To the shock and disgust of her support team, Erica Rose rolled onto her back and dropped a dried pineapple ring, steeped in Harlem River water, into her mouth.

“The thought now of dipping food in the Harlem River and then eating it is just disgusting,” Rose says. “At the time, I was like, ‘It’s got sugar in it. It’s going to help. It’s going to be great.’”

Yes, open-water marathon swimming can make a person do strange things.

It can make you push the limits of human endurance, as Rose did swimming for 10 hours to complete a 55-mile race down the Parana River in Argentina in 2005 and 2007.

It can also overwhelm your senses, like when Rose -- competing for the U.S. National Open Water Swimming Team -- became so enamored with the sea life in the clear waters surrounding the Cayman Islands that she left course and finished dead last.

“I came off the course and the coaches were standing there and said, ‘You know, if you had wanted to go snorkeling, we probably could have arranged for that after the race,’” Rose says.

While working stiffs were fantasizing about the scenic landscape images on their computer desktop, Rose was swimming in them. Australia. Japan. Spain. Panama. China. Mexico. Italy. Ecuador.

She trained and traveled the professional open-water marathon circuits full-time after graduating from Northwestern in 2004 until coming to grips with its financial limitations in 2008.

Rose represented the USA on seven World Championship teams, earned 10 national titles and was voted USA Open Water Swimmer of the Year four times. All that translated into just enough prize money to get from one race to the next.

“I could not even touch my living expenses,” she says. “I started to figure out that that was not a sustainable way to live.”

The 28-year-old native of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, moved to Ann Arbor in December 2009 with her boyfriend, Brendan Dancik, and got herself a desk job at the University of Michigan.

(Her desktop, by the way, features scrolling international landscape images from Bing.)

Just last week she left a job as a recruitment coordinator in the Office of University Development to become an administrative specialist in the school’s Athletic Development Office, supporting recently named senior associate athletic director Chrissi Rawak.

“It took quite a bit of getting used to sitting at a desk all day,” said Rose, who broke into the job market back in Chicago, where she trained with former Northwestern men’s swimming coach Bob Gorseth.

“I like it more now that I like the work I’m doing, and that I’ve found a way to continue to train before and after work. But it literally went from being active six to eight hours a day, which is what I was doing when I was training full time, to sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. I was like, ‘This is not OK. This is horrible.’”

Rose still gets in a workout before and after work -- and whenever else she can -- mixing yoga, running, cycling and strength work with her time at the YMCA and Canham Natatorium pools.

Behind her are those Saturday morning workouts when Gorseth would tether Rose to a starting block and throw ice-cold water and tangled up ropes (to simulate seaweed) on top of her while she stroked in place for hour after hour after hour.

Future races will be chosen as part of vacations, though Rose admits it’s “hard to line up the great swims and the great places with vacation time.”

But not impossible.

After nearly three years away from elite-level competition, Rose signed up to compete in last month’s Manhattan Island Marathon Swim, a 28.5-mile counter-clockwise circumnavigation of the island that begins and ends at Battery Park City.

After training at 60-percent of her full-time regimen, she estimates, Rose didn’t know what to expect from the race.

“Going into it, I had no way of knowing how I compared to the other swimmers,” she said. “When I got in there, got in the water, felt fantastic and was having fun, I knew I had a good chance.”

She won it in 7 hours, 29 minutes, 46 seconds.

Australia’s John van Wisse, a three-time winner of the event, finished four minutes behind -- gaining some time when Rose was stopped mid-stroke by a New York City Police boat because the Norwegian Princess cruise ship was pulling out of port in front of her.

Rose said the event instantly became one of her favorite open water races, which she started competing in 15 years ago as a member of the Lake Erie Silver Dolphins swim club.

The currents of the East River propelled Rose to an 8 miles-per-hour pace. “I felt like I was flying,” she says with a wide grin.

Dancik and other members of her support boat -- the same group that handed her that whole dried pineapple ring rather than the bite-sized piece she expected -- acted as New York City tour guides during the swim.

“U.N. Building,” they wrote on a white board and pointed to the 17-acre complex on the banks of the East River. “Yankee Stadium,” was scrawled on the board during a stretch of the Harlem River. And so on.

Winning the prestigious event didn't hurt the experience.

“It was exciting for me to see that I can work a full-time job, fit this training in and still be able to do something I love to do,” Rose said. “And win it. That makes it more fun, absolutely makes it more fun.”

Besides her reduced training, Rose beating the top male competitors around Manhattan was no surprise to the open-water swimming world.

The longer the race, the smaller the gender gap gets. Get above 25 kilometers, Rose says, and it’s an even playing field. Make it a cold-water swim and women, with their additional body fat, have an advantage.

“So I guess when you get up to eight-, nine-, 10-hour swims, things even out,” Rose says with a laugh. “But there’s also a very small group of people that are crazy enough to do those swims, so you’re not talking about a huge population. That probably has something to do with it.”

Rose’s endurance is what originally drew her to open-water racing.

“I never had a lot of speed, but I could hold a relatively fast pace for a very long time,” she says. “So as I started doing more and more open-water races, we found that if we kept bumping up the distance and bumping up the distance, I would do better with it.”

The lack of speed is relative, of course. In the pool, Rose was a high school state champion and a Big Ten finalist and NCAA Championship qualifier at Northwestern. In the open water, though, she became one of the best in the world.

The water is the only place the constantly on-the-go Rose is content.

She's trained herself not only physically, but mentally. Constant interaction with her support crew keeps Rose's mind busy with race details -- her stroke rate, her position, her surroundings, her next feeding time -- and the hours fly by.

One after another after another.

“You know, I don’t even sleep for eight hours. I couldn’t run for eight hours. I couldn’t walk for eight hours,” she says. “There’s nothing else I could do for eight hours.

“But I think it’s just been so many years of training my body to swim for eight hours that it just goes by quickly.”

Rich Rezler is a sports producer at AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at richrezler@annarbor.com or 734-623-2553.