Festival of Sport: 3k swim

If I'm honest, this isn't a race that I am really interested in writing up,  but I will do for the sake of completeness.  I'm glad that 3k is a distance I've not ever raced before (and am unlikely to race again) as it means I don't have to beat myself up for it.

We were down at the Festival of Sport at the weekend to take part in two events each (because by doing two you got two free t-shirts - I'm a sucker for a free t-shirt!).  On Saturday morning Mr W set off early for a 100k sportive whilst I cooked him a birthday cake, and at lunchtime I waited anxiously for him to hit the finishing mat so that I could make sure he ate and more importantly so I could get changed and give him my swim bag.

Unfortunately the swim didn't seem very well organised.  The 10k swimmers were supposed to go off half an hour before, and the 1.5k swimmers half an hour later, but the 1.5kers had already been told they'd have to wait til 5pm and the 10kers didn't go off when they were supposed to.  The race got a bit confusing really as I wasn't sure what was happening, but eventually we were wading out along the causeway to St Michael's Mount (which was slowly being covered over).  I was nearish the back of the line and could see some swimmers already in the water when suddenly I heard the countdown and the race was about to start.  I semi-dived into the hip deep water, got my goggles on, and was just about swimming when the race started, but I was quite a few metres behind the pack, not where I like to be at the start.

It then got a bit worse.  The course had changed slightly and was difficult to envisage in reality compred to the diagram I'd seen previously.  Without my glasses, with the swell on the water, the very far apart buoys were almost impossible to spot.  I have to say that I kind of lost interest; I'd lost the time at the start, I kept having to stop and breastroke to work out if the swimmers I was following were going the right way, and I remembered that I *hate* swimming in the sea.  Hate not being able to streamline and hate the salty taste.  So eventually I got back, and I was pretty cross and grumpy, especially at my time of 52:09.  I wasn't expecting a fast time in the sea, but it could have been a lot faster if the race issues had been ironed out.

Fortunately I had a much better experience on the tri (although not with the swimming!) and I'll blog about that soon!