Strawberry Fields Triathlon: The Swim

I've always been a middle of the pack swimmer and this event was no exception. I came in 151st place on the swim, which was right smack in the middle of the pack (53%). Unfortunately my time was much worse than I expected. I went into the event predicting a swim time somewhere around 30 minutes, but my actual time was 40:77. That's over 10 minutes worse than my swim time at my previous Olympic distance event.

It's always hard for me to analyze why certain swims are better or worse than others. On the bike or run, it's usually easy to tell why a particular course is fast or slow (hills, wind, heat, etc) but some of the likely factors for my slow swim include:

• Less swim training time since I've been focusing on the bike this year.
• Course distance could have been wrong. The race director had the swim course reversed on the morning of the race because ocean currents changed direction, so maybe the markers were not placed exactly right when they moved them. (How do they measure that in the water anyway?)
• Ocean currents could have both slowed my forward progress and also moved me off course enough to make me swim a bit farther than intended. Since there's no good reference point out in the ocean, it's always hard for me to tell how bad the currents are. It's not like I can see the bottom of the pool and tell how fast (or slow) I'm moving.

The good news is I was able to get a new PR in spite of the fact that my swim time was 10 minutes slower than I expected it to be. That means I could realistically set a time goal of 2:30 for an Olympic distance race since I know I can finish a 1500m swim in under 30 under the right conditions.