Swimrun Lake James 2024 race report
During the race, I told Trista that back when I was doing triathlons, I always tried to do new events, rarely wanting to repeat ones I'd done in the past. That just didn't interest me. Maybe some of the local events that were super convenient, but if I was going to travel, I wanted to see something new.
I don't feel the same way about swimrun. This is the fourth time we've done Swimrun Lake James, and I'm just as excited to come back and do it again next year. Swimrun events always feel new and exciting, even if it's a course you've done before. It's never exactly the same experience. It's always an amazing adventure.
And that was just as true this year, our fourth Lake James, as it was when we did it our first year, as our first ever swimrun! The one that got us hooked.
Perfect weather, perfect partner, perfect swimrun family.
That's it. That's the report. Thanks for reading!
Just kidding. I have to do SOMETHING with all these ridiculous photos we accumulated from the race!
Plus Trista would never let me get away with not telling the shoe story.
As has become our superfun tradition, Envol Swimrun hosted a little swimrun clinic the day before the race. We rolled up with half an hour or so to spare, and quickly ripped our bags apart to find the right gear, getting suited up in the bathrooms at Paddy's Creek, the meetup location. Everything was going great until I went to put my shoes on.
I absolutely have been attributing this to "packing in the dark", but I'm fairly sure I packed in the light, and just grabbed two similarly blue shoes, without paying any more attention. The best part is that one of these shoes is from my old-old pair of road shoes. Not even the ones-before-the-most-recent-ones-which-I-now-use-to-mow-and-stuff. They are ones I NEVER use, and just haven't moved off the shoe rack.
You know that heart-sinking realization feeling. It's terrible.
But there was nothing to be done. I had 3 pairs of shoes with me. This mismatched pair, which in addition to being different shoes, were the same foot. Complete non-starter. My oofos, which are some of my favorite shoes, but also try to murder me when I WALK in them when my feet are wet. And my road shoes, which usually serve as my airport shoes, and also shoes in case I do a road run. These were the ONLY option I had with me.
And I'd like to give full credit to all the women at the shakeout or who learned about my plight via Trista's instagram story. SO many people said, "Oh, I have a spare pair I can loan you! What size are you?" "7!" "Oh. Nevermind, sorry." Curse you, comically tiny feet!
And so I took my road shoes on a little test swimrun at the clinic. And honestly.. they were fine. If I had to choose a swimrun venue to do in road shoes, Lake James would be near the top of the list. (Also, if we're doing this exercise, Orcas Island, and Casco if you removed Vail Island.) Lake James doesn't have much slick rock, and road shoes are fine for the gravel roads and the pine forest trails. For the race, I absolutely anticipated blisters in weird places, repeatedly having to re-tie my shoes, and having trouble with the muddy rope-assisted swim exit climbs, but I felt like this wouldn't be a complete disaster, at least. Maybe. At least not because of my shoes. We can always be a disaster for other reasons, though!
We wore our ARK Vigg wetsuits during the shakeout, anticipating wearing our warmer wetsuits for the actual race, and wanting to start the race with them dry, but honestly, the water was much warmer than we anticipated. Mid to upper 60s. And the air temp was in the low 80s, and sunny. We pretty much decided the Vigg was the most appropriate wetsuit for the actual race.
Which brings us to race morning! When it was pretty chilly (in the 50s), and my Vigg was still wet, and I was tired, and so it was an easy decision to completely change my mind and wear the other wetsuit I'd packed, the ARK Uto! Gotta be flexible, right?
Race morning went well with nothing notable other than TONY MADE TRISTA AND ME SING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. I can't even do this fiasco justice, but basically he asked for volunteers, and Trista jokingly yells my name. I said no way, Tony said what if Trista does it with you. He was VERY convinced this should happen, and we didn't want to cause a delay in the race start, so we begrudgingly went up and took the microphone. Meanwhile Tony was being clever, and whispered that he was going to play Whitney Houston and we could lip sync. I want to make it perfectly clear that we had NO idea this was the plan when we went up there, and were legitimately freaking out. I'm going to blame anything that went wrong with our race on this pre-race adrenaline spike.
Anyway, we lip synced, people were good sports and cheered for us, this all took place during the time Trista normally does last minute wetsuit adjustments and eats a gel, so none of that happened, and then it was race time!
We scampered our way to the very back, and that turned out to be exactly where we should be. When the race started, everyone took off, and it was Hugh and Anna (Team It's Okay, She's a Lesbian on their inaugural journey) ahead of us, and a team of really funny and friendly guys behind us, with whom we swapped many inappropriate and off-color jokes (Justin and Thaxton of Hillsborough St Dad Bods).
The rest of the race pulled off into the distance, and we just went our chill, fun pace (Adorkable Fun Pace (AFP)) and settled in for a beautiful day of swimrunning with friends.
Our coach gave us a little pre-race pep talk where he said he knew our training hadn't been ideal lately and so we shouldn't set our goals too high, and just go have fun. Which honestly sounds much better when I'm saying it about myself, than when my coach is saying it about me. All true, though! No goals. Just fun.
And now we move to Notable Scenes From the Day, because with 14 runs and 13 swims, it's very hard to keep track of what happened when in this race.
We definitely had the best First Transition of the Day that we've ever had in this race. I remember last year I wanted to really nail this first transition, and I still ended up with the tether clipped below my buoy, which is fine while running, tragic while swimming, so we had to stop before the swim to fix that. Happy to say I was fully ready to go for this one, as was Trista, and we passed an "adorably figuring out their first transition in a real race together" IOSAL (that's not a very satisfying acronym, we'll just call them Anna and Hugh from here on out) (or maybe "the Lesbians", as an obvious way to shorten it, and also achieve maximal potential confusion?) on the land and jumped into the water for our swim. And then Hugh powered past us a little while later, with Anna tucked safely and comfortably into his draft. We were so happy to see their team thriving!
We navigated the first couple short swims and runs, and then came out of swim 3 to find the Waughs! Trista said they might be out there, but we weren't sure where or when, so it was a delight to see them this early.
When trying to explain to people how swimrun is NOT triathlon without the bike, and more akin to adventure racing, we always want them to see some of the more.. adventurous parts of the courses. And fortunately this year Kim was parked at the top of one of the sketchier swim exits, so we have some photos to show.. this is not triathlon without the bike. A study in three photos.
The adventure, the nature, the problem solving, the camaraderie, the team challenge, the help from friends and strangers alike. This is swimrun.
I think I mentioned this last year, but for some reason it's STILL stuck in my head that the long run is somewhere just past the halfway point of the legs, but it wasn't last year, it still isn't, and it still surprised me when, relatively early, we were suddenly coming out of the water at the aid station at the beginning of the long run.
We grabbed some water, then walked a few minutes while we settled in for a nice, easy seven, I mean eight, ugh, 28 mile run leg. (Everyone says it's 7, in reality we always hit at least 8 miles on this leg, but it feels like it's at least 28 miles by the time it's done.)
Because we were in chonkier wetsuits (both in the Uto), and because it was sunny, we knew we'd probably be best served by cabbing down (unzipping our wetsuits and pulling the top down off our shoulders to hang at our waists), and if we were going to do it, we might as well just do it now, while we're already walking, before we even have a chance to get warm. Wetsuits came down, goggles and swimcaps came off, paddles came off, all gear was stowed in places that we would hopefully find it later (spoiler: I didn't lose any gear this year, but that's not to say I didn't try really hard a few times), and the tether was retired until the next swim.
And then we just had a delightful 28 mile run, full of "punchy" hills!
One of the most fun parts of the long run is that it's one of the most social places in the race. With constant transitions and long swims, there's not a lot of chance to chat with friends, but on this run, the short course share several miles, there's enough time to pass or be passed, and there's a section where you may get to see the front runners coming back.
Notably we got to see our adorable protégé and new fast friend Karen (though I think that was before the long run, whatever, you don't know any better, and she doesn't do social media, so she'll never know), we saw Joanna, we leap frogged a few times with our new friends, the Gregs (side note: we meet a LOT of people at these races, and I'm very old and my brain barely works even when it has sufficient oxygen, so I apologize if I meet you and then later forget that I've met you or forget your name. You can help avoid this process by having BOTH members of your team have the SAME NAME, like our new friends The Gregs. Even though I know their actual team name (The Cut-Öff Böyz), I will forever call them The Gregs, and so I will never forget either of their names) (remember those tall guys who helped push me up the muddy hill? Gregs!), Julia and Stephanie burned a few matches to catch up to us, just so they could harass us (they were not behind us, they were just short course), Karen and Tim, who we'd not gotten to hang with for too long, and Ben!
Ben called out Trista's name in greeting as he ran up on us. At first I figured he must be someone I should know, see above about my ability to retain names and faces, and I figured I'd ask Trista later how we knew him. Except I DIDN'T know him. Ben was Trista's survival partner at Orcas Island last year, when I wasn't able to race with her and she decided to do long course solo. They teamed up for a while and suffered together through that brutal course, and it was fun to see them reunite. Ben was short course, and the first 5 miles of their run overlaps the long course, so he slowed down and stuck with us until the signs said to split off, and that was delightful to have a special guest star for several miles. As a bonus, he lives in Vancouver, so I picked his brain for activity and food suggestions when we head up there after Whistler! (And then forgot everything he told me, but I warned him that would happen, and that I'd find him on the socials later and get that list again.)
And then we also got to see Lars and Cam coming back in for their last few miles before an absolutely dominating overall win. I feel like it's not fair, since Cam's legs are as tall as my entire body. I'm gonna pretend like that's the only reason I'm not that fast.
After the long run, there's a series of rapid-fire short swim and run transitions, with the two longest swims of the day mixed in. The water felt great, the sun was shining, and it was just a good day. Trista and I were laughing the whole time, and doing dumb Team Shitshow things, and at one point after a swim, Trista said something about how she was just having a really fun time with me. And it turns out, my love language is.. literally telling me you love me. It made me so happy that we've been doing this since 2018, this was our 22nd swimrun together, and we're still having so much fun, we still like each other, we still want to keep doing this. Even when the training isn't perfect and life is throwing us a billion curveballs, we can meet up and just act like children playing in the forest.
I bought Trista lunch the next day, and she asked why, and I told her it was because she said she liked hanging out with me. I'm not too proud to buy my friends' love, people.
Speaking of swims. Was it this swim? Who knows. Let's say it was this swim. At the swim entrances, we do all the things we need to do individually (swim cap, goggles, paddles, buoy, etc), then we both check in that we're ready, then we go. Sometimes we go two strokes and then one of us remembers that we were obviously not ready in some way, so we stop and get our shit (sort of) together, then we go for real.
For the last long swim of the day (allegedly 1300m), we got all ready, we said so, we went, and then I discovered that I had unzipped my suit a bit during the previous run, and had forgotten to zip it fully back up. Not a big deal, just a little bit of water coming into the suit. No need to stop. And then over time, as the water went into my suit, it unzipped further and further, and eventually it was unzipped to my waist. No big deal, I could still stay on Trista's feet, I wasn't getting too cold because of it, not worth stopping. Plus, in a swim this long, this far into the race, odds were super high we were going to end up stopping for some reason. Foggy goggles (just Trista's, I don't need to be able to see (sorry, Trista)), adjust paddles, hit by random fish (ask Marcus about his fish), interesting story that can't wait, etc. Although we'd made it through the entire "mile" swim without stopping at all, which is HUGE for us as a team. So maybe I was going to just be unzipped the whole time. No big deal.
Eventually, though, Trista did pull up and do.. something. I don't even know what, because she stopped, said something, and I said, "Oh, good, now I can zip up my wetsuit!" and she just looked at me incredulously and we started laughing hysterically.
So profesh.
At one of the later swim exits, we came across Kim, and she hiked out with us to get to her bike, and we got to catch up a bit. It's always fun to see her out in her element, and we wished WE had a camera so we could snap a picture of her riding back to the finish line through the tall, sunny, majestic trees.
We made our way through the portion of the course we'd done in the clinic the day before, keeping an eye out for Tom's lost goggles, and then we sadly came to the last swim. It's sad because we love swimming, we're sad the race will soon be over, and because we know that last run feels so insanely long to get to the finish line. Uuuuugh.
Once we started that last run, we again took off all our gear and stowed it away. During that run, I dropped both my goggles (but noticed within 20 seconds, still baaaarely within visual range) and my swim cap, and we couldn't stop laughing about what a disaster we are, especially when Trista remembered the year we ran that last leg with Meredith and Fatima, and Meredith fell. Nothing causes Trista to laugh uncontrollably like someone falling.
Some time in the last hour of the race, Trista looked at her watch and realized this was definitely going to be a personal worst time for us. We've gotten faster every year, and this time we were headed for a time even slower than our first-ever Lake James. And we absolutely did not care.
I did comment that I didn't feel like we'd been THAT much slower than we've been in the past, but then I remembered the part where we sat there at an aid station and spit water back and forth at each other for literally 3 minutes or so. And as we crossed the bridge to begin the last mile of the run, Lisa drove by on her way to pick up the flags and markers, and we turned around to go back to the road and chat with her briefly. So yeah. I guess I can see where some of that extra time might have come from.
We perhaps are not the most driven and podium-focused athletes. Which is why I love us.
Marcus came back up the trail a bit to run in with us, which is a fun thing he's always done, and we love getting to hear how his race went and how everyone else had done, and it really helped pass the time in that last interminable mile.
And then the finish line! We had no time to try out a new finish line move, so we decided to do piggyback again, since we haven't done that since Casco Bay 2019? I decided not to question whether my tired legs could handle that, since we hadn't practiced it, and we just went for it.
And fortunately it worked out!
Definitely our slowest Lake James, but absolutely in the running for our most fun Lake James.
Lake James 2021: 5:04:39
Lake James 2022: 4:56:59
Lake James 2023: 4:53:12
Oh, and the shoes did just fine. Trista had to stop twice to re-tie her shoes, mine stayed tied the whole time with no problems. No blisters. The only places I struggled with traction were on the muddy rope-assisted climbs, and everyone had problems there. That being said, I am definitely not a convert to wearing road shoes for swimruns. Never again, assuming I pay attention when I pack in the future. I may have to replace my beautiful rainbow road shoes, though. Swimrun is tough on shoes. And smelly.
Next up is ÖTILLÖ Whistler in early July! We can't wait.
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