Despite the seeming disadvantages of living 800 miles from the nearest ocean, Denver’s Craig Lenning became the 38th person to complete the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming last month when he swam the English Channel.
The Triple Crown odyssey began in August 2009, when he swam 21 miles from Catalina Island to Point Vicente near Long Beach, Calif., and suffered several punctures in a toe when he stepped on a sea urchin at the end of the swim. It took him a little more than nine hours to make the crossing, most of it in the dark.
“I told the observers in the boat, ‘This is my second time in the ocean,’ and they were a little worried about me,” Lenning said. “But it wasn’t too bad.”
In June, he completed the Manhattan Island Marathon swim, 28.5 miles counterclockwise around the Big Apple via the East, Harlem and Hudson rivers. That one took 8 hours, 24 minutes, 28 seconds.
“I got stung twice in the face,” Lenning said, “so there is life in the East River.”
And on Aug. 3, Lenning became one of five swimmers to complete the Triple Crown in less than a year, crossing the 21 miles from Shakespeare Beach at Dover, England, to Cap Gris Nez, France, in 11 hours, 25 minutes.
“A French gentleman walked up with his three kids and he was like, ‘Bonjour?’ When he said that, I was like, ‘I’m in France, this is awesome!’ He was like, ‘You swim?’ I explained, ‘Yeah, I swam from Dover.’ Then he actually asked me if I wanted to go back to his town for some biscuits and water.”
Lenning does most of his training in a gravel pond at Chatfield State Park. He practices night swimming at Green Mountain Reservoir in the high country between Silverthorne and Kremmling.
“You do some night swims to get used to it, because the first time you do a night swim, it’s just weird,” Lenning said. “Everything is black and dark and you can’t see, so you’ve got to get all your monsters out. You need to get comfortable with it.”
He’ll also swim in pools but prefers being outside for hours on end in water most of us would consider insanely cold.
“I just enjoy it,” said Lenning, 31, who writes software for a living. “It’s real enjoyable, just to be outside, nice cool water. I’ve got a lot of friends who are ultra-runners, and they say the same thing: Once you get in that groove, it’s not hard anymore. You just stretch out and you go and just enjoy it.”
Lenning was a club swimmer growing up in Alabama. He attended the University of Colorado and soon got into mountaineering, but three years ago he broke his leg in a fall on James Peak.
He couldn’t run or walk, so he decided to swim for fitness with the cast still on the broken leg. He would use a fan to dry it out between sessions.
Soon he was into swimming in a big way, and when a friend told him about the Catalina swim, Lenning went for it. The crossing started around midnight.
“Once you get out there, it’s you and a boat and a light shining on you,” Lenning said. “And you just swim, follow the boat.”
Lenning was hooked. In April, he won the Tampa Bay Marathon swim (24 miles) in 10 hours, 17 minutes. The water was too warm for his taste — 70-75 degrees — and his muscles cramped.
The water in the English Channel was 62 degrees in a crossing that started around 4 a.m.
“In the middle of the swims, no matter if I’m hurting, feeling good, I always want to stop, take it in and enjoy it,” Lenning said. “When you’re in the middle of the English Channel, it’s easy to put a smile on your face. You’re like, ‘I’m in the middle of the English Channel right now. Not many people can say that. I’m here floating around in the middle of a shipping lane.’ “
Lenning typically swims three times a week at Chatfield for 2 1/2 hours or so. Even in such a solitary sport, he has the camaraderie of a half-dozen other open-water swimmers who train there, plus other swimmers training for triathlons. The open-water swimmers are always first in, last out.
“It was kind of like ‘Endless Summer,’ ” Lenning said. “It was the first time I’d been around so many channel swimmers. We’d all show up at 4:30 (a.m.), right when it opened. It was like one of those movies. It was the perfect summer of swimming.”
