SWIM IN OPEN WATER

When your pool has no ends, you have greater freedom but need a different kind of discipline.

BY MARTY MUNSON

RYAN UTSUMI, 41, had been drenched in the turquoise blue and calm of southern California pools since he started swimming competitively at age five. “But in 2001, after 15 years of chlorine and coaches on the pool deck, I was done with all that,” he says. What the investment-management professional didn’t know was that he wasn’t done with swimming. Ten years later, a move to San Francisco gave him access to the bay, “and I started picking up swimming as a way to get active again.” Free of sets and clocks—“all the things I was done doing,” he says—“I felt freer to swim wherever I wanted to, for however long I wanted to.” Utsumi loved what San Francisco Bay served up: cold water, challenging chop, and “no two days that are ever…

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Men's Health (Digital) - 1 Issue, Jul/Aug 2020

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