Kure Beach Double Sprint

Congrats on finishing your second race at S&T. I was there myself, and really blew the swim. My split said 20:01 for the swim. That was my first open water/ ocean swim as well. I am not doing Kure Beach, but I spoke with a freind the other day who has. He said the thing to watch out for is the fact that you have to swim at the end. I know it's only 375m's but that can be a long swim if you burn yourself out on the first swim and then the bike and run portions. Hopefully the water stays calm that morning. That was one nice thing about the S&T swim. Good luck, and I hope this helps some. I have a guy's number that can help with swimming. He won S&T. He has helped me to understand a lot of what I was doing wrong and gave me some drills to do. Let me know if you wnat to get some lessons.

Erik

Thanks Erik! Congrats on finishing S&T too! It would be great to get some swim tip and drills, what did you learn?

I sent you a pm.

Erik

Kure Beach is a great race, the biggest thing you can do to help yourself in ocean swims is practice, practice, practice. The more time you can spend in the water the more comfortable you will be no matter what conditions are on race day. I would suggest running into the water until it gets about knee/thigh high, then dolphin dive over the waves till it's deep enough to swim. Go under waves if there are whitecaps, otherwise just swim over them. You might have to breathe on one side only depending on wind, waves, etc. On the way in try to catch and ride the waves in and swim till your hand hits the bottom, you can swim faster than you can wade.
Hope this helps.

What a fun race. I've done it twice.

Unfortunately, having grown up in Kansas I too have very little experience with open ocean swims. Kind of freaked me out too.

Like Nick said, try to get in a few practices here and there. My biggest issue was getting out past the breakers and the energy it took. If I had practiced I would have felt more comfortable.

Beyond that, have a plan for your footwear. About half will change into shoes on the beach and the other half will wait until they splash through a kiddie pool on the sidewalk. And then, another 10% ;-) run barefoot.

For the last one I did I went ahead and changed my pedals to toe-clips rather than look pedals. Saved a bit of time since there are extra transitions.

Key is to enjoy the race.

SO how did it go?

I just posted my race report this morning. Overall it was a fun event with good swim conditions. I was pretty happy with my swimming but sucked on the bike and run. But my training has been horribly lax the past couple months and you definitely get what you put into it!

Again I didn't do so well at the first swim, but I have been very bad about training in the past month. The run was good and bike ok except for a pretty bad wind on one portion of the course (I'm little it was blowing me all over the place). I was really encourage and wouldn't have been able to finish without the support of a fellow Texas A&M Aggie on the course! The final swim was better for me, but I think I was just too worn out to really think about it or panic. Last tri for me for a few months....in the mean time I really have to work on my swim and bike.