The showers grow wetsuits… might there be a 70.3 in the air? (Taken with instagram)

On Saturday, I participated in the Limmat river swim (“Limmatschwimmen”). There was an actual race (see first pic), but I chose not to embarrass myself and didn’t participate. Instead, I did the “floating with a rubber duck” part (see second pic).

The original plan was to sneak in an open water swim, but the floating was so cozy and fun (plus absolutely nobody was actually swimming) that I couldn’t bring myself to swim. So floating all the way it was!

It would have been a training swim for this Sunday’s Uster Triathon (olympic distance). I’m watching the lake temperature all the time now:

With the recent heat wave, it looks like the 22 °C that marks the “no wetsuit” line might very well be exceeded. My hope is on some cold rain until the weekend.

There’s a lake Zurich crossing on Wednesday (“Stadtzürcher Seeüberquerung”), and if time permits I’ll participate there. It’s exactly 1500 m; what better than this to get some confidence for the imminent non-wetsuit swim!

When I wrote in my last race report that my next race would be Uster Triathlon end of August, I wasn’t quite correct. I’m participating in tomorrow’s Limmat river swim! 4’000 people will swim down the Limmat river, 2’000 metres (“corresponds to 1’300 metres”, they say). There’s an actual race, but looking at the times people achieve there, it was easy for me to not participate there.

I’ll “abuse” the fun swim however as an open water freestyle training and maybe reduce the very uncomfortable feeling I have when thinking of the imminent non-wetsuit swim in Uster. Plus it’s going to be fun!

Swim start at Ironman Regensburg 2010 (the carnage begins at 1:59). I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be in the first row at such an opportunity. Ever.

My running buddy for early mornings invited me to take advantage of hotel/dinner vouchers she got from work for a weekend in Leukerbad, and so we went there! Shortly after arriving, we went for a long(ish) run. It was a bit hard to find that little lake we were looking for, but we finally managed. It turned out to be not the sight I expected (water), but still pretty:

That’s our shadows there. After the lake, there was a trail of packed snow – just perfect to run along. More perfect than the slippery ice slopes that followed in the forest afterwards. We managed almost without falling and went for an extra loop on the other side of the village, which resulted in this overall:

After that, we enjoyed having the 36 °C (97 °F) hotel thermal bath all to ourselves. A perfect opportunity for a little swim training! Freestyle felt like swimming through some hot gel, one lap of 15 metres was already quite exhausting. But it was fun, and everybody else who was in that pool hates us now. Sorry for the splashing!

Saturday was skiing/snowboarding time. The weather was, again, pretty much awesome:

Leukerbad is not a huge skiing resort, I think we’ve seen most of its 50 kilometres of slopes. The snow was pretty good the whole day despite the high temperatures. Oh, and I brought my new phone to play with take better pictures than I used to. It has a front facing camera:

The evening brought another thermal bath session, but this time we went to a larger pool and it was definitely not possible to do any kind of workout.

On the last day, we went cross country skiing on Gemmi Pass. You take a cable car to the top of a cliff towering over the village, and from there another small cable car to the frozen lake on which the run is situated. You can see it here, towards the lower left corner:

Have I mentioned that we were quite lucky with the weather?

Now who would not want to ski around when the start looks like this:

Not me. One loop was 5 km and I could tell we were in the mountains: everything was a bit more exhausting than usual. And my cross country skiing form can still be improved very much.

This is what the loop is situated like:

I tried to record the way back down to the village with my Garmin, but somehow I didn’t manage to get the track hovering in the air. Too bad.

I also saw this:

An ad for Gemmi triathlon in September. It’s “sprint distance”, but a super tough one: 900 metres swimming, 23.2 km cycling with 750 m elevation and then 3.8 km running with 1.1 km elevation. Probably more walking than running! I might just participate :)

A great weekend all in all.

Less than usual, no more crazies than usual – I was about right ;)

I’m about to settle a recent discussion on “will there be many people at the pool on Christmas Day?”

The hypotheses are:

• Yes, it’s going to be full of families
• No, who’s that crazy to go swimming on Christmas day
• Only crazies will be there, but there are more crazies than you’d think

All my money is on the second one. Will know in 30 minutes!

I recommend swimming laps in the same pool as a bunch of teenage girls doing their synchronised swimming training.

Do they ever have to breathe?

How the hell can you propel yourself forward with one leg permanently in the air?

Also, the (underwater) music was awesome (and loud).

This is how much pool I had to share with exactly one other guy for the last 30 minutes.

or “How to make these mistakes you’re supposed to make only once”

I had my very first triathlon on Sunday. I did some exemplary preparation for it by going to the army for four weeks and training once per week max for a full month.

It was a short distance (0.5 km swim, 18.4 km bike, 3.8 km run)*, and my main goal would have been to be able to do front crawl for the swim, but no, I’m not there yet.

The weather was awesome, and contrary to my fears, the outdoor pool was even heated to about 24 °C. I had borrowed a tri suit from a friend, used my road bicycle and normal running shoes. Among my numerous fans (haha) was my dad who took a few pictures, which I used here, thank you!

I set up my transition zone (not much to set up, actually):

and then nervously walked around for one hour, trying to find out where to enter and leave the transition zone. I watched two other waves swim and got ready for my own.

I had to share my lane with four others, and about 30 seconds before starting, they started to ask how fast we were, probably to arrange a certain order to minimise getting kicked in the face. They countdown was suddenly at zero, and unfortunately I couldn’t join the discussion any more as I had some swimming to do (second lane, blueish goggles):

However, two seconds later, they’d already passed me. Not without me kicking somebody in the head during the process (sorry!):

A few laps later (we had to do ten lanes), I felt still okay, but the water around me was a bit more quiet.

Like, much more quiet.

Anyway, I enjoyed my solo “show” and was happy to finish the swim part. I almost didn’t get out of the pool (thank you for not taking pictures) and wobbled to the transition zone.

Transitions weren’t timed separately, but also without T1, my swim was super mega slow. “Faster than only three others” slow, to be precise. But never mind, I put on my cycling shoes (some struggling there!), number, helmet and glasses and left the transition zone. It’s actually a hockey rink, so it was pretty slippery, especially with race bike cleats on!

The cycling course went ever so slightly uphill for the first few minutes so I felt like progressing only slowly, but everybody experienced the same, I guess. We had to do two laps on this course:

Towards the end of the first lap, around point 420, I passed a few others and followed one guy. At the point where we got back to the same course again (and should have turned right to pass by start/finish), he turned left, and the volunteer with his flags was not really looking, so I ended up doing a left turn, too.

When I realised that I was on the second lap without having passed the start, I asked a volunteer if I shouldn’t have passed start by now, and he said yes; the next volunteer I asked what to do, and she didn’t really know. I decided not to turn around, which – in retrospective – was really, really dumb, but in the moment it seemed okay.

Cycling went okay, especially one part towards the end where the paving was really smooth. My dad captured me just before the end of the cycling leg, me already trying the ultra pro “leave the shoes on the bike” technique:

T2 went okay, I’ll definitely invest in elastic laces for next time. Lots of fumbling around without them! The run was really short, here I am after about 100 m:

Something’s wrong with my left wrist! I’ve seen that before…

I didn’t feel super strong, but okay, and it was much shorter than what I usually run, so it was over with quickly. Finishing:

And discussing my little bike stunt with an official:

They were like, “hmmm, what should we do, disqualification wouldn’t be fair, you did finish after all blablabla” but in the end it says DNF in the ranking list for me. Booo.

I thought it was fun and I want to do more triathlons, I’ll get my own tri suit, tri cycling shoes (to do the “shoes already on bike” thing), elastic laces and probably other running shoes, because mine chafe a bit on the toes. And a neoprene suit for open water swims.

And I want to be able to do crawl for more than 100 metres ;)

Next weekend would be another triathlon, but I can’t go, so that was my triathlon season. I plan to do about four more runs this year (one HM, three short ones around 10K) and lots of swimming. Lots.

* The bike leg was actually just 15.1 km, after measuring it with Google Maps.

Update: I’m no more DNF now.