The title says it all. What an adventure!This morning I headed east to Sandy Point State Park to participate in a swim clinic sponsored by Sports & Spinal Physical Therapy. See, http://sportsandspinalpt.com/services/open-water-swim-clinic.asp. A big group turned out to hear the encouraging words, race tips and to jump in to do some swimming.
We split into three large groups to hit the water. We started with a two lap warm up. We all sort of started out into the Bay, dove into the waves and swam out to the buoys that marked the swim zone and kept boats away.
An important note about the water conditions. It was much warmer than I anticipated --- in the 70's. That was weird. The water was also very choppy due to the strong winds blowing across the Bay. The result was swimming into 1-2 foot swells!!!
I'm serious. Holy crap that was a bit unnerving.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally comfortable with surf and even navigating pretty big waves. It's a completely different story to try and swim freestyle through all of this...and doing it while swimming straight!
I learned a great tip today --- how to efficiently turn around the buoys. I'm psyched!
After warming up, practicing turns and how to draft, we all headed down the beach to do some more swimming. We broke into waves of 20 swimmers and headed out to the first buoy. We then all turned and swam parallel to the beach passing four buoys and then swam into shore. The total loop was around 700 meters. We did this loop twice.
After the loops, I practiced some additional sighting and buoy turns.
All in all, today's swim was a HUGE confidence builder.
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