How to write a triathlon blog:
1) Do a race
2) Wait at least a month to write a blog post about it.
3) ???
4) Profit?
That doesn’t seem to be working out for me.
The Upstate Splash was a first-time event put on by my master’s team (Greenville Splash!) to raise money for scholarships to provide kids with swim lessons. It looks like it will continue to be an even based on the huge success it was this year! We had a 1.2 and 2.4 mile swim which definitely attracted a lot of swimmer and triathletes from the area.
The event was out at Lake Jocassee which is a little over an hour from Greenville – really out in the middle of nowhere, actually. But it’s a beautiful lake in the mountains and is a great venue. There’s not really anywhere to stay out there, but there is a campground on site and we had the opportunity to take over a teammate’s campsite who couldn’t use her’s. Yay camping!
We enjoyed some weenies, s’mores, and..uh…beverages (those are not allowed at SC state parks but the key here is to not be an obnoxious asshole!). We also enjoyed the convenient beach at the campground and goofed off a lot before going to bed way too late in our tents. Note to self: not a good plan for Ironman training.
Saturday morning came way to stinking early and we walked over to the race start and a great sunrise.
See that nice water. It’s normally smooth and glassy. It was so not on this morning. Apparently it was pretty windy and there was some pretty good chop on the water (I mean, for a lake. It’s not an ocean).
We had wave starts and I was in the second wave. The first 500 m or so I felt the chop but thought it was because of the other swimmers around me. Then we kept swimming and the chop just kept getting worse the further we got from the beach (it’s in a cove, kind of). While it doesn’t really bother me that much, I was thinking about my IM training buddy Danette who was also swimming the 2.4 mile who doesn’t love swimming as much as I do. (She ended up doing just fine but was super worried about Chattanooga. I told her it would be much, much easier!!).
Once I reached the turn around, I hit the lap button on my watch and headed back to the start (obviously). The chop was definitely coming from the north because the return leg was much easier than the outbound leg! I just kept swimming until I reached the finish which was a boat with some people writing numbers down. High-tech, I know, but they weren’t anticipating how big it would be this year! They already have a timing sponsor for 2016 which is awesome.
I looked down at my watch and saw 2.64 and said ??!?!. No wonder that seemed so long. I didn’t think I swam off course and when I checked my garmin file later I found that I stayed pretty well on course so the swim was definitely long. Whew. My final time was 1:11:30, which is not very meaningful for 2.6 miles but my pace per 100 was 1:31, which I think is a nice, comfortable pace for an IM swim.
After I finished I grabbed some food (there was SO MUCH), and packed up my car quickly because I had a 90 mile ride on the schedule for the afternoon. There wasn’t really any good place out near the lake so I had to drive back to Greenville. I ended up not getting started until 12:30…we’ll just say I didn’t finish 90 miles but I tried.
Anyways, that’s the Upstate Splash!
swim.run.eat 