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The Governors Island Swim was a day full of firsts. Held on the first day of August, it was Mara’s first competitive swim of 2 miles or longer. It was the first open water swim for our good friend Carlos, who’s a very fast pool swimmer.

It also marked the first visit any of us had made to Governors Island, even though Mara and I live a mere 2 miles away as the crow flies in Jersey City, and I grew up even closer in Brooklyn Heights (1.08 miles, according to Google maps).

Just like running, open water swimming can make us more aware of our local geography. New York is a city not just of skyscrapers, but also rivers and dozens of islands, including of course Manhattan but many more that are hardly ever noticed by the millions who live and work here.

So on this visit to Governors, I started counting New York's islands. I’ve lived and worked in Manhattan. I’ve been to Staten Island for the start of 6 marathons. I’ve visited Ellis, Liberty, Roosevelt, Wards, and Randall’s islands. Technically, Long Island is part of the city too because Queens and Brooklyn are on one end of it.

But I’ve never been to Rikers, home of the city’s largest jail. I hope to stay on the straight and narrow and avoid that one. I’m also missing City Island off the Bronx. There’s also the abandoned North Brother Island and its smaller sibling South Brother Island in the Upper East River. Didn’t even know about those. From here it gets even more complicated: There are two clusters of islands, I guess you could call them archipelagos, one around Rockaway Beach in Queens and the other called the Pelham Islands near the Bronx. I won’t go through all the names, but if they ever want to settle Rat Island, Goose Island or the Chimney Sweeps, they might want to see about a name change.

NYC Swim, which organizes many of the marquee swimming events in New York, offers races around Governors, Liberty and Manhattan. Another group called CIBBOWS has a few races in Coney Island every summer. But for the record, Coney doesn’t count as an island anymore --- the creek that separated it from Brooklyn was filled in the 1950s.

Back to Governors Island, which Mara and Carlos set out to circumnavigate on this beautiful Sunday morning. The pre-race logistics included not one but two ferry rides, one to get us to the island, and one to take the swimmers a few hundred yards to the designated start area on the northwest side of the island. All 240 leapt into the water, and soon after the race was on. I walked along the circumference of the island and was able to keep Mara in view for nearly all of it. She even waved to me a couple of times in the middle of her stroke. The currents were choppy at times, and forced many swimmers back into the island, but Mara quickly figured out that staying to the outside of the swimmers and far away from the sea wall offered the best route. In open water swimming, the fastest path is not always the shortest. In fact, the winner of the race went far out away from the island and apparently caught friendlier currents.

My walk was 1.5 miles, and Mara completed her 2-mile circle around mine in a fantastic 54 minutes. This was even faster than her 1.7 mile swim in Rhode Island. Carlos was amazing too, finishing in 46 minutes in his open water debut.

While I may not be the speediest of swimmers, I do have stamina. At the end of several mile-long swims in my four years of competing in open-water swimming, I’ve been convinced I could go further. And it wasn’t just the adrenalin talking.

I recently completed my longest swim ever and my first "crossing" - from Newport to Jamestown across Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. It was a 1.7-mile swim, a fundraiser for the Save the Bay Foundation. I nearly went the extra mile.

It was a glorious morning, sunny and warm, and the water was cool enough so that I was comfortable in my full wetsuit. The Bay was salty and relatively clear, and my visibility extended beyond the end of my outstretched arms.

The organizers called this a swim, rather than a race, and the difference was evident from the confusion at the start to the rustic method – involving popsicle sticks – that they used to measure our time.

At the pre-race safety briefing, we were told that a horn would signal 5 minutes to the start. However, when the warning horn sounded, many of the swimmers took off immediately. I wasn’t in the water yet and was unaware that the race had unintentionally begun! I put on my swim cap, strolled down to the Bay’s edge, posed for a photo, and looked for the yellow line that was supposed to mark the starting point.

To my shock, nearly the entire first wave of swimmers in which I belonged had already departed. The false start by a few had created a domino effect.

By the time I reached the start, kayakers were lining the water for the second wave (the first wave was for individual swimmers without escorts). Soon after I heard another horn – and the second wave was off. Panic struck: What if I was to get whacked by one of those oars?

But soon I was ahead of most of the kayaks and I realized I would be fine. I finally turned my focus to actually swimming.

The crossing is alongside the Pell Bridge, which links Newport to Jamestown. The bridge – with its two arched towers evoking a much smaller Verrazano-Narrows Bridge – was to my left. It was a great measuring stick.

It seemed to take forever to reach the first arch. I was swimming alongside a red kayak that was supporting a swimmer four or five strokes behind me. It was handy having the kayaks around – I could use them as my sight and avoid lifting my head too often to spot my destination, which can result in lost time.

Just before the halfway point, we swam into huge patches of seaweed. This was heavy-duty, cord-like seaweed that appeared suddenly on the surface in huge clumps. One clump was so dense it prevented me from breathing to my side. I had to keep my head out of the water, so I tried to breast-stroke through it to no avail – it was too thick. The seaweed weighed on my legs as well. Another swimmer lifted his arm out of the water draped in the stuff, mirroring my own struggle.

We hit another patch a few meters ahead, resulting in more dog-paddling, but eventually we were in the clear.

With several hundred meters to go, I spotted the two large balloons marking the finish line. I wondered if I was within my target time of finishing in about one hour. Swimming times can vary greatly due to currents, but that had been my pace for a practice swim the previous weekend in Long Island, and I’d also done 3-kilometers in one hour in the pool recently (3K is longer than 1.7 miles, but I added the extra distance to compensate for pushing off the wall during turns, which helps cover ground).

At the finish, I passed through the two balloons, and this is where the popsicle sticks came in. I was given a stick with a number for my finishing position. After trudging through the shallow water toward the beach, I was told to hand the stick to another person who wrote my race number on it. With that information, and some timing device not visible to me, the organizers determined each swimmer’s time – down to the seconds. Assuming, of course, we’d all started together.

My husband Gregg timed my swim at about 1 hour and one minute. According to the popsicle stick method, my time was 1:03:44.

“I’m not screaming every time… just at the really big ones,” my wife Mara shouted over to me while bobbing in the waters of Shinnecock Bay in eastern Long Island during a 1.7-mile training swim. As if she had to defend her toughness to me. She most certainly didn’t.

I was in my usual position, with the kayak's thick yellow plastic shielding me from the hundreds or thousands of jellyfish of various sizes just below the surface. I often accompany Mara on her training swims, a task which we view as fair given her tireless support for my marathons. Mara can’t run because of a back problem, but at least in swimming we can spend time together while she trains.

About half a dozen times on this swim, Mara had thrashed her arms and let out a quick, high pitched noise – not so much a scream, as in Freddie Kruger is after me, but more of a screech, as in I just touched something really gross. At first I had thought it was another clump of seaweed, something else Mara had been dealing with on this sunny mid-summer morning. When she told me about the jellyfish invasion, I worried that she would get stung, leading to a cramp and that I would somehow have to help her out of the water and onto the unstable craft. I had an awful vision of her slung over the kayak with hives or shortness of breath. Who knows what those creatures do!

I asked Mara if she wanted to turn around or get in the kayak, but she looked kind of surprised at my question and shook her head no. I would have been out of the water as fast as possible. We distance runners can count ourselves lucky; occasionally we happen upon a rodent, or maybe road kill. We can be chased by dogs or intimidated by SUVs. But rarely, if ever, does a member of another species actually touch us during our workouts. Least of all squishy invertebrates with tentacles.

There have been reports lately of jellyfish populations being on the rise, with everything from global warming to overfishing of the jellies’ larger predators cited as causes. From what I’ve read, there is little proof, partly because it is so hard to count the translucent buggers. However, it seems to be generally accepted that warm weather causes certain types of jellyfish to arrive earlier and in greater abundance. And it has been unusually hot this year in the Northeast U.S.

In 2008, jellyfish fears spiked after a 32-year-old Argentine man died during the New York City Triathlon. Jellies were swarming in the Hudson River that day, and some people suspected that he was stung multiple times, leading to a heart attack. But a coroner later concluded that his death was caused by high blood pressure.

So what exactly are we afraid of? Jellyfish have no bones, brains, circulatory or respiratory systems. They don’t even have a digestive system, just a central cavity that holds plankton or whatever and … well, let’s move on. What they do have are tentacles, and venomous cells that can be used to sting their prey, predators, or even open-water swimmers and surfers. Reactions can vary greatly depending on the jellyfish, and can even cause death in rare cases. The most dangerous type of jellyfish, known as a box jelly, is mostly found in northern Australia or other tropical waters. It’s not a big fan of the Hamptons.

Thankfully, Mara wasn’t stung once on her swim. Just harassed. Maybe even though they lack brains, they respected her need to train for next weekend’s 1.7-miler near Newport, R.I., her longest open-water swim race to date. The Save the Bay Swim raises money to help protect the Narragansett Bay estuary, which according to the race web site is home to more than 60 species of fish and shellfish – including, of course, jellyfish.