Reflecting on a Mighty Mac Swim

By Matt Soderquist

Sun contributor

As read at the Leelanau Clean Water and Here:Say storytelling event “Bubbling Up” on Aug. 4 at the Lively NeighborFood Market.

I’d been in the water for five hours before I began to hallucinate. It was subtle at first. Kind of like at Thanksgiving dinner when you eat too much, sit on the couch and start to go into that dream state where you can kind-of still hear everyone’s voices around you, but you’re also probably drooling.

It was Labor Day, and while 40,000 people walked across the Mackinaw Bridge, 80 of us were swimming underneath it.

The event was called the Mighty Mac Swim, a 4.5-mile charity open water swim across the straits of Mackinac from St. Ignace to Mackinaw City to raise money for Habitat for Humanity.

I’ve loved the water since I was a kid. My dad pulled the classic move when I asked him if he would teach me how to swim by throwing me into the deep end. I swam competitively in middle and high school. I dabbled in sprint triathlons and short open water swims as an adult.

Swimming became a favorite activity with my family and my children. So, when I heard about the Mighty Mac Swim I thought, what better way to show my 7, 8, and 10-year-olds what their old man is made of!

My son, the oldest, thought it sounded great. My middle daughter, always the peacekeeper, was excited without question. But my youngest daughter, Violet. Well, she just tells it like it is. She says, “A 4.5-mile swim? It seems kind of out of reach. I don’t think you can make it, Dad.”

I have read a lot of motivational books. But I can tell you there is nothing more motivating than your 7-year-old daughter saying that you cannot do something.

Over the winter, we swam every weekend at the community pool. I swam laps before work in the morning; somedays I would go on my lunch break. I’d shut down the pool in the evenings. I constantly smelled like chlorine.

In the spring, I set a goal to swim across 100 lakes. The kids and I would map out a handful to swim that day. They would play on the shore while I swam across and back. We’d get lost trying to find no-name lakes down dirt roads, and they’d laugh when I’d come out of the water covered in mud and leeches.

They played on the beach at Sleeping Bear Dunes. They cheered me on at the break wall as I swam across Little Traverse Bay from Harbor Springs to Petoskey. We swam in the sunshine and in the downpouring rain. By the end of the summer, my car was so filled with sand that you couldn’t see the carpet anymore.

On Labor Day we estimated our finish time would be about 3 ½ hours. By the time we reached the first tower, we knew we had grossly underestimated because of the wind, the waves, and the cold water.

At one point shortly after starting, I could see the bottom and I realized that we were not making any progress. The current was pushing us backward. For almost half an hour, we had to swim double time to get through the strong current.

In the middle of the bridge, we were battling 4-foot white caps. It was like being in a never-ending pillow fight with your hands tied behind your back.

Swimmers were dropping left and right, having only trained for what they expected to be a three-hour swim.

I didn’t know if I was going to make it, but I knew I wasn’t going to quit. At 4.5 hours, our group of swimmers decided to make a dash for the finish.

We had been resting every 30 minutes to refuel and rehydrate, but every minute that we stopped the current pushed us farther and farther away.

We calculated that if we didn’t stop, we should be able to finish in about an hour. Our once tight group of swimmers went entirely rogue. I lost track of them. In between the swells I’d see an occasional head up in front of me and a couple swimmers behind me.

I just put my face into the water and swam. I was completely exhausted. I was stripped down emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Staring into the abyss, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had taken a breath. Even lifting my head out of the water to required too much energy that I didn’t have.

Typically, I breathed on every third stroke so I thought I should start counting how many strokes I took between breaths. When I got to ten, I realized I should probably lift my head out of the water.

But I wasn’t panicked. Strangely, I was very calm. I’ve often dreamed that I could breathe underwater. And it felt like I was in a dream. Instead of swimming, it was like I was flying and moving through the water with ease.

My senses became heightened, and I could smell all these schools of fish around me. Under my own duress, I’d moved through this survival mode, and my muscles, and my fuel, were just completely exhausted. Now I’m burning my brain cells, and I have tunnel vision. I’m in this flow state and completely unstoppable.

I’d become part animal, or rather tapped back into the animal that is in all of us. I was overcome with this deep connection to this vast body of water. I had pushed and pulled and prodded and been swallowed whole, becoming part of nature, not something separate from it.

Then I saw it. It was the bottom of the lake. I lifted my head and was only 200 yards off shore. I was still mostly human, with a job, email and kids. Three kids who were on the shore, who had been waiting for six hours and 7.6 miles since I had started.

As I hugged my kids, I realized that this whole adventure wasn’t about me trying to prove that their dad was some kind of superhero. But rather this entire journey, the hours in the pool, the hundreds of lakes we swam together, was about cultivating a deeper connection with each other.

Only about half of the 81 swimmers who started ended up making the shore in Mackinaw City, but combined we had raised over a quarter of a million dollars for Habitat for Humanity.

A few years later, they held another Mighty Mac Swim. I asked my now 10-year-old daughter Violet if she thought her old man could finish it again? She looked at me and took a really deep breath. “I don’t know dad. That’s a really long swim.”

So, this time I finished in 2 ½ hours.