So when all of you were out on this gorgeous Sunday doing your long runs or long rides… I went for a long swim. I’m treating this much like I would training for an ultramarathon… given the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of other people around to confer with about marathon swimming… seems like the right approach… I hope. So 13 days out of MIMS I did my longest swim of the season, 4 1/2 hours.
I took the sleep in until 8:30 and then took the college kid inhabiting our house and went back down to the site of our first LOST swim of the season yesterday. You never know what you are going to get with open water swimming… but I got lucky again… the air temp was… I don’t know… hot… and not a cloud in the sky… the water temp started at 64F and was as flat as glass. Perfect. Dylan was nice/stupid enough to volunteer for an nice long paddle in the kayak we borrowed from Peter. I didn’t really have a plan… just something long. If it was really cold (50’sF or so) then only 2 hours and if it was nice (60’sF) then 4 hours… or somewhere in between. I was perfect, so I was aiming at the long end. So off we went. Headed east towards Toronto… past our turn around for LOST swimming… past the 3.8 km start for the LOST Race at the foot of Maple Grove… I’d never swum past there, so it was kind of interesting (probably more for Dylan as he got a great view of all the beautiful homes from an angle most people never see)… and kept going until I hit the pier for the St Lawrence Cement Plant the comes out about 500m into the lake.
Perfect timing, 2:02… which would bring me in around 4 hours, return trip. If the water was the same going back… but it wasn’t. The wind picked up almost exactly when we turned around and built all the way back. It made it much more difficult, but that’s okay, it was training… and I was feeling good. One interesting thing is that we saw probably about 2 dozen large carp… maybe 2 feet long and, I don’t know, 15 lbs. I found this one place where they seemed to call home and swam withing about 2 feet of one and we both stopped for a few seconds and stared at each other in amazement… then we both swam away. I was feeding on bars and gatorade/carbo pro mix every half hour from Dylan and everything went well. Dylan had a cell phone and called Joanne who had just got back from Maisey and Jillians swim meet and the 3 of them kept popping up along the shore to wave to us along the way back. The water was a very comfortable 66F by the time we finished and we made it back in 4:37 and ended up going 13km. A bit tired, a little bit sun burned… but none the worse for wear. A good long swim… tough but do-able… and hopefully well prepared for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in 13 days!
Cheers,
Rob