Ranie Pearce, a teacher in the Special Education department and a well-known member of the Campo staff, has completed another amazing benchmark in her 17 years of swimming adventures.
While Pearce has students to think of at Campo, she believes swimming to be not a side hobby or job but a passion. “I swim six days a week, four days during the school week at the Campo pool at six in the morning, and then both weekend days in the ocean in San Francisco,” Pearce stated. “I love to set a goal and have something to train for.”
Pearce’s swim explorations have gone far on the global scale, and her recent Antarctica trip is a huge accomplishment. “I have swam on six continents so far: North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and now Antarctica. I swam in 49 of the 50 states, I swam the English Channel, around Manhattan, the Strait of Magellan, the length of Tahoe, the Cold Half in Hong Kong…”
Pearce’s extensive training to be able to swim in all sorts of temperatures and in all sorts of conditions often spans an average of nine to ten months. This training, while fun, Pearce put it, was nothing compared to her swim test in Antarctica, where the water was below 32 degrees Fahrenheit for a kilometer. “Your hands and feet turn into blocks with no feeling other than pain, and you just have to convince yourself that you are indeed swimming because you don’t get any normal feedback feelings or sensations like you do in warm water swimming,” Pearce said while describing her swim, in which it was snowing and the air temperature was approximately 30 degrees Fahrenheit. “It is a mental challenge as well as a very physical challenge.”
Pearce’s accomplishment, which she says was “1,330 meters in 24 minutes” was mainly due to the amount of hard work she put into spending time in ice baths and swimming extensively. “I definitely could have kept going given the opportunity,” Pearce added. “My swim, in the end, turned out to be ‘easy’ for me.”
Her motivation behind challenging herself and putting in the effort is, she says, something that can be applied to all students. “I wanted to be able to appreciate the magical place I was swimming in, and not be focused on the pain and suffering. There is no way to skip the hard work. You are going to suffer, you just have to decide when you want to suffer.” Her quick recovery from the Antarctic ice swimming, a total of fifteen minutes when it ordinarily would have been an hour, is another factor that she considers while encouraging students to never give up trying to achieve their goals.
The story of a swimmer who only began at the age of forty-five should truly be inspiring to the Campo community; Pearce’s hard work made her Antarctica swimming adventure of a milestone possible to check off another continent on her list of places to go and swim next. When asked about her future plans, Pearce responded, “I have several in mind. I want to swim from Sweden to Denmark which, if I am lucky, I could do this summer, and I still need to swim in Australia and or New Zealand to be done with my quest to swim on all seven continents.”
