Swimrun: What and Why?

I first heard about the sport of swimrun when Snarky Girl returned from a trip to Germany, reporting that she had seen people running around in a park with swim paddles on their hands. She said they were also sometimes swimming but the whole thing was hard to parse.

Sometime later, like months later, I stumbled on something on the internet about swimrun that got me curious enough to plug it into google. The subsequent chain of events is a bit murky but at some point I started listening to the Löw Tide Böyz podcast. The hosts, Chipper and Chris, reminded me of the Two Gomers, with their down-to-earth attitude and focus on fun. I started looking into swimrun a little more and discovered the Casco Bay race in Portland, Maine. That’s only a three and a half hour drive. Mervus and I had almost gone there last all for our 25^th wedding anniversary getaway. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get Snarky Girl on board as a partner / co-conspirator.

So what exactly is swimrun? It’s sort of like triathlon except without the biking. Also, instead of just one swim and one run, you swim and then run, and then swim and then run, and, as the Löw Tide Böyz put it, just keep going until you’re done. Or, don’t stop! Swimrun originated in Sweden and traditionally you go from island to island, running across one island, swimming to the next, then running across that island, swimming to the next, etc. Unlike in triathlon, you don’t change gear. Instead you swim in your shoes and run in your wetsuit with your paddles and pull buoy strapped onto your body. Whenever I’m explaining this to someone, this is where I pause for questions:

You swim in your shoes? Yes, you do. You need shoes with good drainage.

You run in a wetsuit? Isn’t that hot? Yes, you do, and yes, I expect it is. Most people seem to wear those short-sleeved wetsuits with shorts instead of pants. They also make special swimrun wetsuits.

After those questions are out of the way, I bring up what I consider the best part of swimrun, “By the way, swimrun is traditionally a team sport and you are tethered to your partner.”

So, yes, that’s the gist of it. Snarky Girl and I will be running through the woods and fields and swimming through the ocean of the Casco Bay archipelago this coming July while tied together with some kind of rope.

Why? Because the last year has been really hard. I need something fun and vaguely silly and adventurous and badass and somewhat outrageous. An event that has no meaningful clock. I can’t think of a better person to do this craziness with than Snarky Girl because whenever something goes wrong – a lot might go wrong – we will laugh pretty hard about it. But if something goes seriously wrong, we will have each other’s backs. I’ll try to share as much of this adventure as I can. I’m already pretty in love with swimrun and we haven’t even done one yet!