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Comments: I can say with confidence that I was not alone in finding the deceptive conditions very challenging. Sighting on the first down current leg was difficult. Swimming parallel to shore 100 yd. out did not give me much to sight on. We swam straight into the sun and the buoys were 1/2 mile apart. The surface chop also threw my navigation off just a bit. I was surprised by the speed of the current and had never swam at that beach before. In retrospect I am curious if the correct strategy would have been to swim a line from the point of one jetty to the next so to be in closer to the beach. It seems that might have moved me into calmer waters on the up current leg and made it easier to sight as well. It has NEVER taken me so long to finish a 5K (I had just raced a 4K in a lake in 54 min.) I attribute this to the conditions. I was swimming better than I did the 4K the month before. It took me about 45 seconds per hundred longer to cover the 5K distance in this race. By the end of the race I was beginning to feel cold. What would you do differently?: Longer warm up swim beyond the jetties to assess rip currents. My warm-up swim did not expose the strong current that ran parallel to the shore beyond the jetties. Start further up-current on the beach at the start. I took a gamble and it didn't pay off. I had to swim a short way up-current to get around the first buoy. I missed catching on with the fast starters as a result. An amateur mistake. Get a better reference point for first leg of swim. Swim closer in to minimize current.  Post race
Warm down: Lots of clothes and food What limited your ability to perform faster: Lack of sleep. I could have done more swim training. Up until 2 weeks before the race I had been training for my first HIM (lots of running). Unfortunately I broke a toe the week of the race and DNS. I switched to training for this race using a neoprene sock taped onto my foot. Event comments: 18 of the 64 swimmers DNF. You had to be qualified to enter this race. I suspect the high rate of DNF was a result of the strong current and some what cooler waters. There was a wetsuit division, but only a few people wore wetsuits. The less experienced swimmers could enter the one mile race. The top finishers were blistering fast, and I suspect had a good strategy for dealing with the current. A great race run by a great group of people. Last updated: 2009-06-14 12:00 AM
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United States
Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers
66F / 19C
Sunny
Overall Rank = 12/64
Age Group = 55-59
Age Group Rank = 2/5
I awoke at 1 AM after 3 hours of sleep. I was jet lagged and my internal clock was a mess. I never got back to sleep
A short warm up swim. I had focused entirely on swimming the 2 weeks before the race and I felt ready. The lack of sleep affected my mental focus at times during the race, but did not impair my physical ability.