We’ve been through this before, but it bears repeating: There is no black line on the bottom of the ocean… nor is there one on the bottom of Tempe Town Lake. Most importantly, there isn’t a push-off wall every 25 meters to give my arms a little breather.
There is merely a series of buoys that I have to circumnavigate, swimming shrink-wrapped in a steel-belted radial and dodging a chorus line of heels and hands. Under water, you can’t see them, but you can feel them – in the champagne remnants of their efforts and the thud of their heels hitting your forehead, or worse, when their hands come up from behind, across your heels and hands, like a giant squid pulling you down to the 14-foot depths of a man-made lake.