Pic Spocket

I just completed a pretty epic weekend of training and racing. Saturday, I headed to Kensington Park in Michigan for a long brick workout in the hills: 117 km bike with hill repeats on hilly and rolling terrain immediately followed by a 30 min run. At the end of the bike segment, I actually ran into a group of LPC athletes, which was pretty nice. The workout was tough and I was dead once I got back home shortly after noon.

Sunday morning brought something new for me: a stand-alone open water swim race called “Swim to the moon” organized by Epic Races. This is a 5000 m one-way swim through 5 connecting lakes in the Pinckney Recreation Area once again in Michigan. I entered the ‘wetsuit division’ for the race. Turns out that the race was mostly attended by swimmers (duh!) and not so many triahletes it seemed. We were only ~23 swimmers in the wetsuit division.

For the race, I put my Garmin 310XT GPS watch under my swim cap to record my race. I thought I had a great idea by turning off the “swim mode - which does smoothing” so that the watch could notify me at each kilometer during the swim (vibration), but it turned out to be a bad idea. In the normal mode, the watch ended up overestimating the distance travelled by ~20%, so when the 4km warning arrived, I thought I was on fire with a killer time and I increased the pace further. After a while, I knew somethign was wrong because 10 minutes later, I still was not seeing a hint of a beach or a finish line. Bummer! Here is a satellite view of my swim through the 5 lakes. Pretty cool huh?

You can actually see on the satellite view where the watch was warning me of the completed kilometers. As you can see, I still had ways to go when the 4 km warning came about. Because of false on-the-fly data, it seemed like the swim was never ending. Final distance reported by the Garmin unit: ~6km. I usually get better correlation when I swim with the watch under my swim cap.

I really had a blast during this event. They had aid stations with drinks and gels at various docks and boats.

My final time for the 5000 m swim with wetsuit: 1:21:58. Still far from real good swimmers that finished the race in 1h06 (without wetsuits!!!!), but I am very happy with my performance. This equates to a 31′ time on a Half Ironman swim, and a 1h02 for the full Ironman swim. Considering that was my first swim to life above 3000 m, that’s quite good.

With this time, I get 4/27 in the wetsuit division, 3rd overall male and a nice award: a “swim to the moon - Award” beach towel.

I did better than I was expecting, and this gives me a huge confidence boost for my upcoming triathlon swims, including next year’s Ironman (3.8 km) : now I know I can do the distance!!

>> RESULTS: Overall

Here is the link to the interactive Garmin site.

But the weekend of training was not done.. I had to log in a long run of 1h40 later in the day. I have done it during dinner time, running through Malden Park and at the Detroit River for a good 20 km. The legs were completely DEAD after that. Today Monday is a rest day, and I feel pretty sore from the last week. Back to training tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Sport and Races, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.