Ironman training swim

Saturday morning, 5th of October, rolled around. Alarm was set to 6 in the morning, quick breakfast and to the town we went. At 8 o'clock the start is given for Ironman training swim - race where the Hawaii Ironman swimming leg is open for public to race at. The only difference was that the finish was moved to a beach next to the pier, during the actual race swimming start and finish is as the same location in the bay. Online registration died before the deadline was reached so we needed to get the registration done in the morning. After filling 3 different sheets, paying the entrance fee and agreeing with pages full of small printed text we got our numbers. Mine was a beautiful round one - 220. It was like a real race with proper lifeguards on duty and timing chip and all. Just like open water swims go there was briefing before the race. Even some pro triathletes were present, doing their warm up for the main race I guess :)

Ironman start spot

Briefing done the start was given. About 200 swimmers started out to 2.4 mile (3900 meter) swim race. As the water is warm in the ocean there were no wetsuits used, but one could do the race using fins (although I did not see many people using this option). Somehow I ended up in the middle of 2 big groups at the start so first I got to just swim in my own pace. Soon enough this fun was over and I was getting squeezed into people while having to literally jump over some swimmers, at the same time trying to figure out the direction where to swim. At one point I found a set of legs to swim after :) For a little while I was quite satisfied with the finding, but soon enough I got tired of those feet jumping from one place to the other - at one point they were in front of me and another second they moved 2 meters to my right and so on. I have never really understood swimming at someones feet, it takes too much effort from me to deal with such distraction. While checking my direction I noticed that there is a whole big group in front of the legs I tried to follow, but they all were going crooked. As the pace wasn't that fast I decided to take a shortcut and make my own way to the next buoy :) And what do you know - once at the buoy I had made my way to the front of the pack! Rest of the race was a whole lot more interesting as we swam together with one tall guy who had colorful swim pants on :) Side by side we moved together to the finish line.

Swimming back was in one way easier as there wasn't so much struggle with other people, but on the other hand all the directions were missing as the buoys were not visible (and we had to aim for the beach now). Luckily there were some paddlers who made sure we don't fall into the opposite direction so we got to swim next to them and did not need to look for the direction ourselves.

All in all it was a very nice race. My pace was good - just fast enough to keep the tempo up and not too fast to make me exhausted. Weather was nice, it was sunny and the waves were not too big. My race time was 1 hour 1 minute and 52 seconds which made me quite happy :) Now I have something to compare myself with once the main race day rolls around.

Certified Ironman Training Swim finisher :)

Rest of the day was quite a slow one :) Race was tiring :) Tried to go to see turtles by the marina, but the park closed at 16:30 and we just got there too late. As it turned out the parks will be closed for some time now as US government did not accept the budget so government organizations get closed down for a while. Oh well, there is still time for us to do the sightseeing so no worries!