she was worth living for, became more important than life itself. This feeling was recognized from childhood, a desire to escape difficult circumstances by leaving her body behind, finding relief in numbness.

Memories surfaced of sailing with her father, Ralph, on the river Humber. Tragically, her father took his own life in 1985 when she was nine years old. A stroke in his early 40s had led to a loss of independence and a future consumed by self-loathing. The news of his death, delivered while she was staying with friends, was an "interminable journey home" for her mother. Her initial response, "Don't worry, Mom. I'll be able to get free school dinners now," was often misinterpreted as a sign of her not being affected. However, as a nine-year-old, she was trying to alleviate her mother's distress.

The Impact of Suicide and Unspoken Grief

The swimmer highlights that it's normal for children of suicide victims to hide their feelings to protect their surviving parents. She had never even heard the word "suicide" before her father's death. Returning to school, she felt alienated, believing she had experienced something nobody else had, and harbored a deep feeling of not being worth staying alive for.

She focused on academic success as a means of control and frequented the library, seeking answers in psychology books about why her father had died. However, her father's death was not spoken about at home, school, or among friends, with the word "suicide" uttered in hushed tones.

Connection Through the Sea and Fulfilling a Legacy

Despite the decades of silence surrounding her father, the swimmer felt most connected to him through their shared love of the sea. He had served in the merchant navy, and they spent summers sailing on their boat, "Algae Pug." His dream of a global voyage on a larger boat, "Island Girl," remained unfulfilled due to his death.

This experience shaped her perspective on the fragility of life, leading her to grasp opportunities. In her mid-20s, she sailed around the world in the Clipper race, fulfilling her father's ambition, believing he would have been proud, and perhaps jealous.

The Turning Tide: From Victim to Empowered Survivor

As dawn broke, the tide finally turned, pushing her towards the finish. Her mantra for the final hours was "keep going because when you get there, you don't ever have to swim another stroke ever again in your life." This propelled her to punch the pier in Ryde 26 hours and 33 minutes later, becoming one of only four people to have swum solo and non-stop around the Isle of Wight.

Overcoming Perceived Limitations

The swimmer acknowledges that many might perceive her as "bonkers" or believe they could never achieve such a feat. She emphasizes that she was not born with superpowers. She taught herself front crawl at age 30, initially struggling significantly. She was also poor at PE at school, often hiding during cross-country runs and being the last to be chosen for sports teams. She wishes she had realized back then that life was equipping her for endurance athletics.

Finding Strength in Adversity

With 40 years of hindsight, she recognizes the profound impact of her father's suicide on her life and those around her. She has battled depression and anxiety, struggled with relationships, and numbed pain and shame with substances, work, and endurance sport.

The turning point came when she stopped seeing herself as a victim and adopted a narrative of empowerment, recognizing her resilience and will to succeed not in spite of her experiences, but because of them. She concludes that our toughest life experiences are where we find our superpowers, revealing inner strength that allows us to survive and shine. Realizing this can turn the tide for others, enabling them to achieve more than they ever thought possible.