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Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival 2025 race report.

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 Back to the ice for a second year in a row! I'm not going to do a lot of background on this event this year. I covered that  last year , so if you want to know how we found this event and why we first did it (TRISTA), go read that. For those who don't want to, but want to know what the heck this event even is, quoting myself from last year: So, what IS this event? In Newport, Vermont, in mid February, they cut a 25m long, 2 lane wide, hole in the ice of the frozen Lake Memphremagog, and then they hold a swim meet there. Ice swimming. A perfectly sane thing to do. Two days before the event, preparing the hole/pool! We had no idea what we'd gotten ourselves into last year, and we ended up having such an amazing time, and we knew we wanted to go back. And we wanted to do MORE. 2024 had been our proof of concept. Just making sure we could get in that water and still function at all. We swam one 25-meter event each day for 3 days last year, and that went great, and we wanted t...

OTILLO Whistler 2024 race report

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Our original plan for 2024 was to travel to Switzerland for our big race of the year, ÖTILLÖ Engadin. With summer heat and summer schedules, we just wanted an earlier-season race, and we really wanted to go explore Switzerland. We dragged our feet a bit on actually committing to anything financially, which ended up being a really good thing, because when they announced that this would be the inaugural year for ÖTILLÖ Whistler , in British Columbia, we all looked at each other and said, "Orrrrrr maybe Whistler." Significantly easier to get to from the US. Significantly cheaper overall. Still an amazing venue. And most importantly, we were pretty sure we couldn't handle the FOMO that would be involved if we weren't there for a race that sounded this amazing, in its first year. We still haven't gotten over missing the one and only Catalina race. Training went well. The weather was trending to be pretty perfect for race day. Matt and I had an amazing vacation planned...