The boat is eerily quiet.
When I first step onto the ferry at about four-thirty in the morning, it is still twilight and the boat is almost empty. I am one of the first athletes aboard, and I remember looking around, trying to decide where I should sit while I wait. There isn’t much to see yet.
By the time we get underway, the early light has come up and the ferry is packed with nearly two thousand athletes, most of us sealed in black neoprene. I can clearly see that we are moving away from the city. Around me, people are making adjustments and preparing for what is coming, all of us pretending this is normal.
It doesn’t feel normal.
There’s no pumping music or pep talk. Just the hum of the engines and fragments of conversation that fade almost as soon as they begin.
People ask where someone is from, whether this is their first Alcatraz, and how they trained. I talk with several athletes, especially those around my age, comparing our preparation in brief, subdued conversations.
Some people sit with their heads down. Others look through the windows or move out onto the deck. A few keep adjusting goggles, caps, and timing chips—anything that gives their hands something to do.
We all know what is coming.
Soon the ferry will stop near Alcatraz. The doors will open, and we will begin jumping into San Francisco Bay.
The water is fifty-five degrees.
The swim is roughly a mile and a half, although the current gets a vote. Aim too far in one direction, and you swim farther than necessary. Aim too far in the other, and the outgoing current may carry you past the exit. There is no line painted on the bottom and no friendly row of lane markers leading to shore.
Just cold water, chop, current, several thousand swinging arms, and a handful of buildings onshore that we have been told to use as landmarks.
I’m sixty-five years old.
Under the wetsuit, just below my left collarbone, is a pacemaker.
I didn’t set out to become an inspiration. I wasn’t standing on a mountaintop thinking, You know what the world really needs? My story.
If you had met me a few years earlier, you probably would not have predicted this morning. You might have seen the grey hair and the extra weight. You might have noticed that I became winded more easily than a former athlete should. You might have heard me talk about the sports I once played or the marathons I once ran and quietly placed me in the category reserved for people whose best physical years are behind them.
I might have placed myself there too.
That was the danger.
My entire life, I had known myself through movement and competition. I was the kid who grew up in locker rooms, the quarterback who wanted the ball in his hands, the runner who once believed a Boston qualifying time might be within reach.
Then life did what life does. Work became demanding. My children’s schedules replaced my own. Fitness faded slowly enough that I could explain it away.
I was getting older. Of course running felt harder. Of course I was slower. Of course I was more tired.
That explanation worked until it didn’t.
Somewhere between the athlete I remembered, and the older man people had begun to see, a gap opened. From the outside, it might have looked as though I had already lived the important chapters: athlete, husband, father, businessman. A good run. Nothing to complain about.
From the inside, it didn’t feel finished.
I still wanted to compete. I still wanted to build things. I still wanted to find out what I could do when the outcome wasn’t guaranteed.
But wanting those things and having the body to support them were no longer the same thing.
The pacemaker beneath the wetsuit is proof of that.
I don’t think about it constantly anymore. Most days, it is simply there, quietly doing its job. But on this ferry, heading toward cold, open water, I’m very aware of it.
I’m aware of the scar and the wiring threaded into my heart. I’m also aware that my body has limits the younger version of me never had to consider—and that I chose to be here anyway.
Not because age doesn’t matter. It does.
Not because the pacemaker somehow made me indestructible. It didn’t.
And not because I was trying to prove that sixty-five is the new thirty. That always sounds ridiculous to me. Sixty-five is sixty-five. Recovery takes longer. Injuries carry consequences. Your body sends warnings and ignoring them is no longer toughness. It’s stupidity.
But respecting reality is not the same thing as surrendering to it.
That distinction is part of what brought me onto this boat.
The ferry continues across the bay. The cabin grows quieter still as people pull their goggles into position and adjust their caps one last time. The nervous energy around me narrows into something more focused.
We are getting close.
Somewhere outside is a prison island famous because people were not supposed to escape from it.
I am moving toward it voluntarily.
That irony isn’t lost on me.
The race is called Escape from Alcatraz, but getting onto this ferry had already required me to change the direction my life was taking.
A few years earlier, I had wanted to feel like an athlete again. I hadn’t imagined the doctors, the hardware, the mistakes—or that my first attempt would end before I ever reached the starting line.
The athlete I had been and the older man I was becoming no longer seemed to fit together. I had reached a point where something had to change.
The ferry slows, people begin standing, and the doors will open soon.
To understand why a sixty-five-year-old man with a pacemaker is waiting to jump into San Francisco Bay, you have to go back to the first identity I ever understood.
The athlete I used to be.
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