Now that’s a fun way to roll into the New Year!
Maybe I’m getting old, but New Year’s Eve was no biggee. And unless I’m going to Time Square it usually isn’t… and I’ve never been to Time Square for New Year’s Eve.
However, New Year’s day was lots of fun! We had the 6th Annual LOST Polar Bear Dip! And it was great! Our biggest LOST PBD ever… 37 dippers, twice as many people watching all the fools in the water… -2C air temp and +3C water temp… perfect! Well maybe not perfect, but better than the last two freakin’ cold winters!
Then on Jan 2 a whole bunch of us made the trek out to the Pan Am Pool in Scarberia to do 100 x 100’s on 100 (which in non-swimming lingo means swimming 100 meters, 100 times on a 1:40 pace time = 10k swim!). Great new pool… in the middle of nowhere. Should have been in Oakville in my (biased and) humble opinion, but that ship has sailed.
Bud did a great job getting out a lot of the Etobicoke Masters, Lynn represented Burlington Masters, Joanne, Michael and Will were the pride of the Oakville Masters… and of course, most of them were (or will be!) LOSTies as well! I believe we had about 30 swimmers out for it, not too shabby! I was worried there would only be 5 or 6 of us, but they just kept coming!
I have been nursing a bad back for almost 3 weeks now and was hoping it would cut me some slack and let me do the 100 x 100’s… well we came to a compromise. My back said you can do it, but… you can only do open turns! That’s a lot of slow open turns! But we got it done! I think there was only about 7 of us that were able to do all 100 on 1:40, but it doesn’t matter, everyone was able to over-do it to their own ability. I’m pretty sure everyone was feeling it the next day.
Special tip of the hat goes to Tara Norton (our celebrity former pro-Ironman guest). She came to mind when I turned to Brian at #38 (or 3.8k) and said “I’d much rather do 62 more than have to get out and jump on the bike for 180k!” I’m thinking Tara would have loved to have gotten out and jumped on the bike then! But she did the whole thing… and earned some real “pool cred”… although I did say to her when we finally finished 2 hours and 47 minutes later when I saw her grimacing because she had to pee so badly she thought she was going to explode… “you’ve got the swimming down, but if you really want to be a true swimmer you have to learn how to pee in the pool!” (of course, I was joking… I’d never pee in the pool! eww.).
Scary thing is she went home and ran 12k. She wins. I made it to Bud’s truck and ripped open a box of chocolates he had received from a client an scarfed them down. And that was just to get me home. When we got home, Joanne and I went out for lunch. I had the “Big Ass” burrito… about the size of a small child… and then held the couch in place for about an hour and a half. Overall I probably broke even on calories for the day.
But… a good time was had by all. Well done everyone!
Only 5 or 6 months until the start of LOST Swimming! Woohoo!
Cheers,
Rob