siglinde99

Ever since my first summer of open water swimming (two, three? summers ago), I have thought about swimming from one end of Meech Lake to the other, and back. It's 4 km each way (5 miles total for those who don't use the metric system). A week or so ago, someone in my gang of fellow swimmers said we should go for it, and today we did. We started out with 10 swimmers, 7 of whom were stronger and had already done this distance or more. Our group of 4 (including me) form the core of our gang; only Nadine, our ringleader, had ever done this distance.

Here's where we went:

Here is our core group at the end, following a celebratory feast of pea soup, scones, nuts, cheese, watermelon, coffee and chocolate cake (hey, the water was cold and we need to maintain our insulation reserves!):

The six who finished first had long-since disappeared, and missed out on all the snacks.

I was really happy with how things went. I wore my new swim socks and my feet stayed warm enough that I had minimal cramping, despite being in the water for four hours. My neoprene cold water swim cap was pretty nice too, though I ended up with major chafing from the chin strap. I also have chafing on my arms from hitting the "sides" of my suit (okay, the boobs) on each stroke. Next time, Ièll wear a tighter suit!

Right now, I'm feeling pretty hard core, despite the desperate need for a nap when I got home. My longest distance this year was just 5 km, and we didn't work up to this at all, but I'm not too stiff. Today's swim ensured that I am in 21st place overall in my age category for distance in Canada this month (among master's swimmers who bother to keep track), 6th for breaststroke (all ages) and 5th for front crawl. We're already talking about doing a 10 km next year - the swimming marathon distance.