OTILLO Whistler 2024 race report
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 for the couple weeks after the race. Everything was looking great.
Then Matt had some business travel, and picked up a cold. His cold turned into a sinus infection. He got on antibiotics, and had a week for them to work and get him feeling better.
Then I started to feel crappy. Now let me just say, this could have been SO MUCH WORSE. For several days, I felt like I was getting sick. Thick throat, hard to swallow, definitely not feeling right. But each night, I'd go to bed feeling like I was going to wake up in the morning with full-blown illness. And it never got That Bad. It was a cold. It never became a sinus infection. Never had a fever or aches. Several negative covid tests. But as I tried to figure out what it was or how bad it was going to get, I had a terrible week emotionally. This has been an incredibly stressful year for us. I needed this race. We needed this vacation. It's been months of "just put your head down and get through all of this, and then we can go to Canada.." And each night when I went to bed, I expected to wake up with a fever, covid, a sinus infection, and I did a lot of pre-mourning the loss of this trip. I didn't even tell Trista I was sick, because I didn't want to tell her I couldn't go until I was sure I couldn't go. And if I could get on that plane, I was going to go, and if I could get to that start line, I was going to. My swimrun partner is amazing, and I knew she'd be fine with whatever decision I made. But I still have PTSD from Orcas, and I was not going to back out of another big race right at the last minute if I had any say in the matter.
I showed up in Whistler looking fine, sounding terrible. It's hard to pretend that you're 100% when your voice sounds like you're going through puberty. All my top range was gone, which mostly concerned Trista about how I was going to sing all day during the race.
And as predicted, she was fine with whatever I needed to do. If I felt like the race was a bad idea, we could not do it. If we had to start the race and DNF at some point. If we wanted to drop down to the Experience distance. (She actually sounded suspiciously eager and excited when she listed that option.) I told her I was planning to start the race unless things got worse, and planning to do the race until we either finished, or I decided it was be unwise to go any further.
We got to do a little swimming and running the day before the race, at the Low Tide Boyz Fika with Form swim and then the Envol Pre-Race Clinic. I hadn't tried swimming or running since Tuesday, and wasn't sure how they would feel. I was a little concerned about vertigo, just given how stuffed up my head was, but the tests went just fine. I was tired, but it all felt okay enough to at least start!
And so we did!
Remember what I said about amazing weather? Yeah, no. Evidently we brought our Texas weather with us. Highs in the 90s, sunny. Which would normally mean a minimal wetsuit like the ARK Vigg, but then also swims with water temps in the 50s! A conundrum, indeed. Trista and I both ended up wearing our ARK Utö wetsuits, no sleeves. And adorable socks, which I also forced on our sister team, It's Okay She's a Lesbian.
I also brought and wore both a left and a right shoe from the same pair of Adidas Terrex Speed Ultra shoes. Tryin' something new, why not.
And so with barely any voice and a ziploc baggie full of cough drops, we crossed the start line for what promised to be a long but amazing and beautiful day!
It should be noted that I'm writing this race report almost 3 full weeks after the race, after a 2 week vacation, and sleep deprived after unexpectedly getting a brand new puppy the first full day we were back in town. I feel like I've forgotten most of the details, so maybe this will be a shorter report? Only one way to find out. (Oh, nevermind, it's not. We all knew that, though.)
We'd done a part of the first run the day before in our clinic, so we knew it started with a stupid and cruel steep dirt hill. We were the last team up that hill, and we were pretty much off the back of the whole group at that point, and for the rest of the race. All pressure removed! Go, Team We Like It In The Back!
This first run is a combination of some forest single track and some jeep road, and we just enjoyed the coolest weather we'd have for the day and smiled a lot and settled in. I assessed how I was feeling starting out, and I'll just go ahead and ruin all suspense here, and say that all day, I felt okay. I kinda felt like I didn't have access to all the lung capacity I might normally have, but also I didn't feel like it was in my lungs at all (I wouldn't have gone to Canada or raced if I felt like it was in my lungs; probably). It felt good to just run at a very easy pace, and walk most hills, and frankly that's our normal strategy in most races anyway, so I'm not sure me being sick really changed much. If Trista feels differently, she never once complained the whole day about me slowing her down, and I'm fairly sure some of the walking started with her, not me. We just like walking.
A nice chill 2 mile run brought us down to our first swim in Lost Lake. During the shakeout we'd taken the wrong path down the steep hill to the lake, and it was sketchy AF, and I was glad to find out that the RIGHT trail was just fine and very manageable!
And glad to find our people out on the Lost Lake dock! Matt and Kim were out there cheering for us and documenting. We executed a perfect, flawless, speedy transition into the water and were off for our first swim.
Oh, wait, I'm just kidding. I'm thinking of Marcus and Beek, who they also got video of. Here, let's compare and contrast.
If you're new to swimrun, here is how you execute a run to swim transition.
That is.. NOT how Trista and I do things. Observe.
Whatever. Doesn't ours look more fun? More social? Better hops? (My hops sucked. I forgot to actually hop.)
I was really looking forward to this swim, and I gotta admit, I was a little disappointed. I mean, it was beautiful. Great views. Clean water. A great temp, one of the warmer lakes we'd have for the day (maybe upper 60s?). But we'd swam in this lake for our shakeout the day before, and it was FULL OF TADPOLES. At first we all thought it was trash or debris or algae or something, but then it was very peppy and motivated debris, and we realized it was a billion tadpoles. I could have just sat there watching them for hours. Which means it's probably a good thing that there were NO tadpoles in the section of the lake we were in for this first swim, or I might never have finished the swim.
But.. disappointing. I could have used more tadpoles.
We cruised through that swim (just under 400 yards), passing another team, making us briefly not-last! Always exciting.
An easy beach swim exit, and then it was time to hit the town! The next 3 mile run is largely bike paths, sidewalks, and roads, and goes through the middle of Whistler proper. Which is fun! I like road running as much as trail running (#unpopularopinion), and I love touristing on the run, so it was fun to get a little taste of the Whistler area as the other early morning locals (is anyone actually local to Whistler?) stared at us in confusion.
We had one older guy ask us what the heck we were doing, so we slowed down to explain the entire concept of swimrun to him. And he had follow-up questions, so we started walking (he was stationary). And then he was trying to explain something to us, and having trouble finding his words, so we just full stopped and sat there chatting with him for a few minutes. Follow us for more tips on how to come in last!
We got to one fairly large road intersection with a stop light, and there were guys in the road with signs. I thought maybe there was construction going on there, and we'd have to navigate our way through there, but no, it turns out these were people out there stopping traffic so we could safely diagonally cross the busy intersection! Top notch service, Whistler team. Thanks for staying out there for us later folks.
Eventually we wound our way around to Alta Lake, Blueberry Dock, and our next swim! Matt and Kim were there at the trailhead leading down to the water, adorable on their bikes. Every time I'd see Matt and his bike, my general stress levels would drop back down again for a while. It may take me a while to truly get over the whole Orcas thing.
Alta Lake was the site of the LTBz swim the day before, so we were familiar with this trail and this dock, and we were about to get a LOT more familiar with Alta Lake in the next few hours, since three of our upcoming swims were in it.
On the dock, we found that team we'd passed on the first swim again. It was a female team who had passed us back during run 2 (story of our lives), and we transitioned a little faster than them and started our second longest swim of the day!
To be fair, I didn't know this was our second longest swim of the day. Trista had written the distances on her arm at the last minute, but we didn't really consult it heavily until later in the race, when the run distances got really long, and we needed to know what we were getting ourselves into. Also she'd written them on her forearm in silver sharpie, making it nigh impossible to read, especially in the sun, which it generally was.
So as we swam along, I kept thinking, "Wow. This is a long swim." My watch says ~1300 yards, which is a long swim when you had no idea it was a long swim! Not a particularly notable swim, other than its length. It was a very tolerable temperature (mid to upper 60s?), it was a little tree-covered, so not much for views, a lot of it was on a weird shallow shelf full of random objects and some garbage, which was dismaying and made me want to dive down and collect it, which probably wasn't going to help our race at all in any way. So I just chilled out behind Trista, enjoying the day, enjoying that I felt well enough to stay on her feet, wondering exactly how long we'd be swimming.
We got to the swim exit, which was a dock at a cute little park. I think that was a ladder exit. Ladder exits are always exciting when you're tethered to another human.
This little park had our first aid station, which.. I definitely would have preferred another aid station somewhere in there, like during the second run. That was a long time to go without an aid station, in my opinion. I had actually commented on that as we finished the second run, that I would have liked there to be an aid station some time before then. Fortunately the sun was still low in the sky, the morning was still chilly, and the water was cold, so we could get away with a little early-game dehydration!
After chugging some water and eating a gel (I hope that wasn't our first gel, probably we had one before then, like responsible adults; let's assume), we headed out for our next run. It was on a cute little bike path, and we settled in and started chatting. I think on this run, we saw people coming back toward us on the bike path, and realized this must be some sort of out and back eventually.
And then off on the side of the path, there was an arrow! That pointed at the water! It was just kinda.. there off the path. The least dramatic and obvious swim entrance ever. WAS it the swim entrance? We figured it had to be! We weren't at all ready, so we got everything all zipped and prepped and ready, and Trista waded into the water on a little rock shelf.
As you might have observed earlier, we aren't really "okay, let's go, team!" starters some of the time, so she was just moseying in, finding her footing, trying to figure out how deep it might be off the stone shelf. I was still on dry land, getting my goggles on and my buoy off my back. And then she said "Oh, it's cold." Which.. sure, some of the lakes were supposed to be colder than others. And then she said, "It's REALLY cold, we need to GO."
So I hopped down on the shelf as she took off, and .. yeah. It was COLD. We hadn't really gotten recent temps on most of the lakes, and the two we'd be in weren't bad, so I (and I think most people) were thinking that Green Lake, the last lake, purported to be the coldest lake, would be cold, and the others would be like Lost Lake and Alta Lake. A nice tolerable mid to upper 60s. This was absolutely in the 50s, felt like the low 50s. It wasn't going to kill us, but I spent the whole swim thinking, "I am afraid I have erred, and significantly underestimated Green Lake." Because if this lake, Nita Lake, hadn't even made the list of cold lakes, how cold was Green going to be?
I realize I swam in an icehole in February in Vermont, so this should be nothing, but it's all about EXPECTATIONS. This was like the cold year at NC where we were expecting mid 60s water and got upper 40s. Just.. surprising!
And not a super short swim at almost 700 yards. We notably never stopped and chatted during this swim, as usually happens once or twice in a swim this length. We were FOCUSED. Focused on GETTING THE HELL OUT OF THIS WATER.
"Yep. So fucked when we get to Green Lake" was my mantra.
But we lived! And we got out at the dock, where we found Matt! He confirmed that everybody was shocked by how cold Nita was, so at least we were in good company.
Back onto a bike path for the halfish mile run over to Alpha Lake, and Matt rode with us and gave us the general race updates that he knew about, and how people were doing. The swim entrance to Alpha was in another cute little park, and as we ran up, Kim rode up and said, "Hey, is anyone missing a paddle?" and held up a paddle. And the volunteer said "Yes! A team just came through about 10 minutes ago, and one of them had lost a paddle!" Somehow it was determined that the paddle was Kate's (the whole thing is kind of a blur in my memory, and Matt is filling in where he's able), and Matt said he'd take the paddle and try to get it to her.
And evidently Matt rode it to the swim exit of our next Alta Lake swim, and when she got out of the water, he held it up and said, "Anyone need a paddle?" and Kate said something to the effect of "No fucking way!" I love a good reunited story!
Anyway, back at Alpha Lake, Trista and I jumped in the water for a little 300yd swim in a charming little lake, which fortunately was warmer than Nita Lake. But after one really cold, slightly longer swim, and the still-chilly air temps, a very short run with no real time to warm up, and then back into some not-warm water, I was way more cold than I wanted to be, even though the water wasn't super cold. I was glad that this swim was so short, and that we were next headed back to warmer waters.
A sorta weird swim exit, and then a very weird 1.5 mile run. It had "Marcus" written all over it, and he later confirmed it was his baby. We were running on the edge of a weird park, and through underbrush, and behind weird buildings, and it was mostly funny because there was a trail visible just right over there that any sane person would have taken, but the flags clearly said "Take this weird not-trail that a not-sane person has chosen!" Verrrry Marcus, and we laughed a lot and enjoyed the adventure.
Ultimately we ended up back on the bike path we'd been on earlier, where we'd seen people running the opposite direction. Now we were those people! There were a lot more runners and cyclists out now, and we got a lot of looks and an equal lot of cheers and questions.
We wound our way back to Alta Lake again for our second Alta swim, and the longest swim of the day!
There were some folks on the dock, and we consulted them on our destination as we squinted really hard and looked down the shore. It's a ~1500 yard swim, and it's straight down the shore, so we definitely couldn't see any flags or strobes at the exit. But we knew it was on the same shore, so we just hopped in and started swimming along the shore!
This was probably my favorite swim of the day. I KNEW it was a long swim, so set my expectations accordingly. The views were just stellar in every direction. The water was cool but not cold. I was feeling fine. It was just.. good.
The swim exit became obvious as we got closer to it, as we'd hoped, and we had an easy exit into a little dock/park area, where we found Matt again!
This area was extremely chaotic. People were starting to wake up and head to the lake for the day, and the combination of locals and tourists with bikes and canoes and kayaks, and then racers coming out of and into the water (second spot on the course where you could see other racers!), and a much-appreciated aid station with volunteers and spectators.. just a lot going on!
We took an extra minute (or so) at that aid station, since we knew this was the beginning of The Second half of the Race, where each remaining run was long and difficult, and we wanted to fuel up a little. We got to see Batman's Parents and Low Tide Boyz finishing up the run we were about to start, and the cheering Low Tide Famz as we headed out for (spoiler) the most fun run of the day!
Well, first we had to get to the fun part. We followed the markings out to the road, and started running along the road. Trista looked ahead and spied Kim! Yay, we must be going the right way! Except.. Kim is yelling at us. Oh, we're NOT going the right way! There was a turn-off into the woods, except there were cars parked all along the road, and they were blocking the visibility of the flag that indicated where we should turn. I'm SO glad Kim was there and that she let us know, so we could turn around, skirt around the cars, and find the entrance into the woods.
And THEN it was just crazytimes.
This first section, A River Runs Through It, is a very popular Whistler mountain bike trail. It has.. a lot of mountain bike toys. Bridges. Fallen trees. Wooden banks. Flow tracks. Just everything. It was fun as hell to navigate it as a runner, and also scary as hell at some points. Balance beams! That were pretty terrifying to walk across. I can't even IMAGINE trying to ride a mountain bike over one.
Actually, I pretty much just repeated that this whole section. "HOW DO YOU DO THIS ON A MOUNTAIN BIKE?!"
It was so tree-covered it was almost dark. It was nice and cool. It was spongey. It was like a giant playground. We saw no mountain bikes and only a few other swimrunners, so it was eerily quiet. It was just.. somuchfun.
At one point there was a teeter totter. You're supposed to ride your mountain bike over it. You bet your ass Trista and I hopped on either end and teeter-tottered. Serious athletes always.
In addition to all the zigging and zagging and bridging and playing, there were some INTENSE uphill climbs. I think they're downhill, if you are doing this loop properly on a mountain bike, which .. again, TERRIFYING. Double black diamond-rated trails. The kind where you are nearly fully doubled over, using your hands to help you get up the incline. We knew Marcus was pretty proud of getting us out on this trail, so we praised and cursed his name in equal amounts.
After A River Runs Through It, we moved to some less insane trails that were a little easier to navigate. And those took us across the Rainbow Falls Bridge. Which is just.. beautiful. Like stop you in your tracks beautiful. So we did. We stopped on the bridge and looked upstream. Looked downstream. And then broke into a spontaneous mid-bridge hug, because we were just so happy to be out there, together, in this beautiful place, having such a great time together.
And then we started running again, turned the corner, and were treated to perhaps the LEAST attractive part of the course, where they were doing massive earth-moving construction on the hillside, and there were vehicles and cones and barriers all over the place. Stark contrast. Moving moment over, back to real life!
We got some beautiful views of Alta lake as we headed through the last trails to get back to the same Alta Lake aid station where we'd begun our run. Significantly fewer racers in the area this time, but significantly more lake-visitors and boat-carriers. We did see the female team who we'd last seen on the dock of the first Alta swim, just starting the 4 mile loop we'd just finished, and were a little concerned about them and cut-off times, given how long that loop had taken us. They said they'd had a little off-course adventure that we never got to hear the full story of.
Once we'd fully loaded up on calories and fluids again, knowing we had another tough run before we'd hit another aid station, we jagged down to the water for our third and final swim of the day in Alta Lake! MVP lake, for sure.
When we got to the shore, there was a really cute shiba inu hanging out at the water's edge (with its people), which definitely slowed us down a little, as I threatened to steal it and swim off, and its person said if I could swim with 30lbs of dog on my back, I was welcome to it. Thought about it.
We got all our gear on as we waded in, and then.. we just kept wading. It was pretty shallow, though definitely swimmable, but kept wading for a WHILE. So much so that I politely inquired as to whether we were just going to walk this whole swim, and Trista said we might. But then eventually we did start swimming, and it was a delightful little swim to finish up our Alta Lake time, even though it was really hard to see the dock we knew we should be swimming to. Got there eventually!
Another ladder exit onto the Blueberry Dock (really could have gone for some of the Timbits they'd had at the dock as the Fika the morning before, at that moment), and then we headed out for our next-to-last run of the day! Which, again, was a long one.
The day was definitely heating up at this point. We knew this was going to be a long, hot run, so we went ahead and took goggles and swimcaps off immediately, and cabbed down so we'd be a little cooler.
The first part of this run is through a beautiful forest. We soon came upon the swings that Marcus had promised were on the course, and we hopped on to swing for a few seconds, overlooking the lake. Just stunning.
And then.. I remember nothing else about the forested part of this run! Maybe Trista will remind me of what I'm forgetting. Maybe you just get a reprieve from my wall of words here. But it was lovely, and then eventually we came out of the woods onto a road.
A little section of road running, into a neighborhood. We ran down a long, long hill in this neighborhood for a while, and then we noticed we hadn't seen any markers, signs, arrows, flags for a while. Well, maybe if we run a little further. Nope. Nothing. At this point, we were pretty far down this hill. And we were pretty sure something had gone wrong. But we had no idea what. Trista is really good at heads-up racing (I'm not terrible, but she almost always notices markers before I do, which is one of the reasons we keep her in the front). The fact that neither of us had seen ANYthing was confusing. But we did NOT want to run back up that hill to find where our last known marker was, especially because as we dithered over what to do, we just kept running further and further downhill.
We started asking people out in their yards or walking their dogs whether they had seen anyone come through that looked weird like us. Nobody had. Clearly we were off course. But could we get back on if we just kept going down this hill?
We knew our ultimate next destination was Green Lake, so Trista started asking passersby how to get to Green Lake, and they kinda pointed off to the left, at the bottom of the hill. So we ran all the way down the hill until we got to.. a highway of sorts. Okay. Well.
At that point we stopped and flagged down a person with a phone and asked if we could look at a map on their phone. We determined that if we went over to this path next to us, it would eventually lead us to a road that would take us to Green Lake. And maybe somewhere in there, we'd end up back on the course. Fingers crossed!
We very sincerely thanked this nice person for letting us use her phone even though we were clearly in some sort of weird wetsuit cult, and we hopped onto the footpath, hoping we were doing a sane thing.
And we were! Very shortly, when we looked off to the right, we saw some people, and those people turned out to be an aid station! On.. the other side of a fence, over a weird ravine. But we realized if we kept going down that footpath, it would get us through there and to the aid station! And as we navigated that, we saw flags going up a path, which was pretty clearly where we SHOULD have come onto this footpath. I was mostly relieved that, even though we'd done it wrong, we had clearly ADDED distance to the course, not cut distance off. Whew.
We later learned that someone (HOA?) had gone through the neighborhood and picked up signs and markers, so it wasn't that we'd missed them, it's that they weren't there at all. I'm so glad that we stuck with trying to figure out where we were and got back on course, rather than getting to that highway, giving up, and hitchhiking our way.. somewhere.
Okay, back on course, and at an aid station! We had a little chat with RD Dale and a really kind volunteer, refilled our water, chugged some electrolytes, took a gel, and then headed off the right direction again!
Which brings us to my LEAST favorite part of the course. I mean, it's a sidewalk path along a busy highway. There's no shade. It was very sunny and very warm at this point. With cars zooming by next to us. And bikes coming from both directions, which meant we had to run single file a lot. And it just wasn't great.
Eventually the path took us alongside Green Lake, which was neat, because Green Lake is beautiful and weird (weirdly green), but it still wasn't a pleasant run. And it's a few miles of that. By the end of that run, we were running ("running") through the sunny bits, and then letting ourselves walk through the shady bits as a reward, to get us more time in the shade. Still having fun, but lowest point for sure. It wouldn't have been a great run even if it had been cool and overcast, but I would have preferred it be cool and overcast.
But then we hooked a right and finally ran down to Green Lake itself! We were so very excited to have this run be over, and get to swim.
Oh, wait, I almost forgot the most important part of this section of the run. (We'll see if Trista makes it this far while proofreading this before she sends me a message saying YOU FORGOT. I didn't forget! I just.. forgot. Until now. Calm down.)
We knew Green Lake had a seaplane dock, and that we might see some seaplanes taking off or landing while we were out on that part of the course. And sure enough, as we ran along the lake, we heard a droning noise getting closer. I said, "Ooh, it's a sea plane! Except.. I can't see it. So it's a.. not-see plane." Which obviously quickly devolved into us declaring it a Nazi plane, and I wish I could blame that on how hot and tired we were, but honestly it was always going to devolve into us declaring it a Nazi plane. And declaring anything else we couldn't see for the rest of the race/day/vacation a Nazi whatever.
At least we entertain ourselves. Aren't you glad I didn't leave out that VITALLY important story?
Okay, back to the aid station at the swim entrance on Green Lake.
We were too busy dying of heat exhaustion and giggling to ourselves about Nazi planes to have done ANYthing to get ready to swim, so we arrived half-suited, goggles, paddles, swimcaps all stowed. We grabbed some water, then proceeded to get suited back up as Trista interrogated one of the volunteers about who had been the first people and teams to cross the finish line.
I was pulling all my gear out of my Kangaroo top pockets, getting everything settled, putting things on, when I realized I couldn't find my swimcap. I hadn't zipped up my wetsuit yet, so I went through all my pockets again, and came up empty. Between my wetsuit, the Kangaroo top, and the Kangaroo bra, there are a LOT of pockets, so I dug into them all again: no swimcap.
I felt SO terrible. This isn't the first time this has happened to me! I seem to have a talent for losing things I stow in my wetsuit. I hate it. It's a terrible feeling. It's a team sport. Why can't I keep my half of the team's shit together?!
I finally reluctantly said out loud that I couldn't find my swimcap, but Trista was chatting with the volunteer and didn't hear me, so I repeated it louder, and asked the volunteer if they had any swimcaps. We'd been told that some aid stations would have extra, but this one didn't. And this was supposed to be the coldest swim, and so the one you least want to do capless. Ugh.
Trista dug through all my pockets again in case I had missed it, but came up empty, as well. There wasn't really much to be done, so I zipped up my wetsuit, put my goggles on over my bare hair (stuff of nightmares: I never wear goggles without a swimcap, so the goggles were too loose without it, and pulled my hair, and just uuuuugh), and started to hand the other end of the tether to Trista so we could get this cold-ass swim over with.
And then Trista said "Wait, let me check MY suit..." She unzips her wetsuit, and immediately finds HER swimcap, which has been in her Kangaroo top pocket the whole time, after she picked up MY swimcap from the water barrel where I had set it down for a few seconds while I sorted through my stuff.
We both immediately said "Well THIS is going in the race report!"
And now here we are.
I'm just so glad I didn't lose another damn swimcap.
I love when it's Trista's fault! Good job, teamie.
Fortunately I waited a really long time to write this report, so the Olympics are now happening, and I can include this link declaring Trista Bob the Cap-Catcher.
Meanwhile the one solo racer who had been behind us pulled up during all this foofaraw (we learned the women's team who had been starting that last run when we finished hadn't made a time cut-off and were pulled), and we basically all three started this last swim together.
We waded into Green Lake and.. it wasn't that cold. I mean, it wasn't WARM, but it wasn't anywhere NEAR Nita Lake cold. Granted, it was much later in the day, and the day had been very warm and sunny, so maybe earlier it had been a lot colder, but frankly I was a little disappointed! That was a LOT of buildup, and it didn't at all live up to the hype.
After a few strokes, I hit Trista's feet and said, "It's not that cold!" She agreed, we started swimming again, and then a few strokes later, we both came up again and said, "Oh, now it's cold."
It was patchy. Cold patches, warmer patches. But Nita Lake was far and away the winner of the Coldest Lake of the Day trophy. Congratulations, Nita.
This was originally supposed to be a 300 meter swim, but they evidently changed where the swim entrance was, and turned it into an 800 meter swim. Which would have been a bigger deal if it HAD been in the lower 50s, but really wasn't a problem for us at all.
The far shore where the exit was was pretty shaded, which made it hard to see the swim exit flag, but there weren't a lot of other swimmers out there (one. one other swimmer), so we basically had a personal SUP support to sit there and let us aim for it, with the swim exit on the other side of them.
Uneventful, unfrigid swim completed, and then it was just one run to the finish line!
One.. very long, very hot, very exposed, hilly run. MARCUS.
BUT.. during that run, we came across a Matt on a mountain bike, who offered us water and rode with us, AND a Marcus who ran back to run in with us, and answer all of Trista's questions finally about who won and who finished where and all the nitty gritty details.
Which is actually really good, because this run was also very dusty, and over 7 hours of swimming and running had taken a toll, and the dust finally put the nail in the coffin of my voice, and I was almost inaudible when I spoke for this last run. Trista would run right next to me, which was close enough to barely hear me, then she'd relay my questions and comments to Matt and/or Marcus. It was frustrating, but also kinda fun, because I lose my voice so rarely, it's a weird novelty when it happens.
It was so hot and miserable at this point that the last run was pure survival, but we gutted it out and got through it. It's a testament to how miserable that highway run to Green Lake was that the highway run was MORE miserable than this last run.
We discussed finish line moves in the last few miles, and I almost just said I couldn't do it. I wasn't feeling sick, per se, but I was just wiped out, had no voice, was feeling pretty dehydrated, and couldn't think to come up with ideas. We also couldn't remember if it was grass or cement at the finish line, so it was hard to decide what was feasible. When Marcus reminded us it was a sidewalk, we knew we couldn't do any rolling.
Well, we knew we couldn't do any FORWARD rolling. We settled on a barrel roll, because that didn't require any thought, strength, or coordination. Perfect.
During the last run, our new solo friend Ava passed us one last time and finished before us, which meant we were the final finishers, which we had no problem with. I wasn't sure I should be racing at all, and certainly not for 8 hours, so I was happy just to cross the finish line with everything but my voice intact, and feeling pretty okay, considering.
Even though I was sick, and it was slow, and we got lost, it was a really, really fun day with a great friend. I croaked out to Trista during the last run that I was absolutely on board with coming out and doing this race again, when I wasn't sick. I'm not sure we'll be any faster, but at least the days before will be less physically and emotionally fraught.
That would be a good ending, but instead I give you a GREAT ending.
As we were gathered at the finish line, taking photos and swapping stories, a dog appeared. The finish line is that terrible dirt downhill we went up at the beginning, and then a sidewalk through the finish chute. And a random ownerless dog appeared, ran down the hill, and trotted directly down the sidewalk and through the finish chute. Everyone cheered for this random dog, having no idea where it had come from, and then we crowded around it to congratulate it and give it some love.
The owner was eventually found and reunited with the dog, but what a magical finish to a great race! And the dog kindly made it so Trista and I weren't the last finishers. Dogs are great.
Overall it was a super fun race, a great but too short weekend meetup in Whistler (everyone else immediately left for other adventures, while Matt and I stayed in BC for another week and a half), and I will absolutely do this race again, assuming it's held again in the future! Fingers crossed. Highly recommend.
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