The idea:
It all started with a text from Snarky Girl a few years ago.
“Hey – we are in a park north of Berlin and people are running around with swim paddles! They look crazy. What do you think is going on?”
No idea, but it stuck in my mind. Time passed. I had surgery to have my thyroid out. I needed some kind of new adventure and started googling. Somehow I came across the Löw Tide Böyz podcast and the Ödyssey Swimrun website. Those people in the park had surely been swimrunning! Swimrun is a relatively new sport where teams of two run and swim together, usually through a beautiful natural landscape. A little more googling revealed a race in Portland, Maine, less than a four hour drive. Of course, we should do this! For more on swimrun, see this post.
The decision to do the race was easy. Choosing a team name took longer. Middletown Mermaids? Middlesexy Mermaids? Eventually we hit upon Team Mermatron. Rose let us know that the Mermatron is an actual creature. She’s a female siren mermaid dragon, who fights the Power Rangers. Perfect! That’s us in a nutshell. We registered for the Casco Bay short course, about 9 miles of running and 2 miles of swimming.
Training:
Swimrun training commenced as soon as I finished the Virginia Beach half marathon last March. At first “swimrun training” just meant “more swimming.” Snarky Girl and I could certainly handle 9 miles of running. We swim about once a week, but post-pandemic swimming workouts had topped out around 1200-1500 meters. We spent April getting used to being back in the pool on a regular basis and swimming longer distances.
We had essentially zero open water swimming experience, but that was about to change. Our “maiden voyage” was May 6th. We headed to Miller’s Pond, a beautiful state park that is only a few miles from where we live. Snarky Girl had a triathlon wetsuit. I had Mervus’s old sailing wetsuit. From high school. I could barely get it on and once in it, I could barely walk. The water was really cold. We swam about 150 meters across a little cove and we couldn’t put our faces in the water. At that moment, we both had serious doubts about whether we could complete this event at all!
But then we did an important thing. We ran back to where we had started swimming and tried again. The same 150 meters. The second time felt a lot more manageable. We put our faces in the water. We got across the cove a lot quicker. That 150 meters still felt really far, but maybe we could do this after all.
I have been learning about swimrun online. I know it’s popular to hate on Facebook but for niche interests, it’s ideal. I started posting questions in a swimrun Facebook group and suddenly another team, Team Adorkable, offered to lend us a set of swimrun wetsuits! Getting out of the sailing wetsuit and into the swimrun wetsuit was a major breakthrough. I could get the suit on! I could walk and even run! Things looked a lot more promising with those suits! THANK YOU Team Adorkable!
Swimrun training makes really cool maps!
From early May to mid-June, we kept at it. The next time out, we swam to Lizard Rock, much further than across the cove! We made friends in the middle of Miller’s Pond – two women who ended up signing up for Casco Bay! I swam almost all the way across Cedar Lake! A few days later, Snarky Girl joined me and we made it across the whole lake! It got warmer and we got braver and soon we were doing actual swimrun training sessions, running on the trails and swimming hither and yon across Miller’s Pond. Amazing.
Open water swimming has been…..Eye opening? Transformative? Maybe even life changing? I’ve heard that pool swimming is to open water swimming what treadmill running is to running outside. Now I understand that. You can go anywhere in the water! Seeing the edge of a pond from the middle of the pond is a completely different perspective. It’s like a part of the world that used to have a barrier around it suddenly opens up. I can imagine that people who are afraid to go in the woods and then get over that fear might have a similar feeling. At some point, we got good enough at open water swimming that it started to feel like we could just keep going. It feels like walking.
We did some swimrun practice so we could work on transitioning from running to swimming and back again. Mervus got me a very cool very big swimrun-specific pull buoy for Mother’s Day. We ordered our other required gear – a safety whistle and an Israeli bandage. Yikes.
A couple of weeks before the race, I took off for 10 days in Iceland. Interesting taper strategy. Luckily, Snarky Girl is highly tolerant. The one thing we didn’t find time for was going to Long Island Sound and swimming in the ocean.
The trip:
For the trip to Portland, we took along the husbands and the daughters. The sons both stayed home to work. We left in the early afternoon on Friday and arrived in Portland around dinner time. The AirBnb was great and we quickly headed downtown for dinner at the Green Elephant. Delicious!
The next day we had a decent agenda of swimrun activities planned. We started with a brunch with the Löw Tide Böyz at the Standard Baking Company. Swimrun originated in Sweden and swimrunners enjoy the Swedish tradition of Fika. There’s no English word for Fika (ALAS!) but it seems to mean coffee and treats with friends. Gotta love an event that includes a PASTRY phase! The Löw Tide Böyz is my favorite swimrun podcast – I am pretty sure they are the only swimrun podcast. I have worked my way through a decent percentage of the back catalog in preparation for this event and I was excited to meet Chipper and Chris in person. Rose was excited too! She got their autographs! We all enjoyed the Fika. Standard Baking Company is not to be missed!
Meeting the Low Tide Boyz!
Standard Baking Company
After Fika, we wandered around Portland a bit and then headed to East End Beach for a swimrun clinic. We got to meet the Adorkables in person! This was our chance to get in the water and see how cold it was. Answer: COLD. But not as cold as that very first swim at Miller’s Pond. We got past the temperature and put our faces in the water. Super grateful to Team Envol for organizing this event. I am not sure we would have been brave enough to go in on our own and it really helped to know what to expect.
Meeting the Adorkables!
Team BABS! Our friends from Miller’s Pond!
After the swimrun clinic, we headed to packet pick-up. Apparently so did every other swimrunner because the line was crazy. We waited a *very* long time, but it gave us a chance to scope people out and chat with the swimrunners in line near us. It was a mix of first-timers like us and folks with more experience. Even the long line didn’t make people grouchy. Rose had a chance to get her picture taken with the Adorkables so that was worth the wait!
Eventually we got our timing chip and collapsible cup and headed to the Great Lost Bear brewery for late afternoon lunch/dinner. The restaurant was really fun – you could easily do a week-long eating tour of Portland. Eventually we went back to the AirBnB, where we played a game, watched a nature show and ate a bunch of delicious bread. I got all my gear together, including a drop bag with a change of clothes. We went to bed.
I went to bed, but not to sleep. This race scared me. Not the running, which would be fine. But the ocean swimming, which would be cold and pretty dang long. For some reason, I like challenging myself. But it’s one thing to challenge a mostly healthy body to a running race. After all, you can always stop and walk. It’s quite another to challenge a body with a known calcium deficiency to a race involving swimming. What if something about the temperature swings or the length of the event caused some kind of severe calcium drop and I started cramping while in the water? That has never happened. I planned to supplement with calcium before the race. I have switched to a liquid calcium and I had little waterproof bottles ready to go. But still. What if this time in pushing to find some kind of edge, I pushed too far? How much of this anxiety was normal pre-race jitters and how much was genuine worry and how much of the genuine worry was justified? No way to know.
I turned on my favorite “Sleepcast” meditation on the Headspace app, “Cat Marina 2”. But the description of boats and cats just reminded me of the pre-race panic attack I experienced in Philadelphia. I tried “Cozy Farmhouse” but that didn’t work either. Finally “After Carnival” did the trick. I drifted off to a lovely voice describing a town getting quiet after carnival festivities. I got less sleep than would have been ideal but a whole lot more than I got before Philly.