After the Clean Half last Saturday, I felt that I needed some rest (although it was a relay of 30 minutes on the support kayak, 30 minutes of swimming, the distance was still significant which I swam about 7 km in the 14 km course) so I didn’t swim on Sunday, but after a day of rest I was ready again! On Sunday Edie announced that we were doing an adventure swim from Shek O with varying distances, maybe to…
Today I did a marathon swimming race, Clean Half, in Hong Kong despite the escalating social unrest which effectively put the city under martial law as the MTR was destroyed (but nearly all buses still ran as usual), malls closed, and many events (including scouting activities, orienteering races, triathlon training, lifeguard exams) cancelled with a short notice. It is a 14 km (claimed to be 15 km by the organiser, but satellite image showed the course to be about 14…
On the day after mid-autumn festival, I did the race “The Polson 5”, which is a 5 km (4.7 km measured on Google) swimming race from Stanley Blake Pier to Repulse Bay. This is the first time that I did the race, also the first time for my idol Alex Fong (who is doing a Hong Kong Island circumnavigation in November) as well. On the days before the race, I was really worried because the marine current prediction said that…
Last Sunday I did my first swimming race after returning from my Europe trip, DWB TT, the 2nd race in OWSHK race series this year. DWB TT stands for “Deep Water Bay Time Trial”, unlike normal races, time trial means that drafting is not allowed, and interval start is used such that it’s a race of individual effort. As an orienteer, I’m very familiar with the race format because most formal orienteering competitions are in interval start to minimise following….
On a forum, I left a short response to Iron Mike‘s comment about his DNF rate, saying from my heart that 44% DNF rate?! I would have already given up the sport. I then discovered he has written a blog article responding to this sentence, and happened to read it! Although my open water swimming experience is very little and I haven’t got a single DNF yet in my 7 open water swimming competitions (I got a DNF in an…
Now I have already done my first marathon swimming and got my name listed in the LongSwims Database, and everything about the trip has been settled, so it’s time for me to review what I have actually done in my progress from starting swimming to become a marathon swimmer now. I tried to start doing OW swimming back in December 2014, but it was a struggle in the initial years which I nearly gave up, until I got myself enough…
It was the day for the final race of the trip. Since the race was early, the travel agency arranged with the hotel to have an early breakfast starting from 06:00, because we had to check out before 07:15 if we were not staying afterwards. We were then carried to Cemil Topuzlu Parkı for the race. We had to board 2 specifically-prepared athlete boats at Cemil Topuzlu Parkı, which carried all 2500 of us stripped down to only our swimsuits,…
This day the tour schedule was to do the compulsory race registration in the morning, which we took our race pack, containing most importantly the athlete badge, swim cap and the timing chip, and also got the wrist strap on the hand. After the registration, we got on the boat tour by the race organiser which went through the course once and explained it. We were told that we should swim towards Europe to the centre first, to find some…
The competitions this day were middle distance, then followed by PreO in Tahkovuori. I brought my swimsuit to have some swimming before the race, but due to time constraint, I could only swim for 1 hour, about 2.5 km there. If I planned properly I could swim for 3 hours between the sprint and TempO competitions the day before as there was much time between the competitions, and there were not much walking needed to the starts. The water temperature…
This day I did my first race in my trip – LGSA Classic. It is a 13 km lake swimming race from 🇨🇭 Lausanne to 🇫🇷 Évian-les-Bains. The start was divided into 4 waves based on the expected finishing time, from slowest to fastest, and I was assigned wave 2. The course was a simple straight line, therefore I expected to aim for the destination directly. However it was impossible to see the exact finish beach 13 km away so…