Tampa Bay Marathon Swim race report…

So here is the story of The 15th Annual 38k Tampa Bay Marathon Swim!!!

I was a bit nervous going in.  As I said in my previous blog (below), I was not feeling all that confident… I’d had achilles issues, lower back issues, a bad chest cold… and as a result was not feeling over trained by any stretch.  On the other hand the 8 months of hard training with Coach Dave and all my swimming buddies at BMSC (Burlington Masters Swim Club) and coming off of Ironman Canada last summer did have a pretty solid base.  Oh well, it didn’t matter now.  Excuses be damned.

My crew (my wife, Joanne, and daughters, Maisey and Jillian) and I arrived in Tampa at about 10 am on Friday… the day before the race.  We got to the hotel and headed down to the beach.  I swam about 200 meters to loosen up… felt great… nice and loose… smooth and easy… short and sweet… and called it a day.  Nothing to prove today and it was just nice to feel good.  Just leave well enough alone.

As I always say, for these events and races, half the experience is about the race itself and the other half is about the people.  Whether it’s the competitors, your racing buddies, the officials, the fans, whatever… the people at these races really make it memorable.

I’m not sure if you are aware of it, depending on the depth and breadth of your racing experience… but different types of races have different cultures.  Marathons tend to be dominated by the pretty focussed crowd and very competitive, more so for the mega-marathons… “what was your time?!”… triathlons are a bit more grass-roots and laid back, although with the multi-thousand dollar bikes and equipment and expensive entry fees they are becoming a bit more elitest… ultra-marathons tend to be the kooky, crunchy granola, tree-huggers… very, very laid back.  Nothing against any of them… I’ve done and been all of them… they are all just different cultures… generally speaking.  As for marathon

swimmers… hmmm… it’s such a small group it’s hard to say… you have the newbies… those in their 20’s, fresh out of university swimming and still fast as hell… then you have guys like me, that used to be decent pool swimmers, took a decade or two off and got back into swimming by finding something new called “open water swimming”.  There are the Masters swimmers and a few that were never big time swimmers, but this is what they like to do.  And just a few odds and ends too, that kind of defy categorization.  The net result is you end up with a small, eclectic bunch of people.  Generally pretty down to earth people, because you aren’t in this sport for the glamour or the big bucks… most people don’t even know this sport exists.  So they tend to be interesting people who genuinely like to do long hard swims like this.  And I like interesting people.  And you may not know this about me… but I’m not too shy, so I try to meet as many of them as I can.

Hanging out on Friday, I saw a few other people on the beach who looked out of place… as in, they were at the beach in a pool swim suit, cap and goggles… they were easy to pick out from the tourists slathering on the sun screen and sippin’ pina colada’s… not that there is anything wrong with that!

I met Sarah Thomas from Colorada and went to UConn.  Interesting because just the day before Maisey had got a recruiting letter from the swim coach at UConn!  She thought she was old, because she was going to be 30 soon and said she wished she’d gotten into this sport sooner, because she loves it… and as it turns out… is pretty good at it too.  She’s also done MIMS and is scheduled for the English Channel this summer too!  The following day someone mentioned she was favored to win…

but you wouldn’t have known it, speaking with her… oh yeah… and she did win.  Nice girl.  Darren wasn’t swimming, but is no slouch himself… he’s done the English Channel, Catalina Channel and the Molokai Channel… and has plans on doing the Ocean’s Seven!

Then this very tanned guy and his pretty girlfriend walked by on the beach… Joanne thought they might be swimmers… I wasn’t sure… then the guy smiles and lets out a cheer and points to me… and at his calf?!  What?  I had no idea what he was talking about… then as he came closer I recognized his calf (ows is a small sport!)… you see Steve Munatones posted a story a couple of years ago on Open Water Source about people with swimming tattoos… he featured my Manhattan Island Marathon Swim tattoo… and this other guy’s!  He had recognized my tattoo from the story too!  How funny is that.   Turns out the guy was Mauro Giaconia, from Palermo, Italy… to give you a sample of his amazing swimming accomplishments, he once swam 101 km in the largest pool in the world in 24 hours… a one km long pool in Chile!  He passed the interesting people test too!

I met Tibor Molnar, from Hungary… the youngest person in the race at 19 years old.  I’m not sure what happened, but unfortunately he and Bart Cobb, 57, from Tampa, had to drop out of the race a few hours in.  Pretty adventurous challenge for a 19 year old though, speaking of getting into the sport early!

I saw Allan Barry, 48 and Katie Brooks, 23, both swim coaches from Ashville, North Carolina, head out for a warm up swim.  I never saw them swim back, but when I was talking with Allan the next day, he told me they swam by a boater that told them they had just seen a large type of fish that you don’t want to see when you are swimming… he gave them a ride back to shore in their boat.  Allan wasn’t too fussed about it… but Katie has an entirely understandable trepidation about such aquatic life!

I ran into Dan Boyle at the awards ceremony.  I first met Dan in 2006 in Dover at the Hubert House when we were waiting for decent weather to attempt the swim across the English Channel.  He’s also heavily involved with the NYC Swim group that puts on the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim.  I never got a chance to thank him after my swim in England, but I remember he and Erica Moffett coming down to see me off early in the morning, even though we’d just met.  Both very nice people.  As I said marathon swimming is a small world.

Then there was the only other LOSTie in the race, Ted Gregory, 74, from Pennsylvannia.  When Ted was training for EC and later for an EC relay he would drive all the way up to Oakville just to get some nice cold water training in with us LOSTies.  He’s a great guy… and a helluva example of livin’ life large… at any age!  Lots of characters in this sport.  He was swimming a relay with a woman and her daughter and her daughter’s friends from Texas.  The race director, Ron Collin’s, pretty much nailed it when he introduced Ted at the pre-race meeting (these races are so small and friendly that everyone gets an intro at the meeting!) when he said “… and here’s 74 year old Ted Gregory swimming with 5 pretty ladies as a relay… he’s my hero!”  Five Mermaids and a Shark!

I also met Greg Larson, 43, who was on the US National Team and a college roommate at USC of a team-mate of mine and Olympian, Gary Anderson, when I used to swim with Etobicoke back in the ’80s!  I also met a buddy of his that was crewing for him, Jamie Patrick.

We’d crossed paths on Facebook, but he’s an amazing guy too.  He got tired of Ironman and ventured into Ultraman and a triple Ironman and other such races… and now has become an Ultra-swimmer!  He has also joined up with some others to start the Lake Tahoe Swimming Society, similar to LOST Swimming!  His most notable recent achievement was last year when he swam the length of the Sacramento River… 111 miles / 178 km … in 31 hours!  Yup, they both passed the interesting people test too!

Anyway, on to the race… finally.  Hey, that’s what it was like for me too.  It seemed like it was never going to get here… and then here we are!

I and the 18 other starters were getting ready on the beach… when a lady came up to me and said “are you Rob Kent?”… I said that I was, thinking there was some last minute registration thing I must have forgotten… but she said she was just down from Ottawa on vacation… and was a reader of LOSTswimming.com and thought she would come by and wish me luck!?!  So she got up at 6:30 to drive over and find this out of the way little spot and walk up to me and wish me luck!  How nice is that!  Don’t worry she wasn’t a stalker… her husband was with her too… he must have thought we were both nuts.  Huh… Canadians.

The finally the horn went off.  And I started swimming.  The water was 74F / 23C… which was pretty comfortable, but never really warm, especially since we didn’t see the sun the whole day.  If it had been later in the season and I had gotten some cold water training in, this would have been positively balmy, but as it was, it was reasonably comfortable.  The water was very murky, you couldn’t see beyond your fingertips.  Moments before the horn went I asked a guy who had done the race before if it got clearer out deeper… he said no… but then said that was probably just as well, you didn’t necessarily want to see everything out there!  Great parting words.

Maisey was just ahead in the kayak.  We had to get around the point to meet up with Captain Doug, Joanne and Jillian in Doug’s 24′ power boat.  There were boats that were little bigger than bathtubs, which probably would have been okay in normal years… but this wasn’t a normal year.  They were being tossed around like toys.  Not long after we had caught up to our boat, Maisey had had enough.  She’s a good kayaker, but it was really tough going in the 3-4 foot swells and chop… the swimming was no screamin’ hell either.

Maisey got in the boat and I kept swimming.  Soon after the officials boat came by and asked if they could borrow our paddle as another team’s paddle had broken in the waves.  Ya… it was rough.  Ten footer’s from where I was sittin’… but they told me they weren’t quite that big.  😉

We went around the corner and things got better… much better.  The waves started coming from behind!  For you cyclists out there, that’s the same glorious sensation as when you come around the corner and the wind is at your back.  Nice.  That stayed with me for a couple of hours.  Real nice.

It was still tough going and lots of chop… but it was going well.  On top of that, I was having a good day.  I remember thinking about the races I’ve done… and in how many of them I was having a really “good” day.  Ususally, you get what you deserve.  If you are out of shape you have a slow painful race… and if you are in good shape, you have a fast painful race.  Sometimes you get a bit more or a bit less than you deserve, you never know how your body is going to react on race day.  But sometimes… you are in good shape… everything aligns nicely.  It’s still hard… obviously… but it’s so nice when you have to dig deep to push on, especially in an ultra type race, that there is something there.  I recall having races like that at the Peterborough 1/2 Ironman one year… 30k Around the Bay in 2:19 one year… the 47k Manhattan Island Marathon Swim (MIMS) in 2010… and I was having a day like that today!  Nice.

Of course, if you’ve ever done a loooong race, you know you go through ups and downs during the race (little pun there).  So naturally, the next hour or so was slated to be tough.  A bit of self doubt… a bit of cursing at the waves… a bit of thinking about aquatic life that I didn’t want to think about.  But I got through it.

Also, if you’ve ever done a looooong race, you know that the thing most likely to knock you out of the race is… nutrition.  Well, weather conditions are probably above that in open water swimming, but nutrition is right up there.  And my nutrition was going great.  I’ve screwed up my nutrition way more times than I’ve got it right in races over the years, but I decided to go with what had worked in MIMS.

I had Joanne and Maisey taking good care of me… and Captain Doug was a great pilot.  Tampa Bay is a very tricky bay, due to the shallows, amongst other things.  Jillian was on the boat too, but she was ignoring me, which kind of ticked me off… hour after hour she sat in the same chair on the other side of the boat listening to her ipod.  Oh well, she’s only 14 years old and it was her first experience crewing… I guess it wasn’t her bag.  Or that’s what I thought until at about my 5th or 6th feed when she came over to cheer me on… and I saw her face… she literally looked green.  Joanne shoo’d her back to the other side of the boat… neither of them wanted to worry me about how bad she was feeling, so she just tried to stay out of the way and be discreet.  I still feel bad about thinking she wasn’t interested… she was sick as a dog for 6 or 7 hours and never complained at all.  Turns out she’s pretty tough afterall.

Jo and Maisey would mix my food and drink for me every half hour.  Plan A was: 1 Carboom gel, 250 ml of water with one scoop of gatorade (carbs, electrolytes and flavor) and one scoop of Carbo Pro (pure carbs)… and that was it.  Twice, when I was feeling a bit peckish, I got Maisey to dig into the Plan B reserve and toss me a few M&M’s and a mini Mars bar once too.  Plan B was: what ever works… a backup of: Mars bars, M&M’s, crackers, bananas, etc you never know what might get you through when Plan A is out the window!  The problem is that you don’t have the latitude in what to eat that you do in a land based race, it’s hard and tiring to feed in the water.  I was getting a bit bloated near the end, but again, if you’ve been in a looooong race, that’s well within the scope of acceptable.

At about hour 4 I started zoning out.  The 1/2 hours were flying by like fence posts to a speeding car.  The best case scenario in an ultra event is when time goes by and you don’t notice.  It means nothing is wrong… and your head is in a good place.  Nice.

Because of the strong winds the water was littered with all kinds of jetsom and flotsom (google it), but I was swimming through it, that stuff doesn’t bug me at all.  However, something nibbled my toes!!!  I sat up like a shot and turned around!!!  Jo, Doug and Maisey were looking at me concerned.  Of course, there was nothing there.  I kept swimming.  I spent the next several minutes convincing myself it was just seaweed or something.

It happened again!!!  And I jumped again!!!  Again, because I couldn’t see any further than 3 feet away even if it was something, I convinced myself it was just seaweed… even though I was more convinced it wasn’t.

When it happened for the 4th or 5th time… and I kicked “it”… I knew it was a fish… of some descript… that was literally nibbling at my toes and calves.  Finally the crew asked me what was going on… I laughed and said small fish were nibbling at my toes!  They laughed and Doug said “at least it’s just the small ones!”.  That’s what I told myself anyway.

I fell back into my trance again.  It was great.  Just watching my arms roll by me in front of my eyes… like they didn’t even belong to me.  Joanne even asked me at a feed what I was dreaming about… of course, I had no idea.

The very next feed I was swimming along and WHACK!!!  My right hand smacked into something very solid that brought me to a complete stand still… I looked up and my nose was about 6 inches away from a channel marker!!!  A channel marker, as I found out, is a barnacle encrusted telephone pole sticking out of the water meant to guide ships away from the shallows… and punish day-dreaming swimmers!

I had hit the back of my hand on the recovery of my stroke very hard.  My first thought was if something was broken.  The crew was yelling to see if I was okay (apparently they had been yelling and blowing the whistle, but between the earplugs and the waves I hadn’t heard them).  Immediately, I lied and said I was fine.  I took 2 strokes and found my hand really hurt and I couldn’t hold water.  Then the second thought went through my mind… is it bleeding?  It was scraped up pretty good… but no gushers.  Again, gushers aren’t good with lots of aquatic life around… if you know what I mean.

Whatever, I kept swimming.  It hurt, but it kind of broke me out of my trance.  I started assessing not only my hand but how I felt.  My lower back was a bit sore, stomach a little upset… which I took as feeling really good.  Then Joanne started getting messages on her blackberry from all kinds of well-wishers.  First was Cousin Al (he’s somebody’s cousin, nobody is quite sure who’s though?)… he was asking if I was up for a swim today… Jo said yes… he’s swimming Tampa Bayk… he wanted to join me at the Y for my regular long swim!  Then there was an email that Joanne told me about at a feed, that all my running/ironman buddies were congregated after their Saturday morning run at Brett’s coffee shop, Bean There, in Oakville… tracking my swim and the race!  It sounds kind of corny… but it really perked me up!  After my mental rest during the trance and the wake-up call, this got me back in the game!  I started picking it up… I was feeling great!  I knew I was well past 1/2 way and started to feel like I could push it to the finish!

I think it was 1 or 2 feeds later… I swam over to the boat… Doug said “They’ve called the race!”… WHAT?!?!?… “it’s over… a very big electrical storm is coming in… and we’ve got to get you out now!”… Joanne was listening to the radio… first it was if you were north of the Gandy bridge you could continue… so I wanted to sneak up there asap… we were almost there!  Moments later, the whole thing was cancelled.  I had swum about 25 of the 38 km… and I think around 7th place.  But it was over.  That was it.

I was mad.  Not that it was anyone’s fault… but I didn’t give a sh*t… I was mad and I really didn’t want to get out.  But after a few choice words… I did.  The weather really didn’t look any worse than it had looked all day.  But Doug turned the boat around and high-tailed it back to the start.  Within a few minutes it opened up.  The waves were 5 feet.  The rain was crazy… I could have endured that for an hour or so… but then the lightning came.  There is a reason that is the hockey team is named the “Tampa Bay Lightning”.  It can get pretty intense.  It was the right call.  But it still sucked.

I got over it… eventually.  I felt bad.  Frustrated. Dissappointed.  A bit of self pity. Mad.  Did I mention frustrated.

But you know what… first of all… it’s the nature of the sport.  That’s what makes this sport tougher than ultra running or cycling or triathlon… the weather plays a much bigger role… it plays a role in the others, but for the most part it shouldn’t end the event… in marathon swimming it can and often does.  Second of all… it’s just a race.  We’re all ‘big boys’ (so to speak)… we all have real lives, families, jobs… and it’s good to keep it all in perspective.  Sometimes things like this are good at proving that fact.

Like I said before, for me it’s about the people and the race… and together it makes for an adventure.  The adventure doesn’t necessarily mean you win, just that you did something out of the ordinary that makes you feel alive and that makes you  appreciate and experience things that you might not otherwise experience.  This was one of those times.  So I’m going to call it a great adventure anyway.

PS.  Bring on “Swim Around Key West!”, June 16… and Lake Ontario, Aug 13!!!

Cheers,

Rob