Gabi Rojas’ Swim Story
Hello, hello from rainy Southern Oregon where winter is well on it’s way. We’ve got blizzard conditions in the mountains today and rain, rain, rain down in the valley where we live. Of course, as open water swimmers we welcome the rain and snow as our local reservoir is currently extremely low. In our fire prone region, rain and snowpack are great.
Not that you tuned in for a weather report, but that’s pretty much what’s going on in my world.
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The first thing that today’s guest, Gabi Rojas tells me is, “I’m not a swimmer.”
Yet when we connected earlier this year, she had just returned to Valencia, Spain after successfully completing all 4 lakes at the SCAR swim challenge in Arizona.
I absolutely love Gabi’s story, I hope you do to.
Recently Valencia and other parts of Southern Spain experienced catastrophic flooding. Please hold Gabi and her community in your hearts as they recover from this devastation.
In her own words:
I’m a trained philologist. I carried out research on textual analysis ranging from ancient Greek tragedy to late medieval state documents on Albania and received a PhD. I was on an academic path, until I wasn’t. I now help run Tiny Global Productions, an indie record label.
I’ve been swimming since I was a little girl, both semi-competitively and recreationally. The city where I grew up is located on a high plateau in the Andes, and open water swimming was unheard of – being at altitude, it was too cold, with too little oxygen! But even back then I’d jump into any body of water I encountered, no matter how big or small, deep or shallow. I’m like this even now. When it comes to water, my sense of self-preservation has increased, but not by much.
I get no satisfaction from competition or metrics and instead look at swimming as a learning experience, not unlike the unraveling of a complex text. Swimming is also an opportunity for hardship. I’m extremely lucky to live in a safe, comfortable environment but comfort rarely, if ever, leads to the betterment of oneself. In Aeschylus’ words: Πάθει μάθος [páthei máthos].
