On Saturday, July 21, I had the opportunity to join five other UC Davis-affiliated women to swim the Trans Tahoe Relay.  The Trans Tahoe Relay serves as a fundraiser for Keep Tahoe Blue, but we also swam to support the  Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) and the Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS).  The day was sunny, the water was cool, clear, and refreshing, the mountains ringing the lake were beautiful.  It was an exhilarating, fun, tiring, and fulfilling day.

Just to give a sense of size of the lake and its surroundings, here I am with my guard poodles at a Lake Tahoe overlook in August 2014.

The Trans Tahoe Relay is a race that crosses the northern end of Lake Tahoe from east to west at a part of the lake where it is 10 miles wide.  (The lake overall is approximately 22 miles long and 12 miles wide – it’s a very large and deep lake!).  Teams are composed of six swimmers each, with a support boat.  (We owe big thanks to TERC for providing us with a boat and to TERC’s director, Geoff Schladow, for piloting the boat).  The rules are that each swimmer swims for 30 minutes, and then takes turn swimming 10 minutes each, until the 10 miles is completed.  On our team, after our first leg each of us did two 10-minute legs, with two members of the team doing a third 10-minute leg.  So, we didn’t break any speed records, but we were happy with our result anyway!

As was probably obvious from my earlier article, I’m pretty pro-swimming.  The science backs me up, with numerous documented health benefits from swimming, especially cardiovascular benefits but also muscular and psychological benefits.  It’s a sport that people often take up after they have been injured from some other sport, and it’s a true lifelong sport, with active participants into their 90s and beyond.

In light of that, with various proposals on the table for building new pools in Davis, you might think I am also pro-pool.  And generally speaking, I am – but I also recognize that any proposals for new pools must be weighed against other priorities, and those are complicated conversations.  So, what I’d like to do here is much more minimal, namely, to just point out the extent of the need for pools in Davis, because I think there has been some confusion as to how many “private” swim group workouts there are and whether those groups could make use of a high school pool.

When I first came to Davis for my job interview (the one that would result in my addition to the Philosophy Department at UCD), one of my future colleagues said, with a bit of a sarcastic snort, “Too bad Paul couldn’t be here.  He’s been telling all of the candidates about Davis’s masters swimming group.”  My head whipped around:  “Davis has a masters swimming group??”

A good masters swimming group is hard to find.