I chose this race because it is close to 1/2 IM distance plus I expected the conditions to be as bad or worse than my goal race in August. Well, the bay didn't disappoint. Perfect weather, water was a little warm, but the chop was relatively heavy. The first leg of the triangle took me over 20 minutes, it was tough to get into any kind of rythmm swimming into the chop. My goggles got really fogged up and I ended up doing a fair amount of breaststroke the first leg.

2nd leg went better, was able to do freestyle the whole way except to sight, chop seemed to be pushing me a little which was good. 3rd leg went well too, it was along a sea-wall type thing, so it was easy to sight.

Overall, navigation went okay. The fogged goggles cleared themselves up (weird). Because of the chop I wasn't comfortable swimming for a ways w/o sighting, and when I did sight I had to stop and breaststroke (chop+fogged goggles), so I wasn't able to get into a good rythmm.

Practice more in OW. I don't think there is anything left to practice in the pool besides a little more sighting. I didn't get very tired and was able to push towards the finish pretty hard. All it boils down to is that I need more practice.

One of these days I'll get beyond simply looking at the swim as a survival test and more as an actual race!

Shower.


Lack of experience swimming in relatively heavy chop. I felt bad for the 4.4 mile swimmers, since they were less sheltered than our course (and therefore had even more chop!).