Harbour Crossing

This week hasn’t been the best week by a long shot. The whole family, bar me, have been sick all week (actually longer in my poor wife’s case). This has resulted in me slimming down a number of my training sessions so that I could help out more (breakast’s, dinners kids to bed etc), which is cool as on my list of priorities family comes first.

What was more of a concern was that despite holding out all week, on Friday I woke up with a sore throat and croaky voice. That didn’t bode well for the Harbour Crossing on Sunday, so I spent all day Saturday eating fruit, thinking healthy thoughts, and praying that the sore throat wouldn’t be followed by a runny nose and a chest infection.

So when I woke up on Sunday the first thing I checked was whether or not I could breath through my nose. It was OK. I certainly wasn’t 100% but good enough.

The day was beautiful and the water warm. This was my first mass start swim and it was quite an experience. There were over 1200 people entered so the field was pretty close to what there will be at IMNZ. I seeded myself safely towards the rear as I’m under no illusions as to my swimming abilities, even so the traffic was pretty heavy going for the first half of the swim. I had planned to it on peoples feet as much as possible and had some success in doing so, but the water was pretty murky and I gave up trying after a while.

I think in the end I must have swum well over 2.8 k’s as I kept verring to the right and had to repeatedly come back on course. In the end I finished in 1 hour 7 minutes, but most importantly I beat Rodney Hide! It was a really good day, I got to start next to Ian Johns (ex-All Black) and survived my first mass start open water swim.