You gotta start somewhere and this was from my first Sprint, in the Music City Triathlon. It’s funny how I look back on this now and think it wasn’t really that tough, but I was supremely intimidated by the idea. To swim in the Cumberland River for 400 meters with a “wicked” current had me shakin’ a little bit. And really, I don’t remember much from that swim except gasping for air and wondering what the fuck I was doing. There were about 600 people in the race and we did a timed start, so it wasn’t really congested, but you still taste a lot of feet.
I tried to get into the mindset of a Navy Seal as I navigated the dark and murky waters. Luckily I learned that you have to swim upstream to get straight across, so I buried my head after the last marker and dug in for Opryland. When I looked up, I was STILL below my exit point and scurried like a dog to get back to the pier. The swim took me something like 6:45, but it seemed like I spent a lifetime in that river.