The Morning Swim Show, August 25, 2011: Jamie Patrick Relives Experience of Swimming Down Sacramento River

PHOENIX, Arizona, August 25. JUST a few days after swimming 111 miles down the Sacramento River, Jamie Patrick joins today's edition of The Morning Swim Show.

Patrick talks about the interesting animals that accompanied him, his nutrition during the swim and what adventure possibly lies ahead. Watch the full show in the video player below and visit SwimmingWorld.TV for more video interviews.

Special Thanks to Finis for sponsoring the Morning Swim Show's interview segments in the Finis Monitor. Visit Finis to learn more about their innovative products for aquatic athletes.

Show Transcript: (Note: This is an automated service where some typos and grammatical errors may occur.)

Peter Busch: This is the Morning Swim Show for Thursday, August 25th 2011. I'm your host, Peter Busch. In the FINIS monitor today we'll talk to Jamie Patrick. The extreme open water swimmer just swam 111 miles non-stop down the Sacramento River. Jamie joins us right now in the FINIS monitor from San Francisco. Hey Jamie, welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

Jamie Patrick: Hey, good. Thanks for having me – I appreciate it.

Peter Busch: One hundred eleven miles – that's it man?

Jamie Patrick: Yeah, that's it. I tell you I don't think I could have gone 112, though.

Peter Busch: How are you feeling after that?

Jamie Patrick: You know what? I'm feeling pretty good. I'm still achy all over. But internally my nutrition was pretty rock solid – the swim went pretty well. It took me just over 31 hours to finish and all things went pretty well.

Peter Busch: Is there a current helping you out there?

Jamie Patrick: There is a current. The current averaged between a half a knot and a knot-and-a-half. This river is not one with white water and rapids; it's fairly wide and slow-moving.

Peter Busch: So it did help you a little bit though along the way?

Jamie Patrick: Absolutely.

Peter Busch: What's a crazy thing you see in 111-mile swim down the river?

Jamie Patrick: Well we did actually see quite a few crazy things. During the night time we experienced well over a hundred river otters and they didn't quite understand what we were doing in their environment and they came up to us and snorted and sniffed and slapped their tails but we managed to get through.

Peter Busch: Please tell me you've got good pictures of that stuff.

Jamie Patrick: We do. We have more pictures and video that it was quite comical, a little scary at the beginning actually, but one of my crew members who's a big guy screamed like a little girl the first time it happened.

Peter Busch: All right, on a more serious note – last time when we spoke to you, you had just done a double crossing of Lake Tahoe and you had a little bit of a medical scare because – correct me if I'm wrong – you didn't have enough protein in your system?

Jamie Patrick: Yeah, that's correct. On my Tahoe, double Tahoe swim, which is a 44-mile swim, I didn't plan out my nutrition properly and developed some kidney problems, lack of protein, my body started breaking down my muscle fibers and clogging my kidneys and I ended up in the hospital for three days. For this swim I worked with Stacey Sims, which is Lance Armstrong's nutritionist, and we developed a plan that really ultimately made the swim successful. I avoided all processed foods and processed drinks and it's a lot of mostly solid foods throughout the swim. The other thing I did is I boost my calorie intake up from about 400 calories an hour to about 550 which worked fantastic.

Peter Busch: So you're just swimming along, you see a salmon swimming by, grab it, take a chunk out, keep swimming.J

amie Patrick: I actually did see one salmon.

Peter Busch: All the protein you need right there, man.

Jamie Patrick: That's right, that's all I need, a little sushi.

Peter Busch: But you had to do the swim with a wetsuit, right, and not necessarily because of the water temperature?

Jamie Patrick: That's correct. The water temperature was between 58 and 64 so the water temperature was bearable without a wetsuit. Exposure to runoff and exposure to the sun was really the main reason why I elected to wear a suit. The Sacramento River feeds most of the farmland in the valley there and they use pesticides and fertilizers and it runs right back into the river so it was more of a skin protection than anything else.

Peter Busch: Now this summer you had originally planned to swim from North Africa to Italy, correct? But you had to scrap that, obviously not a good summer to be anywhere near North Africa.

Jamie Patrick: No, what started off in Tunisia – we were going to start the swim at Tunisia and then there was some unrest in Tunisia and it kind of scrapped the planning on that. At some point I would like to go back and do that swim from Tunisia to Sicily. It's an 88-mile open water swim, open ocean swim. I really would love to go back and do that. I'm not sure that's going to happen next year because of what's going on but who knows? I'm in the thinking process right now of what my next adventure will be.

Peter Busch: After this Sacramento River swim do you have any doubt that you could pull off that Mediterranean swim?

Jamie Patrick: If I can dial in my nutrition like I did on this swim, yeah. There's been very few people that have swam over 30 hours and this swim was 31 hours and I truly believe that with the right nutrition, the right mental set, the right training that I could have gotten another 10 or 15 hours.

Peter Busch: Wow! You're pushing the boundaries, man. It's fun to watch.

Jamie Patrick: Yeah, it is fun. I've got an amazing crew. To do these kind of marathon swims you've got to have a proper crew that really knows who you are and knows about marathon swimming, can handle problems without you even knowing about it. You can't just jump in the water and start swimming and expect to finish these things without the proper crew.

Peter Busch: Well stay safe, Jaime. Thanks for joining us.

Jamie Patrick: I appreciate it, thank you.

Peter Busch: All right, that's Jamie Patrick joining us in the FINIS monitor. And that is it for today's show. I'm Peter Busch reminding you to keep your head down at the finish.

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