Well it all looked a little like it was going to be a washout just like last year! Friday saw us with torrential rain, it pretty much poured down all day! I very dubiously headed off to registration to pick up my race pack and Nad'ya's as she was out of town. Briefly thought about trying to change Nad-ya into the non wetsuit swim category!! hehe! Decided that would be a bit mean and didn't do it!
Saturday morning was grey and drizzling but no howling southerly which was good and hey you get wet swimming anyway so it wasn't near as bad as it could have been.
Hard to say much about a swimming race really other that I turned up, I swam and I completed the distance. Its weird, lately I don't seem to get nervous before an event, perhaps because everything seems pretty minor in comparison to IM! Saturday was a little bit like turning up for a sea swim with several hundred of your closest friends! The water was lovely and calm which was great, temperature was a little fresh but you get that in the sea so no big deal. I was in the 2nd wave of 3 which were based on our estimated swim times, it was fairly crowded on the way out to the first bouy and thinned out a little from there, I found there was a reasonable amount of biffo and swimming over people on that first stretch but this eased as we covered the distance. And blimey what a distance!! It seemed ages and ages between each bouy and I felt like I was going pretty slowly and was pretty disappointed to see a time of an hour and 5mins when I finished as I had set a goal time of an hour. I was in the process of reworking through my estimated time for the IM swim and rethinking my whole race plan in my head when I very happily found out that the swim distance was long thanks to the organisers placing the bouys the night before. One would have thought you would double check these in the morning eh? The ocean has these interesting things called tides.... Oh well, at least we all had to swim the same distance and I feel better now knowing that I swam further in that time!
2 comments:
Well that was weird, I typed a comment and then saw that it told me there was a duplicate, and no comment appears.
What did I say?
I wouldn't feel bad that you didn't get nervous. As you said, this in comparison to an IM is fairly simple.
Well done too, and nice to get a new pair of Blue Seventy goggles.
Funny how you said you seemed to swim for ages, because watching the race, the swimmers all seemed to take forever to do the distance - I now feel really sorry for the family when they had to sit on the edge of Lake Wanaka for 1.40 hours - it must have been like watching paint dry, especially when you can't actually pick who is who out there!! It's certainly not a good spectator sport, that's for sure!
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