Despite Rev3's best efforts to de-mud the lake, there was still some lingering sludge at the start. Fortunately, it ended up being only ankle deep instead of knee deep like it would have been had they not bulldozed a path for us. And another interesting thing to note is that it stays shallow for quite some time. Like too shallow to swim shallow. And being that I am so slow at swimming that I actually walk faster than I swim, it was actually kind of a benefit for me. We were able to walk about a quarter of the way to the first buoy before it became deep enough to swim. There were a few souls swimming from the start (Don't ask me how. There must be folks with stumpier arms than me.) I was walking faster than some of the swimmers. I was actually passing people on the swim! Wasn't long though before they were re-passing me while I was actually "swimming".

They said the water temp was 70 degrees. Felt a little bit chillier to me, but I'm the one who goes numb in a full body wetsuit in 70 degree water. Guess it means I need to swim faster.

The course was a triangle-trapezoid course:


Swim triangle on first lap, Trapezoid on second

Math folks, please correct me if I'm wrong about calling it a trapezoid because I'm pretty sure I am wrong.

The longest part of the swim was the far part of the triangle...the part parallel to shore. Definitely felt like it took forever to travese both times I swam it.

Coming back towards shore after the first loop, again it gets shallow far out from shore, too shallow to swim, so it gave me a chance to rest my arms, gulp a GU and chat with my fellow slow swimmers. We came to the consensus that it doesn't matter how slow we are, we're doing a friggin' 140.6! All that matters is making the cutoffs, even if our swim time is 2:19:59.

At the 1.2 mile mark, I was a little slower than I had anticipated, but still faster than my slowest HIM swim at approximately 52 minutes.

In general, the swim was pretty uneventful. The water was murky from all the mud, but it was calm, especially considering it was in a big lake (Lake Erie). It was chilly for me, but I'm a wuss. There wasn't a whole lot of dunking, fist fitting, or splashing either as there were only a couple hundred athletes, compared to the thousands who participate in the Ironman races. And the buoys that led you into the finish had orange at the bottom and yellow at the top and greatly resembled candy corn which was motivating.

My goal for the swim was 1:40-1:45. My actual time was 1:50:01. A little slower than expected, but I had not swam more than 2 miles prior to the race, and I still made the cutoff with a 29:59 cushion, so I can't complain too much. And it still gave me plenty of time in T1 as I wanted to start the bike at 2 hours at the latest to give myself plenty of time to make the bike cutoff.