I am almost finished writing my race report for Oceanside.  It is always good to relive a race by writing a report.  It is easy to forget some of the many things that happen, over the course of the hours I am racing.  One such memory, that I only really recalled as I wrote about it, was how incredibly crowded the swim was.

It is easy to focus on the conditions when talking about the swim at Oceanside. The challenge of fighting through the surf; the current that drags you off line going out to the first turn buoy and the general chop of the water in the ocean. Those things however, disappeared once we started swimming in the harbor.

The harbor part of the swim presented me with a different challenge. It was incredibly crowded.  I have never had so much contact with other swimmers, as I did during that part of the swim.  If you look at the photograph of me running up the swim exit, you get a sense of just how many people were around me.

Part of the problem was my own fault.  I was a little late heading over to the swim start, after my warm up swim.  By the time I got there, the entry chute was already full. I couldn’t get to group of swimmers who would have been swimming at a similar pace to me. I was trapped at the back with slower swimmers.

This meant that by the time I got the the harbor, I was swimming faster than many of the people around me.  As a result, I was constantly having to dodge around swimmers, and this sometimes resulted in contact.  Nothing bad, but still contact.  I found the key was to sight pretty much every other stroke.  This is not ideal, but at least I could avoid most people that way.

Although it sounds bad, I quite enjoyed swimming in a pack like that. I felt alive and it felt like a true triathlon experience.  Have you ever experienced an incredibly crowded swim?