I am an open water swimmer and a white-water stand-up paddle (SUP) boarder.

The primary allure of open water swimming and whitewater paddling is my love of boundary-free water-in-motion and the outdoors. I started swimming competitively at the age of 7 in Chattanooga, Tenn., and 15 years later completed four years of Division I collegiate swimming at the University of Miami and James Madison University. In college (1996), I became a whitewater raft guide on the Ocoee River in Eastern Tennessee, the site of the 1996 Olympic whitewater events, and became an avid whitewater kayaker. It wasn’t until 2006, while performing my postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco, that I made the move from the pool to swimming in oceans, lakes, and rivers, in a sport called open water swimming. Open water swimming (and its lack of walls and flip turns) allowed me access to an uninterrupted stroke rhythm and breathing pattern so I could swim for hours on end. As a white-water paddler, I have internalized the basic principles of water-in-motion. Paddlers think in terms of currents, eddies and ferry angles, and these same principles apply in swimming in ocean currents. There’s nothing like hitching a ride swimming in a strong ebb or flood tide, or the feeling of swimming against the current, or swim ferrying across the current as in a kayak or on a SUP.

Last summer, I applied my paddling skills to the SUP board and became one of the first two people to stand-up paddle on the Ocoee River (Class IV) and Nantahala River (in North Carolina). This is a cutting edge extreme sport with very few souls who have attempted to surf through whitewater rapids standing up on a surf board. Since whitewater SUPing is such a new sport there is not any sport-specific equipment commercially available. Since a lot of safety gear is required, we (my husband Ben and I) are borrowing equipment from football, skate-boarding, snow-boarding, surfing and whitewater kayaking.