With SwimRun NC only a month away, my wife and I decided to head to the lake again for some some specific SwimRun practice. We started with a swim, followed by a run and then another swim.  As soon as you enter the water, you realize that everything gets wet… and I mean everything.

We did a swim-run-swim workout for two reasons.

We mostly wanted to swim, so that we continue to get comfortable swimming as a team.  In the race, we have to stay within 10 meters of each other, so we use a tether in the swim.  Our tether is a bright green shock cord, attached to race belts on our waists.

We are getting better at swimming together.  I swim lead and my wife drafts behind my feet.  She swam really well today, because I never felt the tether go tight at all.  In fact we have decided to shorten the tether a little bit, so we can swim even closer together.

We also did the swim-run-swim workout, to practice our transitions from swimming to running and vice versa.  Coming out of the water, the key was to quickly stash away all of the swim gear.  The swim buoys went behind our backs on lasso mounts.  I stuffed paddles, goggles and the tether into pockets on the legs of my wetsuit.  My wife has fewer pockets, so needed to attach things to her race belt.

Going into the water, the key was to make sure we had everything set up, before entering the water.  That way, we could just swim as soon as the water was deep enough.  

We learned a lot today and because everything gets wet, we needed to use the sun to dry things out when we got home. Hence the photograph of various SwimRun gear all over the table on our deck.