The picture to the left was taken the day before the race. Notice my brand new TYR, Sayonara swim skin that I am wearing. In it’s 2 year history, Ironman Louisville had never been a wetsuit legal race, so I bought this swim skin to use specifically for this race. I had the opportunity to use it several times for practice swims, and I absolutely loved it. I was so excited to try it out the next day at the race.
The picture to the right is me on race day starting the race. Notice anything missing? Yes, my swim skin! After pumping my tires up in transition on race morning, I made the 3/4 mile walk to the swim start. When I arrived at the swim start, I opened my bag to get my swim skin out, and it was not there. My husband made a frantic run back to the hotel to look for it. While he was gone, the race started. The start of Ironman Louisville is unique in that it is the only Ironman race with a time trial start. Racers line up first come, first serve to start the race. I slowly watched racer after racer start. My husband returned. The swim skin was not at the hotel. I decided I needed to stop worrying about it and get in line to start the race.
I walked the 1/2 mile to the end of the race line. I was the last person in line to start the race for a long time. I really thought I was going to be the last person to start the race. Finally, as I neared the start 3 other people got behind me. I was, however, the last female in the water. In the water ahead of me were over 2000 other participants. Unfortunately for me, that equaled 2000 obstacles that I had to swim around, as I am a good swimmer. This slowed me down a lot!
The swim for the race is in the Ohio river. About 1/3 of the swim is upstream and then you make a turn and swim downstream. Fortunately, for all of us in the water, the dams upstream were closed, so you really couldn’t feel the current. Note: if you ever do a river swim with a strong current, stick near the shore. The current is not as strong near the shore as it is in the middle of the river. The water was very dirty, and I couldn’t see anything. When the water is like this, I actually like to close my eyes and try to relax. I know it sounds crazy, but why have them open? You can’t see anyway.
There was one interesting portion of the swim, where I ran into a major traffic jam at a point where the water was shallow and people were standing up. I had no idea I would encounter anything like this in the middle of a river. There seemed to be about 50 people standing talking about the swim course in the middle of the race. It was crazy! I pushed my way through the crowd and went on my merry way.
I made it to the end of the swim with a time of 1:16:49. I was frustrated. Not a good swim for me at all. I blame the bad swim time on my swim skin commotion, being one of the last people to start the race, and probably not logging enough yards in the pool during training (I will elaborate more on this in the future).
Okay, time to get over the prerace swim skin commotion and bad swim time. I still had 138.2 miles of racing ahead of me! I spent approximately 4 minutes in T1, and I was off on my bike.
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Why in the world would people be standing up in the middle of the swim? How did you feel at the end of the swim? I know your time was slower than you wanted, but how was your level of fatigue?
ReplyDeleteI have no idea why people were standing up in the middle of the swim! I guess they needed to take a rest. I felt great at the end of the swim. Not fatigued or out of breath at all. It might have been worth sacrificing 10 minutes on the swim, as it may have allowed me to make up more than that amount of time on the bike and the run. Unfortunately, I'll never know.
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