Tuesday Night Swim.... to Canada

Tuesday Night Open Water Swim……

Fairly nice evening for an open water swim. The lake was agreeing with us for the most part, some fairly mild waves. Water was a bit cooler today,… the “wet suit” wearing people are getting closer to the point where wearing them isn’t cheating…. HA HA… that was for you Texas since you said I didn’t make enough fun of you for wearing it today. Pretty soon I’ll have to stop swimming or buy one myself…. Damn the cold. The great equalizer…well sort of. I really thing those things are cheating unless you need them of course like escape from Lake Erie, and Escape from Alcatraz. Well someday Texas we can have a good race with out wet suits…. I look forward to that day!

Yeah so back to Tuesday. My friend D is preparing for the Olympic Length Lorain Triathlon this weekend and he has not yet done a mile in the water. He did today! We did four lengths of the bay today. D did well…. a little winded at the end but completed it for sure and will have enough gas left in the tank to ride and run this weekend. I’m sure that he’ll do great.

OK….again back to Tuesday….. There are A LOT of boats driving around like mad men. We had several pass while we were swimming, pretty close but nothing like the 2 or three boats and three or four jet ski’s that were WAY to close to shore while we were walking down the stairs. If you don’t understand why that’s an issue think about driving your car and looking at the horizon (as you do when you drive) and actually NEED to be looking for a head in the water swimming towards you that’s about……. well the size of a head in the water…. OH and a boat without bow planes will have the bow up quite high, so you visibility right in front of you will be diminished…..So we’re doing well. I feel particularly well today. Nice long strokes, strong and fluid. I’m moving through the water well and JT is there so I have someone to keep pace with, which is always nice. Someone to push you harder and make you swim faster…. SO… again thanks JT for pushing me. So speaking of JT. We were on bay crossing number three heading straight into the sun, which is ALWAYS fun, and if you ever read JT’s blog…. it’s her favorite thing to do. On the first pass into the sun JT was on the inside of me so that may have helped with the problem that occurred on this third pass. We started crossing the bay, moving quickly and it’s always fun to sight into the sun. I use an interesting technique, which is I find a the line in the first few strokes, and keep the sun in the same spot “underwater” only checking the actual “sighting” fairly rarely, because it takes so long for your eyes to adjust to the sun to be able to actually see the land to sight off. So I use the land to my left to know how far I am across the bay and use the sun in the water to keep straight…. Ok… so we’re moving along JT and I are out in front, Texas and D are not too far behind. I catch sight of JT ever six strokes as I breath to the right, looking out in the lake, and as we are moving across the bay …. She’s getting further and further away from me…. So I stop to do two or three strokes of breast stroke in an attempt to ascertain if I’m heading in to shore or she’s heading out… and she’s MOST DEFINITELY heading out. I proceed to keep an eye on her as we move along the bay hoping that she’s going to start heading back in soon. She doesn’t. I stop and start to do breast stroke to see how far out she is and if there are any of our excellent boater friends coming. She just keeps heading out… so I start to tread water and use my hands to whistle at her in hopes of her evaluating her distance from shore and turning back in. At this point Texas pulls up next to me and starts yelling her name. again to no avail. she’s really starting to get out there now. I resign myself to the position that I’m going to have to try to chase her down and grab her. So I take off, luckily when we do these distance swims NONE of us are sprinting, so I can make up some distance. I’m swimming hard, arm turn over is up, legs are going like mad (I usually use a drag kick for these long swims), head up in a typical sprinters stroke (good thing my body remembers how to do that I thought). I’m now heading out to sea as fast as I can go, sighting on JT to be sure I don’t over/under swim her line and miss her. I’m starting to get quite a bit out, and it runs through my head that, hey wait a minute…. Do I really want to get out that far? What if a boat comes by, then we’ll both get hit….. I’m still heading out. I take one last attempt at stopping and whistling at her, I’m bellowing out this high pitched screech that had the dogs on shore (now about 300 yards away) barking like mad. I see her look at my a couple of times breathing every two strokes to the left, and I start to wave towards shore. She turns back towards US waters. Texas and I believe she was making a run for the boarder! I’m not sure what kind of trouble she could possibly be in, but running to Canada was not the answer….. Of course someone brought it to my attention later that she might have just been heading to Put-In-Bay to start the weekend off a little early. But whatever the case, we all made the rest of the swim without being northward bound. Ended up with an excellent swim.

See you in the waves!