Expect The Unexpected and predictable unpredictability are commonly understood concepts in open water swimming.

They are an understanding, appreciation, and a collective experience among open water swimmers that things will and can change before and during a swim. Whether it is the elements, the course, the competition, or your physical condition, these changes can create unplanned surprises and unexpected circumstances that requires swimmers, coaches, pilots, support crew, and officials to adapt and accommodate to the situation.

But in all our decades in the sport, we have yet to experience what happened yesterday in an AirBnB in Paris during our work at the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games. It was horrific and potentially deadly.

Early in the morning at 5:30 am before the sun rose, I heard the sound of a heavy rain. Then my immediate next thought was the sound was more like hail – not rain.

Then I realized that I was on the first floor of a multi-story building. It could not be hail, that sound would not be heard above me as I was on the first floor of a multi-story building. The sound of hail was right above me.

Then, terror struck. It is not rain. It is not hail. This must be an earthquake because the room was starting to creak. It was an eerie sound, a scary sound, an undeniable sound that I frequently heard growing up in Southern California and, later, living in Japan – two of the most seismically active locations in the world.

I was in the middle of an earthquake.

Instinct kicked in.

I immediately jumped out of bed and ran to the nearest door frame – as I was taught as a child in California.

“Move, move, move“, I thought. Only moments before I had been sound asleep in a comfortable bed – now the time was to get under the door frame, generally considered to be the strongest part of a home or apartment.

BAM! BANG!

Now, the next sound I heard was an explosion. Or it sounded and felt like I imagined an explosion would – because the ceiling came down on me. A massive earthquake did not sound like this. The building was literally falling all around me as I moved across the room, hard plaster ceiling material smashing on my head and shoulders.

In the moment, I thought I was going to die. I could not see anything, but kept moving forward. “Was this it? Is this how I am going to die?” It seemed to anticlimax and all too sudden.

These thoughts and actions occurred within 10 seconds – or less. Time seemed to slow during those 10 seconds, but my thought processes and reaction literally saved me from being crushed in bed. My pillow and the part of the bed where I had been only seconds before were now covered in hard horsehair plaster ceiling materials.

But it was not time to breathe easy. The sounds continued and the ceiling had additional cracks. It was time to move quickly and get out of there. Run to safety for what would come next?

Later, we ended up walking the streets of Paris for hours…out of shock and appreciation that God had saved us from a horrific passing.

Yes, wounds had to be cared for and blood needed to be cleaned up, but we were alive.

Later that day, we returned and gained an even greater appreciated of the disaster that we averted.

Photos show the bed and pillow and rest of the room where the ceiling collapsed.

The 4-5 cm thick wooden table by the bed was cracked half due to the falling debris, showing how hard the horsehair plaster ceiling material was:

Life goes on…expected or not, scary or not.

As did to Hugo Carrillo Brumbaugh, a Mexican film maker and open water swimmer from Puerto Vallarta who made a film, Y si fuertas tú. The film is about his first-person experiences while he was buried alive for 8 hours in a collapsed building in the aftermath of a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.

© 2024 Daily News of Open Water Swimming

“to educate, enthuse, and entertain all those who venture beyond the shoreline“

A World Open Water Swimming Federation project.