Kira McFadden 10 December 2019 "What Open Water Swimming Taught Me About Resilience"
Bhakti Sharma, is a 29-year-old long distance swimmer from India who had what she thought to be a near fatal incident when she was two-years-old. She was riding on the back of a motorcycle with her mother on a hot summer afternoon. She did not know where they were going, but after 20 minutes she found herself engulfed in water. “Before I knew it, I would be kicking, splashing, screaming, gulping down water,” she says. “Holding on to my mom for dear life.” When she was two and a half she began learning how to pool swim. Years later, at the age of 13, Sharma began open-water swimming in the Indian Ocean. She swam from the Uran Port to the Gateway of India, a distance of about 16 kilometers. She remembers being thrown around by the waves, the inner-child in her enjoying it immensely. Next, at the age of 14, she swam from Dharamtar to the Gateway of India, which was an even bigger distance of 36 kilometers. Sharma explains how lonely open-water swimming can be. You are all alone, swimming in an open body of water that seems to be endless, she says. During swimming, you are unable to talk, hear, or see anything except for what is immediately around you. Sharma claims that this isolation that swimming gives her is the greatest gift of all. She says the biggest lesson swimming has taught her is that the one constant companion you have is yourself. Because of this, she makes the decisions every day to invest and believe in herself, even on days when she is feeling unmotivated. When she was 17-years-old, Sharma became the first Indian to race in a 21 kilometer marathon swim around Key West Island, Fla. Next, in 2008, Sharma completed her return journey with her mother, Leena, and her friend, Priyanka Gehlot. They were able to cover a distance of 72 kilometers. They swam in a relay together and Sharma says that, in that moment, all she wanted was to see her mother succeed. By the time she was 20-years-old, Sharma became the youngest swimmer and second individual to swim in four oceans. Five years later, she swam for 41.14 minutes in the freezing waters of the Antarctic. Her mind and body were prepared for the cold, but she was not prepared for how dense the water was. She describes it as trying to swim through oil and says in that moment she considered giving up. It was that day that she realized the fighter within herself, as she completed her swim and broke a world record for being the first and youngest Asian woman to do so. “When you spend so much time with a sport, it ceases to become just that,” Sharma says. “It becomes a mirror and shows who you really are.”
Source: Bhakti Sharma, Ted Talks India: Nayi Baat, "What Open Water Swimming Taught Me About Resilience"
Bhakti Sharma swimming in the Arctic, 2015. Photo courtesy of TheBetterIndia.com