Deepika Rana, a Mumbai-based helicopter pilot, began open water swimming around two years ago. So, when her coach, Srikaanth Viswanathan, asked her if she would be interested in swimming the Strait of Gibraltar, she said yes almost immediately. “I always feel excited about stepping into something that feels challenging and slightly scary, but worth attempting,” she says.
She would spend the next few months training for it, a process that involved long endurance swims, interval sessions, strength training, recovery, and just getting used to cold water. And she had to do this intense training while working full-time. “One of the biggest challenges was balancing training with work and travel. My job as a helicopter pilot often takes me to remote locations, so maintaining consistency was not always easy,” says Deepika, who had to train around unpredictable schedules, fatigue, and days with limited or no access to the pools. “There were days when motivation was low, recovery was poor, or the logistics simply didn’t work out,” she admits.
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But her hard work, despite the challenges, finally did pay off. On May 1, Deepika, with three others—Bengaluru-based IRAS officer Shreyas Hosur; fitness evangelist, former model and actor Milind Soman; and Tanvi Deore, the founder and a director of Viveda Wellness Village in Nashik— completed the 16-odd-kilometre-long swim across the strait, in tandem, swimming from Tarifa in Spain to the coast of Morocco in about four-and-a-half hours. “The Gibraltar Strait swim felt surreal, being in the middle of open pristine waters between two continents, surrounded only by waves, boats, and the horizon,” says Deepika. “Many difficult things we imagine are actually possible if we stay with them long enough and keep moving forward, no matter the pace,” she says about her biggest takeaway from the experience.
Fitness evangelist, former model and actor Milind Soman was one of the four participants
| Photo Credit:
R Ravindran
Srikaanth, a prolific long-distance and open-water swimmer who has completed the 20 Bridges Swim around Manhattan Island in New York City, the Catalina Channel, the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar and the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, explains what makes this particular swim so complicated.
“You are in a place with a lot of current, wind and fog, so the line of sight becomes very important. It is also one of the busiest shipping lanes, and that can really disrupt your swim,” says the founder of Dreams to Live, a Bengaluru-based academy offering a variety of services including motivational talks for corporates, 1-1 life coaching, facilitating crowdfunding, and mental resilience training.
The Strait of Gibraltar swim is one of the Oceans Seven, a term coined by Steven Munatones in 2008 to refer to a bunch of historically iconic ocean channel swims, the aquatic equivalent of mountaineering’s seven summits.
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While he had informally been supporting swimmers who aspired to swim across various channels, Srikaanth says this is the first swim he has coached since the academy’s formation. “This particular idea came last year when some of the students whom I had been coaching and supporting on their Oceans Seven journey asked if I could coordinate this.” .
Srikaanth Viswanathan
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
According to him, most channel swims involve one boat and one swimmer, but this is the only one in which four swimmers were allowed per escort boat. ‘This means that four swimmers have to swim side-by-side, sharing a similar pace, throughout the entire 16-km-long journey, which makes it a very difficult swim. While matching speeds for 100 or 200 meters is possible, 16 kilometres is a lot since people have different endurance capacities,” says Srikaanth, who had to take this into account while putting together a team. “I need people who would be able to cohesively swim together.”
The final team chosen, whose members shared a similar pace and endurance, trained on their own, guided virtually by Srikaanth, for several months before training together. “I planned for them to come at least 10 days before the swim window. We trained together twice a day, in Tarifa, gradually building cold-water endurance and also learning how to swim in a formation.”
The actual day of the swim, he remembers, was a beautiful one, “nice and sunny, with perfect conditions. We were lucky,” he says. The team stuck together, taking feeding breaks every half an hour, often encountering interesting marine life on the way. “We had dolphins, turtles, and pilot whales to give us company,” says Srikaanth, who especially loves this aspect of open water swimming.
“You are connected, at a very raw level, with nature and transported to a different world,” he says, pointing out that, unlike in a swimming pool, a finite, controlled, safe space, open waters are “completely wild. You have no control over what marine life is lurking beneath you; your visibility is variable; you can’t see the land, only an endless horizon.”
Srikaanth believes that once you overcome the initial discomfort and fear of the unknown, you begin enjoying it. “People often hesitate to get into the open waters, but once they do, they fall in love with it. There is an enormous amount of adventure and satisfaction that you get,” he says, a view also shared by Tanvi, part of this four-member team.
As a child, Tanvi dreamed of swimming across the English Channel, “but life happened…education, business, marriage, children… 18 years just passed by like that. But some dreams just don’t fade away.”
Open water swimming comes with its challenges, but it is truly worth it, believe its proponents
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
So, at the age of 32, she decided to revive this dream, signing up for the English Channel swim, training with Srikaanth for nearly two years before finally embarking on the adventure. “I couldn’t swim for even 15 minutes at first, but by the end of that, I managed to do 17 hours,” says Tanvi, who realised that she didn’t want to just stop at the English Channel, another of the Seven Oceans, and so signed up for the Gibraltar swim. ‘The challenge for this swim was the speed, since I needed to match the pace of the other swimmers, and they were quite fast.”
Despite these challenges, she managed to keep up with the others and enjoyed their company. “It was beautiful to swim with these people because open water swimming is a lonely sport. As a group, we bonded well with each other and had a great time,” says Tanvi, who has already set her sights on the next Oceans Seven Challenge, the North Channel, between Ireland and Scotland. “They say that it is tougher than the English Channel, so I have started training for it.”
