On Saturday 28 November 2015, the 37th Solstice Festival cold-water swimming competition took place at Bolevecký Pond in Pilsen. It also always includes the club competition for the Pilsen Mayor’s Cup. This is a challenge trophy: any club winning it three years in a row keeps it permanently. I. PKO Praha swimmers had won it in each of the preceding three seasons, so it became ours for good and now has a permanent home in our clubhouse.
Last year we won the replacement trophy for the first time too. It is a beautiful, enormous cup — a real whopper, I would say, big enough to fill your arms. We brought it back to Pilsen, hoping to win it again and eventually keep it permanently after a third victory.
Even beforehand, there was reason to think we could do it again this year. I have been an I. PKO member since November 2007, and from the start I have understood that the autumn Pilsen event is something of a club duty. “Anyone in PKO with healthy arms and legs naturally goes to Bolevák in the autumn.” The cup is decided by points for the distance swum: the farther you swim, the more points you earn for your club. Fortunately, speed does not matter. That is good news: even swimmers as slow as me can contribute valuable points.
So this year we arrived in force, 36 of us, and full of determination. Of course we wanted to take the trophy back to Prague again, and we brought plenty of strong swimmers. We travelled in five cars and also in smaller groups or individually, as people could. I was assigned to chairman Tomáš Prokop’s car. There were seven of us, including English Channel swimmer Richard Haan and Strait of Gibraltar swimmer Lucie Leišová.
The competitive atmosphere was already building on the drive to Pilsen. Chairman Tomáš was almost constantly on the phone to the organisers and the other “crew leaders”. We checked the current water temperature and planned how best to enter our swimmers: as many people as possible over the longest possible distances, naturally taking account of the cold-water grades they had earned and what those allowed them to swim. Once it was certain that Bolevák was only 3.5°C, the mood in the car split in two. Tomáš and the other strong swimmers decided to use the 3.5°C water to earn higher grades — some even the master grade — by swimming farther than originally planned. With that, the prospect of winning the challenge trophy grew clearer by the minute.
Those of us who are not superstars and had not yet swum in water below 7°C this season were a little alarmed by 3.5°C and looked forward to having it behind us. Personally, I was glad I was allowed to swim “only” 250 metres. I know myself: I would certainly have let myself be talked into playing the hero again and earning as many club points as possible. If I could, I would have entered 500 metres, suffered all the way and sworn, once again, never to do it again! NEVER to get into icy water again in my life.
The competition was well organised, and we swimmers lined up exactly as we should. And we swam exactly as we should too: the challenge trophy was ours again this year — the swimmers of I. plavecký klub otužilců Praha.
We took home the first-place cup of the three awarded, and hope that our club will keep the large trophy again.
Finally, a few entirely personal impressions:
Thirty-nine swimmers had entered the 250 metres, so we had to be split into two heats. By the second heat, in which I swam, the wind that had made huge waves on Bolevák at the start of the competition had dropped. But the sheer number of enthusiastic swimmers made waves almost as large. I am not fast and was not near the front, so I was swimming through heavy chop. As a result, I felt almost as if I were drowning all the way to the turning buoy. Once I rounded it and headed for the finish, a wonderful world opened beneath me, probably because the angle of the sunlight had changed. From that moment I felt like a little fish in an aquarium, swimming above the water plants. It was so extraordinary, so beautiful… Suddenly I swam effortlessly and felt like a fish. Unfortunately, it made no difference to my speed: once again I was almost last. But it was a powerful experience, and I am looking forward to next year.
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