Summer Scene: "Cookie" learns to swim the hard way

Here’s how Stacey Cook learned how to swim … this summer: “Yeah, I finally ditched my life jacket,” she jokingly tells Ski Racing from her summer training grounds in Mammoth, California.
    For someone who grew up on Lake Tahoe, learning the art of swimming for her first triathlon was more difficult than she thought.
    “I am not a swimmer,” the brutally honest 24-year-old says. “I spent the summers up in Tahoe in the water, but I never swam past two docks.”
    Speed skiing, on the other hand, is her thing. Last season, she won the super G and downhill national championship titles and has already been an Olympian and World Championships competitor. Skiing fast has always been fun for the Cali native. Her most memorable little “Cookie” moment was skiing with her family at Northstar, where she decided to point it down a black diamond, explode (by accident) off a knoll and send it into the trees. “I guess my dad thought I was dead, but I thought it was the funniest thing,” Cook recalls.   
    In a way, swimming is her new “funniest” thing.
    “It’s really difficult,” says a laughing Cook. “As someone with skier legs and a skier butt, I did not float in the water. The first time in the pool, I couldn’t even swim across it.’”
HERE'S HOW Stacey Cook learned how to swim … this summer: “Yeah, I finally ditched my life jacket,” she jokingly tells Ski Racing from her summer training grounds in Mammoth, California.
    For someone who grew up on Lake Tahoe, learning the art of swimming for her first triathlon was more difficult than she thought.
    “I am not a swimmer,” the brutally honest 24-year-old says. “I spent the summers up in Tahoe in the water, but I never swam past two docks.”
    Speed skiing, on the other hand, is her thing. Last season, she won the super G and downhill national championship titles and has already been an Olympian and World Championships competitor. Skiing fast has always been fun for the Cali native. Her most memorable little “Cookie” moment was skiing with her family at Northstar, where she decided to point it down a black diamond, explode (by accident) off a knoll and send it into the trees. “I guess my dad thought I was dead, but I thought it was the funniest thing,” Cook recalls.   
    In a way, swimming is her new “funniest” thing.
    “It’s really difficult,” says a laughing Cook. “As someone with skier legs and a skier butt, I did not float in the water. The first time in the pool, I couldn’t even swim across it.’”
    The whole idea to enter a triathlon came from her team physiologist Lesli Shooter while the team was racing in Europe last winter. When Shooter told Cook that there was one—the Scofield Triathlon in Utah—that would fit perfectly into her summer training schedule, Cook committed. Needing some motivation, she decided to get involved with a San Francisco-based nonprofit, the 49ers Foundation, which supports development programs for under-served youth to keep them safe, on track and in school. She started Stacey’s Month for Children to raise awareness and collect donations to support the 49ers and specifically an “active childhood by participation in sports.”
    “I’m doing what I can to help, because I feel like that’s very important,” she says.
    With the children as motivation, Cook started getting more confident in the water. She wasn’t worried about the 12-mile bike ride and 3.2-mile run with all of her high-altitude training in Mammoth over the summer, but that ½-mile swim was still causing some trepidation.
    “I did two open water swims before I got to Scofield,” she says. “The first one, I doggie-paddled the whole way and was freaking out and the second one I did a lot better and gained a lot of confidence.”
    Then it was game day, and the underdog pulled through with what surprisingly was a Natalie Coughlin-esque backstroke. “I took the outside since I didn’t want to get run over by people,” she explains. “From there I think I took off a little too fast because I was scared about the people behind me. I did fine for the first 100 meters, but it was 800 meters, and as soon as I looked up to see where I was going I just started to freak out. At one point I ended up on the opposite shore of where I was supposed to be. It was horrible, but I took a breath and kept on going. I thought I was last. When I ran up, there were still a ton of bikes so I thought, ‘Maybe I didn’t do as bad as I thought, maybe I do have a power backstroke.’”
    Then she really started to heat up, winning the road biking portion of the race. “When I got on my bike, that was my thing,” she says. Then it was the run, which was a struggle but way better than swimming, she admits.
    “My body was hurting, but I kept going,” she says.
    Even with such a rough beginning, Cook finished fourth in her age group—not bad for a novice swimmer. Cook definitely doesn’t need her life jacket anymore.

For more on Cook’s charities, go to www.staceycook.net .