This Fellow Really Gets Around Town

The race began off East 96th Street at 10:30 a.m., with Del Borgo and Horning trading early leads. "It's a strange race," said Johnson's handler, Jim Curl, on the launch Full Moon. "You swim around the island to the Battery, you catch the tide right and then you sprint up the East River to the finish. But get to the Battery too soon, and you get cold and tired treading water."

All the swimmers were mindful of that. But only a few were fast enough to make it a real danger. Johnson was one of those. His stroke rate averaged a low 56 per minute, but still he was going too fast. He was swimming neck and neck with Horning, whose rate was 66.

At the George Washington Bridge, the span that crosses the Hudson River 10 miles into the race, Horning turned to Johnson and asked, "Did you ever swim here before?" "No," came the reply. "Nice, huh?" Horning said.

"He likes to break your concentration," Curl had warned, and now Curl caught Johnson's eye and pointed to the left. Johnson spun away, and a half hour later he was out front and alone.

Earlier, Johnson had warned Curl, "At some point during the swim I'll become completely disoriented because of low blood sugar." With that in mind, he had borrowed a bright red umbrella, which he opened and tied to Full Moon's transom. "I'll be able to focus on that," Johnson said.

Curl was very careful to keep the umbrella in Johnson's line of vision, but there were times when he needn't have been so careful. One came at 3:09 p.m., after Johnson had been swimming for four hours and 39 minutes. Horning had dropped out at West 79th Street with a flare-up of his tendinitis, and Del Borgo was nine minutes back, troubled with leg cramps and not long for the race, either. Johnson's only competition now seemed to be from Marks and from a Brooklyn actor named Jim O'Malley. But they were far upstream. Curl told him, "You've got a chance to break the record."

Johnson said, "All right! I feel great!" And off he went. He paused briefly to gaze at the Statue of Liberty, and he thought, as he said later, "My God, how long it's been." Then he stroked around the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. Suddenly he was going nowhere.

Someone had miscalculated the tides there, and Johnson made little headway for nearly an hour. Meanwhile, Marks and O'Malley swept down the Hudson toward Johnson; by the time the tide had turned and Johnson had reached the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River at 4:22, his lead had been cut to 75 yards. Johnson dug harder. At 5:25, a friend, Dan Honig, called to him, "You've got 200 yards on them now."

"Write it on the board," Johnson said, and Honig wrote out the message on a white board. "He's exhausted," Honig said. "He can't think well, but he can see. The umbrella is important now."

By the East 70s the tide was moving with the swimmers at five knots, and there was only a mile to go. O'Malley had faded, and Marks was churning away at 71 strokes per minute. But Marks had "run out of river," as he said later.