My friend Charles is training for a triathlon in British Columbia next month and I'm doing a few sprint triathlons during the summer so he's been joining me now and then for my open water swims in Lake Washington at Seward Park.  There's a great cove there with several bouys and lots of people do their swim training in that area.  Most people just swim out and back to the first one but I hate it when it's crowded so I've started swimming in a triangle course around them.  Charles mentioned that he's always wanted to swim completely around the park which juts out into the lake.  It's about 2.4 miles, beach to beach which is the distance he'll have to swim in the Iron Man in BC. 

 

I was hurting from running the Seafair Torchlight 8k the night before (I bonked at the 2-mile mark, it was so warm out and I had to trudge to the finish line down a parade route lined with 300,000 people) but I thought the water might actually make my sore legs feel better.  It did!  One more note about the run.  I like to stay and cheer for the final finishers.  This year I actually knew one of them, PW, a VP with the now departed Seattle Sonics. 

 

Anyway we tried the swim and it was much easier than I thought it would be.  Granted Charles ate a pizza before the swim and didn't wear a wetsuit like I did, but I was cruising the whole time and actually kept stopping and waiting for him as the pizza thing didn't go over real well.  I had been a little nervous because two years before I couldn't complete the Fat Salmon Swim, which was over three miles between the I-90 and 520 floating bridges in Seattle.  Actually, I could have finished it but I was going too slow and everyone behind me was pulled out of the water and soon every single support boat and paddleboarder was right behind me.  That was pretty embarrassing and took the wind out of my sails.  Also very windy that day and the water was so rough.  (Tangent Man has struck again, making a short story long....but let me continue lengthening it.)

 

Anyway, I climb into one of the support boats at the 2.25 mile mark and onboard are a local news anchor, KCPQ 13's Bill Wixey and a really gorgeous female lifeguard type, oh man was she cute.   I wasn't so concerned about Wixey seeing me give up but no guy wants a really cute girl seeing him as a quitter.   To make matters worse, I was the last quitter of the day so I had to slowly ride back in the boat which was now trailing the only other guy in the swim that I could see.  It was a slow ride in.

 

So the Seward Park swim was a redemption of sorts.  I finished and felt great.  I could have swam for quite awhile longer in fact.  The one downer was that when we reached the beach, someone had stolen both of our towels and a pair of old flip flops I had borrowed from his wife.  They left Charles smelly old tennis shoes and took everything else.  Nice!