Wednesday, April 20, 2011

King of the Bays

Last weekend Graham, Candice and myself made the hike to Auckland to compete in the King of the Bays ocean swim. It was a scheduled easy day on the legs, so I thought a good 2.8km swim effort would be a nice workout for the day.

For my third race out of four, the weather gods turned on a great show, plenty of rain, wind and a nice little swell rolling into Takapuna. Obviously it was to dangerous to hold the original swim from Milford to Takapuna and the orgainsers made the wise decision to make it a two lap approx 1000m swim. So after the cancellation of the orginial course we all jumped in some buses and made it to the orignal finish line area where they had made the new course. After sitting around waiting in my wetsuit for about 2hrs the motivation was starting to wear thin when we finally made it down to the beach for the start. Before I knew it, the gun was off, some guys with fresh legs where about 100m ahead and I swam, waded, dolphin dived, body surfed the two laps, and got to the finish line with not the best swim of my life.

Next little hiccup of the day, some one left our car lights on, so we had a flat battery, Bugger. Luckly Graham's parents were in the area so gave us a jump start. Some photos below
On the start line

Somewhere out there

Choppy