Nanticoke River 3 Mile Swim

Goal:  Finish

Result: DNF 

Cedar Hill Marina. Look how calm the water is!

The Nanticoke River Swim was my first 3 mile open water swim and a test run for the Chesapeake Bay Swim in June. The setting is so pretty. Everything is staged at the Cedar Hill Marina in Bivalve, MD, right on the river. The event includes 2 mile and 3 mile swims and a very small sprint triathlon. Very low key, extremely nice people, so much to love about it.

Despite being sick all week and having a brief freak-out episode the day before, I was totally pumped for this swim. I left my house at 5:30am and headed for the eastern shore. It was just getting light when I reached the Bay Bridge. I got chills driving over it, thinking about how next month I will be swimming right between those two spans. OMG, I'm not worthy!

I got to the marina two hours before the race. The swag included a long sleeve technical shirt with the Nanticoke River Swim logo on it and a water bottle with the same logo. Cool! 

The volunteers doing the body marking were differentiating between the tri participants and swimmers by putting the race numbers on the swimmers' hands. As I was about to get body marked, one volunteer asked me my age...but before I could tell her that I wasn't in the triathlon, another volunteer saw my white swim cap and said, "Wait. She's a swimmer." 

She's a swimmer. It sounded odd to hear that. I never think of myself as a swimmer. I've always been a runner, never a swimmer. But as I walked toward the water, past transition where the tri people were racking their bikes, I allowed myself to think maybe I am a swimmer. Not a fast one or even a good one, but a swimmer, nonetheless. As Budda supposedly once said, "We become what we think." So, swimmer it is....at least for today.

The sign was a bit concerning...

I had time for a quick practice swim before the race director called everyone out for the pre-race briefing. The water and weather conditions were sick, SICK--as Ed would say. The air AND water temp were both 70. It was low tide and the river was calm. Nice!

The race director told us that the tide would be coming in during the swim and that meant that we would have a current to deal with on the second loop. He said we were going to have to angle ourselves a different way on each leg of the triangular course to avoid getting pushed off course by the current. (This is where being a pilot came in handy. I thought of the current as the wind and figured out which way I would aim the nose of an airplane to stay on course.)

The first loop was awesome. I had no trouble sighting and barely had to angle myself to stay on course. But once I rounded the buoy for the second loop I could feel the difference. The current started sweeping me along. I cruised to the next buoy with the current pushing me from behind. However, as I rounded the buoy for the second leg, the current was coming from the side and started pushing me off track. And so began my battle with the current. 

The chop kicked up a bit, but they had big bright green marker buoys at the mid-point of each leg for us to sight off of, so I just  aimed for it. Actually, I aimed to the left of it to correct for the current. I swam and swam and swam some more. When I finally got close to the green marker I scanned the river up ahead for the next turn buoy but couldn't find it. I asked a kid on a kayak where it was and he pointed to my right.What? It's over there?? I had been looking straight ahead for it, but because I was having to swim at such an angle to fight the current, the buoy was to my right.

I swam and swam but seemed to be making little progress. Pretty soon I noticed the kid on the kayak was staying with me. Then another kid on a kayak came up and kept him company. I had a two-kayak escort going here!  I figured it was because I was last---instead of cops on motorcycles, I had kids on kayaks following me.

It seemed like I would never get to this buoy! I popped my head up at one point and asked the kayak kid how things were going with the other swimmers and if I was last. He pointed way off to the right and said they had swimmers over there who had been blown off course. Then he told me I had 35 minutes to finish the race! I glanced at my watch and had only been swimming for 1.5 hours!  The cut off was 3 hours, so 35 minutes didn't add up. I kept swimming, figuring kayak kid had his times wrong.

After what seemed like FOREVER, I was finally closing in on the last turn buoy. Once I turned, I would be on the final leg-- about .5 to the finish. As I turned my head to breathe, I noticed a different kayak next to me. A few breaths later, the man on the kayak was yelling to get my attention. I popped up and it was the race director! I'm thinking, What's he doing way out here? Shouldn't he be on the shore managing the finish line or something? But he was there to tell me that he was only going to let me swim the final yards to the buoy...and then I would have to get a ride in on the boat. 

I told him I was okay, I wasn't tired, had only been swimming for 2 hours, and would be okay on the final leg. But he said the current had picked up to 2mph and that they had swimmers getting pushed too far north. He said the last leg would be harder than the one I just completed and would take me longer than the hour I had left. No worries, I told him, I would just swim until I was too tired or until the cut-off, to which he said, "It's not a good idea for you to be out here." That sounded a little scary, so I swam the final yards to the buoy, then grabbed the back of the race director's kayak and he paddled me to the boat.

There were several other swimmers on the boat who had also been pulled out. We compared notes and they told me they had been watching my progress and it looked like I was swimming in place! That's exactly what it felt like.

When we got back to the dock, the guy who was driving the boat told all of us swimmers to follow him. He led us over to the finish line and gave us all medals! We were like, we get a medal? But we didn't finish! He said we earned it anyway! That was nice.

Sombrero Bottle Opener Bling!

So here's how I would sum up my first Nanticoke River Swim:

Positives:  My longest open water swim so far, good practice swimming with a current, and I never really got tired. 

Negatives:  I just wasn't strong enough to swim faster against the current....and that's not something I can change before the Bay Swim. Becoming a swimming hulk will take time! 

Overall though, a great experience! Maybe I'll try again next year...