Madison Mile Open Water Swim Report

On June 25th I was back in action at the Madison Mile Open Water Race on Long Island Sound.  As you can see by the course below, the route is out to the right of two buoys, then around a 3rd buoy, before heading back to shore.  Standing onshore before the race and watching earlier waves I saw that there was a very strong current pushing swimmers in the direction of the yellow arrow.

In fact the current was so strong that everyone was swimming from the middle of the course

(between the course markers above) out to the second and third buoys.  I decided to intentionally take a course to hopefully take the current into account by starting out swimming wide to the right.

 

Getting ready to go:

And we are off:

Off to a pretty good start and was staying to the right:

Notice also how calm the water was at the start:

Pretty quickly I started having a lot of goggle trouble.  The goggles were fogging up a lot and with the gray skies and gray water, I couldn’t make out anything with the obscured vision.  So I had to stop and clear the goggles many times during the swim.  Here is just one of those times:

Here is the 1st and 2nd buoy.  Note the swimmers getting pushed to the left and having to swim back to the right to get around the buoy.

Now notice where I am, way to the right which is good.  But I am swimming much slower than the average person at this event which was dominated mostly by real swimmers.  I was happy with my navigation out to the 2nd buoy.

From here I moved beyond camera range, but I started to really struggle between buoy 2 and 3.  By the time I got to the 2nd buoy the current has already moved me over to the buoy and it kept pushing me inside buoy 3.  In all, it took me 23 minutes just to make it to the half mile turn around.  At this point I had been left behind by pretty much the entire field and was way behind my target time.  But I figured that I would get a push from the current on the way back.  However, staying close to the buoys and not getting pushed to the outside would become the problem in the reverse direction.

 

Here the camera picks me up just after the last buoy.  Not a good sign when the kayakers are paying this much attention to you: 

That’s me center of the photo.  The current now is pushing us wide (to the left) of buoy 4 and 5.  Notice how much rougher the water got in a short time.

Closing in on the finish:

Seconds away from the beach:

 

It only took about 15 minutes on the return leg, but nearly 38 minutes was much slower than I was hoping for.  My time of 37:54 was good for 4/11 wetsuit and 126/145 overall. I fully expected the poor result as this is really a swimming race that a few triathletes go to and most of the competitors were clearly on swim teams.

 

It was fun to do a swimming only race.  A little less current, the course knowledge from this year and eliminating goggle issues should all add up to a faster time next year.