My First Triathlon Swim

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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.