It’s 7:45 am on a Saturday and my alarm blares. I am up. My swim bag is already packed; I snap on my one-piece with crisscross back straps that leaves dark slashes of tan. Gulping water and toast, I pass a carrot to Tally – who wags her tail appreciatively but is deeply unimpressed her morning walk will be delayed – and head downstairs.
My ride is my neighbour R, a former life-saver hijabi. We are a well-oiled machine, carpooling for toll and petrol costs. In the quiet morning, Canterbury-Bankstown’s Palestinian flags on cars, manoush bakeries and bro-gyms give way to the skin-cancer clinics, juice bars and women in athleisure of Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
We arrive in Bondi 40 minutes later, zeroing in on the free parking spots closest to Sydney’s famous east coast beach.
Six years on from learning to finish a lap of a swimming pool, I have become one of the “serious” ocean swimmers I used to watch with awe.
Australia’s iconic beach culture used to feel off-limits to me, as a person of colour in a post-Cronulla riots world. But after years of building up my confidence and skills with women’s swim groups like Swim Sisters and Bondi Surf life-saving club volunteer trainers, coming in to last summer I began to feel as if I had shrugged off the outsider identity that had kept me from my city’s coastline.
I joined a community. I felt at ease going solo to Bondi; it had started to feel like a second home. Claiming the beach as my own place felt radical.
I set myself a new goal of distance swimming and begin with 1.5km every week with a new training group, filled with people who actually win races. I call them Aussie ocean Aunties, led by Zoe, an expert swimmer with decades of experience. “There’s swimmers and dippers, Sarah, and we’re swimmers,” Zoe declares matter-of-factly before one of our swims. I nod with superiority, looking at pity at the crowds splashing at the shore.
My first time doing distance at the start of summer at Bondi, I’m panicked. I’ve only been beyond the break a handful of times, and each foray under the waves and beyond them feels like a miracle. At the end of the swim, I’m gasping for breath, embarrassed to be the last straggler but buoyed up by the group cheers of “good job, Sarah!”.
Gradually, the weekly Bondi distance swims become routine. I’m still last and struggling to keep up, kept afloat by encouraging words from the swim Aunties. After swims, I’m pounding with endorphins. Catching a rip feels like a deception, flying through the water seemingly on your own speed. This must be what white privilege feels like, I joke.
“Pondi!” the group exhales, the cheerful moniker we give to Bondi when it is sweet and docile, rewarding us with shimmering clear, flat water to swim in. When the surf is rough and wild, my heart pounds as I scan the horizon and I need Zoe’s guidance to stay horizontal in the water and keep swimming through what seem like insurmountable, high-contraction waves.
I navigate bluebottles, see stingrays, learn how to swim in choppy sea and try to not stray too far behind as we calculate re-entry back, spying the shore in the distance.
The summer of swimming came in the wake of being made redundant and learning to navigate a more precarious freelance life, coupled with the existential stress of a milestone birthday. Beyond my personal challenges, global politics were upending every certainty, as well as the careers of so many I respect – everything felt precarious.
In a city of 100 beaches, I’m not sure why I’ve never explored more of Sydney’s glittering water belt coast. Lack of familiarity with Sydney suburbs where my face is unusual, plus the time and energy it takes to drive to new areas, had made exploring the city feel prohibitive. But this summer, I have nothing but time.
Friends and I create a spreadsheet of NSW beaches to visit and I mark them off my list.
For three months, I swim nearly every day in a pool or in the ocean. I venture for the first time beyond Bondi, Clovelly and Coogee; from expensive harbour beaches to the golf course-wrapped La Perouse and the bush-encased pools of the Blue Mountains. I swim through sparkling shoals of fish in Congwong, a pink and purple-hued sunset at Little Bay on New Year’s Day, and across Gordon’s Bay with a friend, where Canadian tourists marvel at our audacity – “You just jump in from the rocks?!”
We swim across the bay at Shark beach in Vaucluse after emerging from its spacious art deco-style bathrooms; mansions pour out into piers and private beaches overlooking Sydney harbour. I settle near rocks on Parsley beach, soak into Double Bay’s Redleaf pool and wonder how much it would cost to buy a house here.
Yacht owners watch us bobbing ocean swimmers, amused. As I sink into the water, grateful that I have free access to these clean, safe waterways, I remind myself: I belong here.
Through swimming, I find a way to my city, and back to myself. The brick on my chest lifts a little.
I feel my centre shifting, a spaciousness in my mind forming. I think of how Ramadan creates a psychological shift by focusing on the body, community and connection with something transcendent, and how swimming replicates that feeling for me. In the water, my nervous system settles; I float, stillness overtakes me and depression feels arrested. The more I swim, the greater the deluge of happy chemicals flooding my veins, pushing out the hopeless feelings and filling me with a sense of vitality.
I become a swimming evangelist. I corral my family to Penrith “beach”, a lake surrounded by rolling green hills, and my mother frolics with delight in her newly bought burkini as western Sydney temperatures soar. I take a recently arrived Gazan family for their first trip to Clovelly and see their eyes lighten, their bodies relax in the water.
I remember my previous self: scared, nervous, unsure, led forward by swimmers like B and R. Now confident and assured, I want to pass that confidence forward like a rope.
The day before my first ocean race, I do a test drive past the Harbour Bridge and highways, just to practise getting to the race’s endpoint. The Cole Classic boasts being the world’s largest ocean race and begins at the wave-less Shelley Beach, ending at Manly.
We arrive early on the February Sunday morning. Unlike trendy, Bondi, Manly is more well, manly, muscular and sporty. I am not a blonde, size 8, Home and Away beach babe – and here I was setting out on an ocean race, filled with Olympians and people who looked as if they lived here and had been swimming all their life.
I surprise myself with a time of 30 minutes, with several dozen swimmers behind me. Running through the blue finish blow-up, I feel elated.
Finishing my first ocean race feels like crossing more than a physical line.
I realise how rushed and hard I had been on myself in both my career and personal life, comparing myself with people whose starting line was so different from mine.
I felt proud of how far I had come: a western Sydney Muslim desi non-swimmer, living miles away from any water, I had found friends, aides, courage. I had worked hard to become part of a once-unfamiliar world that had no reflection of me. Ocean racing felt like a badge – of not only belonging to, but thriving in this city of water.
If I could do this, I could do possibly anything.
I feel a pressure release after the Cole Classic. A month later, I do the Bondi Bluewater 1km, a race I had for years tried and failed. I finish with ease on a clear Pondi day, at the back of pack. Focusing on how I feel – not how I look or the chatter in my mind – is liberating. Skin bronzed, I feel strong, radiant, alive. No longer an outsider, I lay resting on the sand, restored, happy and ravenous.
