A bit tip of the hat to Steve Hulford and Bill Poole for pulling off a fantastic race! Especially impressive on their first try!
Steve contacted me about a year or so ago, out of the blue about starting up a new race. So we went out for coffee to discuss it. He and Bill had just been for a swim on this great beach in the Toronto Islands called Ward’s Island. Beautiful… and no one knows about it. So he wanted to share it with other people… and a race was a great way to do it. So we chatted for a while… and then off and on over the winter… I gave him a few tips here and there… but I was pretty amazed when I showed up on Sunday morning to find a first class race about to begin! Well done boys.
It’s a pretty cool venue. You take the ferry over to the island… and then walk across the island and come out of the bushes… and low and behold is this incredible beach! Beautiful sand, probably 500 m long that rolls out into a nice sandy bottom lake. It didn’t hurt that it was one of the nicest sunny days of the summer either! (I must confess, I had a bit of beach envy happening!)
But this is open water swimming… and there is always something. And, in keeping with this year’s theme, the water temp was the issue on this particular day! I was talking to Steve prior to the race and he had told me that when they set up the buoys the night before the water temp was 68F / 19C… but naturally that wasn’t what it was the next morning! It was 60F / 15C!
But like I said, this is open water swimming… and you have to roll with the punches, or with the waves, as the case may be. And like real pros, Steve and Bill did just that. They made a few quick adjustments to the timing and placings and told everyone that if they had a choice, they might be more comfortable in a wetsuit!
Now, I for one prefer not to swim in a wetsuit and being a bit of purist I tend to frown on them from that point of view too. I find 60F is about the border line for “comfortable” and “uncomfortable”… certainly not the border line between “swimmable” and “unswimmable” (which is about 10 degrees lower!). So I was kind of torn as to go “wetsuit” or “naked”. I had Lisa, Annaliese, Miguel, Gary and the like calling me out on my whimpy-ness in considering the wetsuit… but the devil on my other shoulder was whispering in my ear that I haven’t been doing any training since I swam across Lake Ontario 370 days ago… cold water or not… the wimp in me won out. I wore my sleeveless wetsuit. Which as far as wetsuits go, is a pleasure to swim in. Full range of motion and not a hint of cold.
The course was very straight forward. It was out and back along the shore. There was about 100 people in the 1.5 k race and about 100 in the 3.8 k race, the 1.5 k swimmers just turned around earlier… yes, I did the 3.8 k race… I wasn’t going to be that wimpy!
The race itself went off without a hitch. I ended up trying to catch this “naked” girl in front of me (hey, you find motivation where you can!)… she was only about 10 m ahead… but for the life of me I couldn’t catch her… I chased her for about 3 km and never got any closer or further than 10 m!!! Then, at the 1.5 k turn around buoy my body and in particular, my arms relized that “oh ya… we haven’t done any training”… and in some kind of magical, Harry Potter way, my arms suddenly turned to cement. I can sum up the last 750m with two words… slow and painful! The girl that was only a couple of seconds ahead of me finished exactly a minute ahead… and it was Lisa! She was 1:01 and I was 1:02! Turns out Tara, Miguel, Gary, Lisa and myself had all been pretty close together for the whole race.
RESULTS: http://www.sportstats.ca/displayResults.xhtml?racecode=105546
Oh, and for those comparing times between this and the LOST Race… well, lets just say that on an out-and-back course, it’s much harder to take advantage of a current than it is if you are going point-to-point! 😉
And they did squeak past us on the number in the 3.8 km race! We had 94 swimmers… they had 97!
I’m sure that I and a bunch more LOSTies will be back next year too!
A lot of fun. Thanks Steve and Bill!
PS. I had to laugh, Steve and Bill were both very proud of their great little race… but a bit disappointed too… they didn’t get to swim it! Haha… that’s the life of a race director! That’s why I was at their race… I didn’t get to swim the LOST Race either… so I told them, they’ll have to do the LOST Race next year instead!
Cheers,
Rob