CMC Swim Race

Fortunately / Unfortunately non of these guys showed up.

My distance swimming lately seems to be wavering. I feel good and strong on (pool) sprint sets: 25s, 50s and 100s. But anything over that, and I really fall off. I haven't had a lot of open water swimming practice this year, and with the Cornwall Triathlon lurking around the corner, tonight's race would be an excellent chance to see how the chips might fall.

But the problem with open water swimming course set up, is that it's virtually impossible to set up a good accurate course. And tonight's swim was actually 1630m instead of 1500m (which came as a huge relief after I learned my final time).

We used a slightly different layout from the usual triathlon course, in that we would swim 3 shorter loops instead of 2 longer ones. There were 3 bouys total to mark the course, one on each end, and one in the middle. And that seemed to be my Achilles heel - I was always totally off course. Especially on my last loop where I was at least 50m outside the middle bouy.

Final time was 29:53 (for 1630m), not terrible for me. This equates to a 1:50/100m pace, or a 27:30 virtual pace for 1500m. (Using the world's greatest triathlon conversion calculator). I suppose the positive thing was that I might be faster at the triathlon based on the fact that a) there weren't too many swimmers here, and I didn't get any draft at all b) there will be fewer turns around the buoys and c) there will be more buoys to sight on.