This weekend I headed to Dorney Lake (home to the previously run horror-half) for my first ever experience of open water swimming. As I keep veering from “oh it’ll be fine, I can definitely do it” to “OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING???!” when thinking about the swimming events and triathlon I signed up to days after crossing the Barcelona finish line, I thought that getting in the water and having a practice would be one the best ways to ease my fears, especially with the British Gas Mile coming up on Saturday *gulp*.
The session was organised by Human Race who were also running a triathlon throughout the day. My session was at 9am and I was asked to arrive half an hour early, so I was sat in my car watching the eager triathletes unloading ALL of their kit by 8.15am beside the lake. Wow, you need a lot of stuff. Most of them had amazingly swish looking bikes, and crates of kit that they balanced on the front of their handlebars. Now I’m doing my first tri in a few weeks and although I don’t feel as prepared as I really want to be, I certainly wasn’t planning on needing a crate of kit. Hmm….time to worry…. I made it down to the registration point (it was rather complicated as the lake will host to Olympic rowing in a couple of months so there’s quite a bit of construction going on) and registered alongside all of the children who were doing a scootathon. SUCH a good idea to keep all of the children occupied if one or both of their parents is competing – genius! I collected my neon green swim cap and headed for the 45 minute seminar that’d start the session.
“You have already done the hardest thing by signing up to this seminar and turning up, the rest will all be easier.”
Excellent words of advice kicked off the seminar and it really was useful; running through the equipment needed and techniques that would be useful for anyone contemplating their first triathlon. I was more worried about my swimming events – they are longer than my tri swim distance – but skills explained were largely transferrable. It was especially useful to learn about sighting and standing starts, and there were great tips such as tipping water down the front (and back) of your wetsuit to warm you up more quickly once you’re in the water.
Once the talk had finished, we all changed into our wetsuits and headed over to our area for swimming. As there were people racing across the course throughout the day, we nipped over to the quicker recovery lane for our swimming, which was really great. We were split into three groups; those who had open water swimming experience, those who hadn’t swum in open water but were really confident swimmers, and…the rest of us… I am a fairly happy pool swimmer, but as an advocate of breast-stroke, I am under no illusions that I will be one of the slowest swimmers in all of my events, and that’s absolutely fine. Part of the reason why I was so keen to sign up for a training session was to try front crawl with my wetsuit on outside, but I’m not planning to suddenly try to do all of the races using front crawl. We got into the water (COLD) and started getting acclimatised. We were a mixed bunch – all fairly nervous but some were far more nervous that others, so we started swimming out and back to a buoy in pairs and threes, eventually working up to a small group start. Everything went really well – I was happily enjoying the promised buoyancy of my wetsuit and not being able to see the bottom didn’t really bother me, but trying front crawl and getting water in my mouth really did concern me. I’m not sure why, I’m guessing it’s partly due to my mortal terror about getting weil’s disease (or something else) and being really ill, but as soon as I got water in my mouth, I seemed to forget to breath out and then panic. This panic meant I breathed in and out really quickly (under water) and then freaked out a little. Not so much that I stopped swimming, but enough that I thought I needed to stop and flailed about a bit like a blubbery trout. Not ideal…..we then progressed to a standing start with the entire group altogether going around a buoy and whilst it was fine, I was still a bit concerned about my uncontrolled freak out. After we got out I mentioned it to our group’s coach and she essentially told me to swim exactly the same as I swim in the pool, and that I almost certainly wouldn’t die from drinking a bit of sea/river/lake water (but obviously not to try to drink it…). I’m aiming to practice both front crawl and breaststroke this week in the pool and KEEP MY MOUTH CLOSED to try to get used to it, but I’m definitely feeling happier about the event this weekend having done the session – I’d definitely recommend it!
So that was that – I swam in the open and I survived! *HOORAH* Now I just need to get through this week’s training – RCDWest tonight and then swimming every morning with perhaps one more run during the week one night. I’m also planning to get start cycling training (I haven’t done ANY so far and my concern over the cycling element is starting to build….) in the form of spinning starting soon following some expert advice from fellow open water swimmers. I’ll write up a separate post on the sheer joy of meeting other first-time-tri-ers and seeing the lake set up for a tri later in the week as the lycra is calling for tonight’s run….it’s *boom time*….
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