Normally, when a swimmer breaks their knee, they’d be expected to have to take months, if not years off from their sport. Maybe they’d never swim again, even after months and months of physical therapy and procedures. Certainly, they wouldn’t be expected to swim 7 kilometers across a jellyfish-infested bay in Bulgaria. However, that’s exactly what Pembroke Pines Charter High School Swim Team member, Martin Petkov, did.
During his high school orientation at PPCHS, Petkov, who had suffered from knee issues his whole life, was severely injured while walking down the stairs in the social studies wing of the U Building. Both of his knees were entirely dislocated, and he was taken via ambulance to the emergency room.
Following his injury, Petkov received surgeries and physical therapy. Throughout his summer and freshman year at PPCHS, he was only able to swim on-and-off, his wound depriving him of his sport that he’d participated in competitively for nine years.
“Around two years ago, I had surgery on both of my knees, and it was a pretty rough recovery,” recalls Petkov. “Thankfully, I had great coaches around me that could accommodate my issues while I was in recovery, and I was able to get fully back into the sport. I’m very proud of myself.” Coaches would rent out private lanes where he could try his best to keep practicing despite his knee injury.
He would go on to compete at States with the PPCHS Swim Team in his Sophomore year, but he still wasn’t done. Petkov wanted another shot. “I would love to be able to compete at States again,” he said. “Especially on the individual level rather than on the relay.”
This summer, on July 27th, in a testament to his dedication in the sport after a year and a half of on-and-off swimming following his surgery, Petkov swam 7 kilometers across the Varna Bay in Bulgaria. Bulgarian by birth, he often visits the country on vacation with his family. This time around, he enrolled in the 85th anniversary of an event called the Galata-Varna, the oldest swimming marathon in the nation.
“It’s basically a big swim across the bay. In terms of raw distance, it’s about 4.5 kilometers, but because of the waves, it ends up being around 7 kilometers,” he detailed, recalling his swim in Varna. Starting near a Bulgarian Navy base, the swimmers took off at the edge of the bay, their finish line at the second of four “wave breaker” barriers on the beach.
Petkov swam the race with his father, who crossed the bay with him, which the announcers of the event took note of. However, midway through the event, disaster struck. Petkov and his father were stopped by a patrol boat several kilometers out to sea. “The boats on the edge of the pack of swimmers — they stopped us and they were like ‘no, you need to go to the left, you need to go with the pack,’” he recounts. “And since we couldn’t tell [where we were]”, we were like, ‘okay, we’ll go there.’”
The father and son then readjusted their course and continued for the finish line, although something was off. By the time they reached the exit, they were far from their destination, the patrol boats having misled them. “We were way too far down shore, so we had to swim an extra two or three kilometers.”
However, they also encountered a second obstacle on their way through the race. “The scary part was that there were jellyfish everywhere. We ran into a giant swarm of them,” he explained. “And we were just getting stung. You just had to swim and hope you didn’t get stung. I, at one point, stopped pulling with my arms and I just kicked forward. I put my arms in front of me, so I wouldn’t accidentally smack one of the jellyfish.” Petkov ended up getting stung on his shoulder in the bay, but continued forward, his time training in spite of his injury paying off and giving him the strength to continue.
In the end, without accounting for waves and currents, Martin Petkov and his father swam about 7 kilometers. There were about 270 contestants in the entire race, and the pair finished around 60th place. “It was really cool, because the announcers saw we were getting out of the water together,” he said. “And the announcer announced it: ‘oh, look at the two friends getting out of the water, it’s so awesome that they’re crossing together!’ We held up our arms together, it was really cool.”
Petkov received a medal for completing the swim marathon. He plans to continue swimming at PPCHS in his junior year at the school. “[This swim] is definitely going to help me at Charter, since I was on vacation and I would have taken a larger break from swimming, which wouldn’t be good for my career,” commented Petkov. “But now since I had that event in the middle, it’s helping me keep shape throughout the summer.”
Despite a knee-break at his orientation here at Charter, Martin Petkov has done the impossible: following two years of pushing through his injuries and sticking with his sport at PPCHS, he’s done a 7 kilometer swim through jellyfish in Bulgaria’s Varna Bay.
