Friday long swim

Oh dear, I am laughing, I had an EPICALLY long swim - it was good, but it was even better when it was over!

I have been feeling remorseful at how little I've been swimming this month. I have these two long-distance swims lined up for September, and I'm looking forward to them both quite a bit, but I guess when I signed up for them I did not know that I'd have any kind of bike here for training purposes and I also had not yet signed up (it is related!) for a late-season half-ironman! I thought the races would serve as good incentives to make sure I swam a lot, but in the event, the bike has taken priority (because, as Al says, in long-course triathlon it really is all about the bike!).

Anyway, I was determined to get in a 90-minute sea swim before I go back to New York on Sunday, so instead of going to the gym with Brent for a treadmill run, I headed out into the SEA for a notional 45-minute out-and-back. I swim north along the shore, so at any point I am actually only about 50 yards off the shore, it is shallow and one can easily get ashore if needed, so it is actually ideal for swimming long.

I find that it is a bit of a trial to stay in for long enough - I have had several swims here where I turned around a little early and then had to kind of kill time in the water when I arrived back at my starting point by doing little pointless loops - so I was kind of figuring it would be good to swim a bit longer on the outwards leg just so that I wouldn't be tempted to cut it short...

I am a person of terrible sense of direction, including NO eye whatsoever for landmarks/buildings; but I know that it is a mile from the Royal Palms to the Ritz-Carlton, because that was the course for the Flowers Sea Swim in June, and the Ritz is probably the only building other than the Grandview (where Brent lives - it is conveniently painted a lovely and unusual color of light blue and looks accordingly quite different from the plethora of yellow and sand-colored buildings that all look the same to me!) that I can actually recognize from the seaward side. So when I spied the Ritz in the distance, I thought I would keep swimming until I got there so that I could have DATA afterwards on exactly how far I'd swum!

Anyway, it was pretty much exactly the 1-hour mark when I got to the Ritz, and I turned around and headed back into what had become much higher swell in the meantime - not rough, but bumpy...

The story was "Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink!" My aerobic fitness and muscular endurance are pretty good, I definitely can swim for a very long time without stopping (I want to do a 10K swim sometime!), but I must confess that I cannot remember the last time I was so thirsty as the last half-hour of this swim - the swell means that salt water is inevitably going into one's mouth, even if one is not actually swallowing it - I was fantasizing for the last twenty minutes about the huge glass of water I was going to drink and the orange I was going to eat when I got home!

And indeed they were both very good...

(I got out 50 yards or so early - I had my eye on the clock and realized that I was going to be late for the movie we were planning on watching on television if I did not hop out and hoof it the very last bit home! Stopped my watch at 2:02, so it is fairly even splits, all things considered...)

2 hours - EPIC THREE-MILE SWIM!