Race report: USMS Del Valle open water festival (5k)

Posted by Rachel

If you don't feel like reading this whole recap, the main takeaway from this race is that I'm not quite in good enough shape to finish a strong 5 km open water swim. The next 5k I sign up for will most certainly be a run.

Rewind
It's hard to remember exactly why I thought signing for a 5k open water swim would be a good idea. I THINK my rationale was that 5k is longer than 3.8k, so if I can do the 5k it'll be good IM training. It also dawned on me while I was researching this race that is it a swimmer race, meaning nobody wears a wetsuit. What the hell, I thought... I'll be a swimmer. I won't wear a wetsuit.

I now much better understand the effect of the wetsuit. I never thought it made me much faster since I swim pretty high in the water anyway, but I do think it really helps in sighting. When you lift your head up to look for the buoy, your hips want to sink. In a wetsuit, they can't really sink. I think that's the main advantage for me, and today around the 4 km mark I really wished I wasn't sinking.

I made some friends
Before the race, I met two new friends while I was checking out the course. (By the way, I had to walk REALLY far to find the turn buoys at the far end of the course. Not a good sign when the swim course feels like a really long walk.) Anyway, at the end of my 2 mile swim last week I remember passing somebody doing the butterfly. I thought I was hallucinating from oxygen deprivation or something, but it turns out that this guy I met this morning DID in fact do the whole 1 mile swim butterfly. (Crazy. And no, that's not enough fly for the guinness book of world records, I asked.) Anyway, he and the girl I met were really nice and let me keep my stuff with their family, after I asked the girl where she puts her car key during the swim without a wetsuit (a detail I had not considered until I was stuck with a car key, a swimsuit, and a cap). Also, my pool training buddy had signed up for the event too which was great.

Race plan
Last weekend, I really attacked the 2 mile swim. I was really tired this week (cumulative training effect and all) so I decided to just go long and comfortable and see if I could hold on the whole 5k (spoiler alert: no). In the pre-race course description and safety blurb, the RD said 'if you are at all apprehensive about your ability to complete the 5 or 10k, please withdraw now.' I stood there for a minute wondering if I should withdraw, but I had already paid $75 and drove an hour, so I went for it. I figured, now is as good a time as any for my longest swim in 12 years :p

It's go time
The water was warm, 72 degrees, so it was no issue temperature-wise. People were commenting that the wind had started to pick up and I was wondering why anyone cared- it's not a bike race or a run, people! (more on this later). We started and everything was fine. I set my watch to beep every 1 km and the first 2k or so were really uneventful. There was a little bit of chop at the far end of the course (wind-duh!), which really surprised me but I just tried to swim smoothly through it. It was a 2-lap course and other than my goggle strap slipping off once and having to fix it, it was really going fine. I noticed my time was about 43:00 at the halfway point which seemed kind of slow, but I was really doing this for training anyway.

So lap 2 starts and everything is going fine. Around 3k I still kind of felt like I was going pretty easy so I picked it up a little (so I thought; looking at my splits I really didn't). The crowd had thinned quite a bit and I seemed to be having issues sighting, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Then at the far end of the course, I started to lose my mental game. This swim is SO LONG and I am still so far away. Right at that point my watch beeped for the 4 km mark, and I was thinking that on IM day I'll be out of the water at this stage. But today, I am getting really tired and starting die. At some point I ran into one of the turn buoys and got all tangled up in the yellow rope that was hanging from it. I have no idea how it happened, but I had to stop and get untangled and another girl actually stopped to see if I was ok. I started stopping (too frequently) to find the next buoy, figure out "am I there yet?" (I was not there yet), and the whole thing was going down (I'm yelling timber). If you don't believe me, you can check out my Garmin file.

See? I told you so. 

So I was really struggling, but then at the last turn buoy with about 500 m left I saw my pool training buddy! (He has a pretty distinctive stroke, which was really helpful for me this particular moment.) I thought to myself, if I can push to stay with him in training, I can do it today, too. And then I got really mad at myself for basically giving up back at the 4 km mark, because I never give up in practice no matter how tired I am. So now I'm dead set on trying to keep up with my training buddy, and I'm working harder and feeling better again. But somehow, seemingly all of a sudden, I found myself about 50 yards to left of my training buddy and everyone else I went around that last buoy with. How the hell did this happen? Well, it's probably because my stroke was completely falling apart. No matter.... I just kept chugging and finished strong (although my training buddy did come out 20 sec before me). I ended up finishing in 1:27:21, which to be honest is longer than I thought it would take. But what can you do... if I look at it as a workout, then hopefully it will make me stronger and it will have been worth it!

Post-race

A few seconds after I finished, all of a sudden I felt like I was going to pass out (I have passed out many times before and unfortunately know what it feels like). I had to sit down right away, and after about a minute I felt perfectly fine. This has NEVER ever ever happened after a swim before so I was slightly concerned. A quick google shows it could be related to motion sickness (which I am highly susceptible to, thanks Dad) and earplugs tend to help most people who this has happened to. I also saw that it could be a blood distribution thing. Anyway, I'll just be careful in the future and hopefully that was a one time thing. I hung around for a bit talking to my training buddy and his wife and my new friends (well one of them.... the other was still in the water doing a 5k butterfly). I found out that I got third in my age group but decided not to wait around for the medal because they weren't planning to distribute them any time soon and I had a bike ride to do. 

Also relevant to post-race, I was craving a coffee milkshake and thought that I earned it, so I got lunch at Habit. I also followed with a 63 mile bike ride (5600 ft climbing) in a pace that is close to my best for that course, so it seems like my brutal swim death was short-lived in its training impact. More on that in my training recap tomorrow. 

My next 5k

Will be a run. For real. In all seriousness, I'm not sure if I would do an open water 5k again. I do love swimming but I am a better pool swimmer than open water and I don't think training twice week (< 10 k yards/week) is quite enough to result in a strong 5k. The endurance from bike and run cross over well with each other but just didn't translate over to that last 1k of the swim. For now, I don't want to think about moving ever again after this Ironman anyway!