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Channeling his energies
By Hal Brown

   Halfway across Long Island Sound in 1996, on his first marathon swim ever, Dave Parcells told his crew he was going to swim the English Channel. This August he did.
    Not bad for a guy who says he was a diver in his teen years because he was the worst swimmer on his West Haven High School team.
    Of course Parcells has stepped out since those high school days. He competed in triathlons through the 80s, including the Iron Man Triathlon in Hawaii. The triathlon schedule was cut when Parcells became a family man a couple of years ago. After his sixth knee operation, his doctor told him he shouldn't run anymore, either.
    That left the water, which Parcells said was always his best leg of the triathlon anyway.
    After deciding he wanted to swim across Long Island Sound, Parcells had to talk the St. Vincent's Foundation Board of Directors, who sponsor the annual Swim Across the Sound as a fundraiser into letting him compete. Until then the race had been for professionals only.
   "I said no, no, no, you don't understand I want to swim from Long Island to Connecticut. I said, 'Hey isn't this a fundraiser?' They said sure. I said 'How many of your professional athletes raise money?' They said none. I said 'What if I told you I could raise $15,000?' They said, "Let's come out and talk to you."
He got in, finishing 19th in a field of 21-and made the mid-swim decision to tackle the Channel, what some people call 'the Everest of swimming." At the end of the year he was invited to join the St. Vincent's Foundation board.
   Parcells said he's proud of besting the Channel, but also of the $40,000 he raised for St. Vincent's. In the last four years the event has raised $1.7 million for the hospital. It goes to 331 programs, ranging from mammography and prostate cancer screenings, teen smoking cessation classes and bone marrow screenings to cancer support groups and medicines, as well as other cancer education.
Finding that he "was actually pretty good" at long distance swimming after swimming the Sound ,Parcells started training in earnest for the Channel.
    "When I was training hard I was swimming six days a week. I swam with a group at Yale; we were doing three miles in the pool each morning before work. On the weekends I would swim long."
   "Long" is anywhere from two hours in the pool at the beginning, increasing to six hours as Spring began to slip away. In the middle of May he took his first chilly dip in the open waters of the Sound, a 53-degree plunge that lasted half an hour. He gradually lengthened his time in the water as weeks passed, acclimating to the cold.
   "Once you get in the high 50s it's bearable," he said. "53 is unbearable." Later he made a six-hour swim in 60-degree water, required to qualify for the Channel crossing. He competed in a 24-mile race in Tampa Bay, and swam around Manhattan Island as his preparations proceeded.
August 21 at 3:06 p.m. he entered the 63-degree water near Dover, England, wearing his bathing suit, a latex bathing cap and a little Vaseline to prevent chafing, for what would be a 30-mile swim. The English Channel between Dover and Cap Gris-Nez, France is a little over 21 miles, but tides surging in and out of the channel lengthen the swim.
     Whipped by 20-knot winds, "the water was very rough, three to six foot swells," he said.
"The first four hours I wanted to quit a lot because that was when it was roughest," he said. "I was getting tossed around a lot and I was swallowing tons of water, waves crashing over my head, but I kept plugging along."
   Three hours into the swim Parcells got the scare of the day.
   "I happened to look in front of me for some reason," he said. "There was this huge tanker, 50, 60 feet above the water. I stopped and [the boat crew] yelled 'Keep swimming. Keep swimming.' It wasn't more than 100 yards ahead of me."
   After dark the wind dropped a bit and the waves settled somewhat but remained in the three-foot range. Parcells said his attitude took a turn for the better.
   "Suddenly I was determined and knew at that time that no matter how harsh the conditions became I was going to finish," he wrote in an article on the "doversolo.com" website, put up by Marcia Cleveland of Greenwich, who swam the Channel in 1994.
   Aside from the tanker, and lights on some of the 500 ships that transit the Channel each day, Parcells said he didn't see very much around him.
   "Being a head above the water you really can't see much if you have a three-foot swell in front of you," he said. "The boat was like 15 feet to the right of me all the way and they had lights on the boat. I just tried to stay a certain distance away and let them guide me."
   Staying near the boat isn't always as easy as it seems. As with anything repetitive, Parcells said, "you get bored. If I started thinking about the Yankees or something ...your stroke begins to fall apart, you drift off, so you really have to concentrate on the next stroke, how far away the boat is, how well you're breathing, your breathing pattern. You really have to think about it the whole way. People always say 'What did you think about?' I thought about this arm going in front of this arm."
   Swimming along at a steady 60 strokes a minute, Parcells pulled up on the French shore near Cap Blanc at 3:15 a.m. August 22, a 12 hour, nine minute crossing.
   "The last 2,000 meters seemed like it took forever," Parcells said in the website article. "Mike (Oram, the British boat pilot) stopped the boat 150 yards from the beach and pointed his spotlight on shore and said, 'Go for it, lad.' When my hand touched the sandy bottom I had this tremendous feeling of joy and exhilaration. I stood up, fell and got up again, ran to the rocky beach and thrust my arms up in the air. No lights, no cameras, no welcome committee, just me on the French shoreline. It was exactly what I wanted."
Parcells said he bent over and picked up some rocks to take back to his kids.
   "I could feel how light-headed I was from the exhaustive effort I just put out. ... After a minute or so I hopped back in the surf and swam back to the boat."
   The boat took off again at 3:30. French regulations require swimmers to depart back to their boats within 10 minutes of finishing their swim.
   On the way back, Parcells said the official observer from the Channel Swimming Association, aboard the boat to certify the swim, said Parcells' was "the hardest swim he ever saw."
   "He said people get conditions like I had for two or three hours, or an hour, but I had them for 12. He said the fact I made it is miraculous, not to mention doing it in 12 hours."
   Ironically, as the sun came up on the return trip, the wind died and the Channel "looked like a lake," Parcells said.
   The crossing puts Parcells in elite company, there have been about 850 successful crossings by 600-plus swimmers-and approximately 6,000 attempts. Cleveland, on her website, notes that more people have been in outer space than have swum the Channel.
   Parcells said he doesn't know what he'll do next, but it won't be the Channel.
   "I'm thinking about it," he said. "I mean, I've done the ultimate open water swim, so I don't see a need to go out and do it again. I think there's other things I'd rather do."

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