Full details here.
PLAN: Depart from Keith Bridge Park. Swim for 90 minutes. Swim back. Afterwards, dinner at North Georgia BBQ Company, reportedly the best BBQ in the state.
REPORT: Look at the map! It's like a fractal. The place was full of little secluded bays -- including one with a trysting couple who managed to ignore me. Coming from Seattle, I thought the water temperature was fine to swim without a wetsuit. The locals thought it was freezing cold and wouldn't dream of swimming.
Oh, and I got my BBQ...
PLAN: Straighforward swim from Magnuson Park.
REPORT: Have you heard of the fresh-water sharks of Lake Washington?
There's one right here, just half a mile south of Magnuson Park. And as
for the notorious toe-eating tortoises of Lake Washington that lurk
in the reeds...
PLAN: Swim from Denny Blaine Park to I90 bridge [2 miles] and back again [4 miles].
REPORT: This was the easiest and most comfortable long-distance swim I've ever done. After 4 miles I still felt so warm and strong that I turned around and swam a further 4 miles, to the 520 bridge and back again. It was all down to nutrition and comfort.
Nutrition: I'd been to a sports nutritionist the previous weekend, to Dr Minh-Hai Tran at NutritionWorks Seattle. I followed her advice: fill up on carbs before the swim, and try to injest 300 calories an hour of smple carbs during the swim. It made a huge difference. The standard model is this: For swimming you're largely using glycogen. The body can store about 2000 calories of glycogen, and it uses about 500 calories an hour. Try to replenish about 300 calories of carbs per hour. Gatorade (130cal/liter) is good because it has a mixture of different sugars to make it easier to digest. Bananas (110cal) are good too. I also ate Pilot Bread crackers (100cal) because they're so easy to digest.
I personally think there's more to it than that. In the past I've been swimming with less nutrition, and have become adapted to 4 hour swims with just water. Most exercise people say this is folly. Then again, they're not the ones doing long distance swims. Maybe it's because I swim a slow breaststroke and so get more of my swimming calories from fat? Maybe it's because my body has been trained this way to store glycogen more efficiently? This article says there might be benefits in endurance training while fasted, and indeed that's what Kenyan long-distance runners do.
Goggles: For the first time I used foam-gasket swimming goggles. They were a delight. Previously I'd been using rubber gasket Aquasphere goggles, which always got painful after four or more hours. But these foam-gasket goggles stayed comfortable for the entire swim.
Shannah and I finished the swim with a delicious steak dinner at Daniel's Broiler House at Leschi Marina, with a window seat to look out over the distance I'd just swum.
