He once bumped against her foot and then swam away from her in an ocean race. Trying to keep up with her on a trail run, he took a spill into the brush, and she ran two miles before noticing. But after years of teasing and one-upping each other, Ed Smith and Becky Glusac took a big step toward solidarity last August. They became Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
They share another title: Mr. and Mrs. Semana Nautica. Since moving to Santa Barbara from his native Australia in 2003, Ed Smith has made a hobby of competing in the endurance events of the Semana Nautica Summer Sports Festival: the five-mile biathlon (four-mile run and one-mile swim); 15-kilometer run; and the one-mile, three-mile, and six-mile ocean swims.
“It’s a fight against the waistline,” said Smith, 39, an engineer at Raytheon. He confesses to a fondness for beer and lamented, “There are not enough athletic events to keep up with the different options for beer drinking.” Ocean swimming is an effective way to burn calories, and Ed has excelled at it; he has won the Semana Nautica six-miler three times in 13 years and finished out of the top five only once.