Last Saturday, Palisadian actress and activist Alexandra Paul swam 12.5 miles in the ocean off Key West, Florida, finishing in just under six hours. But it certainly didn’t come easy. The 36th Annual Swim Around Key West race was threatened by severe weather right up until the morning of the race, but the nearly 30-mph winds died down just in time. Paul, 48, has always managed to hold her own in various endurance races. In 2004, she completed a 6.2-mile swim in Bonaire in under three hours (2:56). Two years later, she swam across the current of the Maui Channel in Hawaii’tougher conditions than Key West, she said’and finished the 10-mile swim in 8:56. Then in 2009, she completed an 18K swim in Fiji in less than seven hours. For Paul, who has numerous television and film credits and is best known for her work on ‘Baywatch,’ the slightly-improved weather at Key West was good news. The bad news was that she had to swim the first four miles without food or water because her accompanying kayaker was stranded ashore. ’My kayaker lost control of her boat almost right away due to the waves and wind and couldn’t get back out past the surf,’ Paul said, adding that several other swimmers were stranded without kayak support. After four miles, Paul was stopped by the Coast Guard, which threatened to pull her from the race if she didn’t find a kayaker to escort her. Another kayaker pulled up at that moment and offered to escort her, though he had only a handful of chips to give her. A mile later, she found another relay boat that provided slightly more food content and water. Paul finished the race despite consuming only five gels, a swig of Gatorade and a handful of chips’not the way she and her nutritionist drew it up. Gels (roughly 80-100 calories) are comprised primarily of sugar to keep athletes’ energy levels up and are easy to consume and digest. Normally, Paul would have had a variety of foods ranging from a vegan chocolate shake and a choc’olate almond bar to cookies and brownies. Her general rule of thumb is about 300 calories an hour. ’Thankfully there were no cruise ships [as obstacles] because I was unescorted most of the race,’ Paul told the Palisadian-Post. ‘But I would say that I came out of it just fine. I think I trained right. I didn’t over-train and that was smart of me.’ Paul also credits keeping a sense of humor about the whole situation as a major reason for being able to stay calm amidst a difficult situation. ’I worked with the Coast Guard on ‘Baywatch,’ and they were much less rude to me than they were at Key West,’ she joked. ‘But the whole thing wasn’t really grueling. It was fun. These kind of races are about being in the moment and going with the flow. ’I’ve always enjoyed endurance sports,’ she said. ‘You have to have the head for it, even though I didn’t always have the body for it because I’ve had knee surgery, so that cut out triathlons and marathons. But to do swimming, you need to have technique.’ Her husband, triathlon coach Ian Murray, works closely with her on this technique when she trains at a community pool near her home in the Highlands. ’I have shoulder pain so I have to work around that,’ Paul said. ‘I can’t swim two days in a row. And I can’t do intervals or speed work because it puts too much stress on my shoulders. That makes me a slower swimmer because I can’t do speed work.’ Paul, a Palisades resident since 2003, grew up in Connecticut in a small town called West Cornwall. ’We didn’t have a television,’ she recalled. ‘We either read or played sports, so I played sports. I wasn’t very good then, but I was always a participant. Soccer in the fall, basket’ball in the winter, softball in the summer, cross-country when I got to high school. And in the summer in middle school, I swam on a swim team.’ Paul was accepted to Stanford University but chose to move to Los Angeles pursue a career in acting when she was 18. Her first film credit was a movie entitled ‘Paper Dolls,’ starring Daryl Hannah, and she appeared on ‘Baywatch’ as Lt. Stephanie Holden from 1992-97. Other film roles have included ‘American Flyers,’ co-starring alongside Kevin Costner, and ‘Dragnet’ with Tom Hanks. Another major aspect of Paul’s life is her political activism. She spent five days in federal prison for protesting the war in Iraq in 2003, and in 2005 captured national attention when she was arrested during a protest to save some of the last remaining GM EV1 electric cars from destruction. ’When I was seven, I wrote a let’ter to President Nixon asking him to help animals and stop pollution,’ she recalled with a laugh. ‘My sister wrote a letter too and we got a letter back and we were so excited, and then we realized it was the exact same letter, a form letter, and it dampened my enthusiasm a bit.’ In recent years, Paul said, she has focused on animal rights and overpopulation. From 2001-2009, she co-hosted a cable television show called ‘Earth Talk’ with fellow Palisadian Peter Kreitler in which they interviewed experts about environmental issues. ’I think it’s great when people get involved in causes, whether people are famous or not,’ she said. ‘There are so many ways you can support an issue. You can write a check, you can show your faith, write letters.’ Yet Paul always strives to have balance in her life. ’People ask me about the Key West swim”Did you do it for charity?”and I tell them, ‘No, I did it for me.”
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