Up at 6 am working on mass starts with the RX Endurance Team. 
Edit: I’ve decided to write something about this swim rather than just post the picture.
Here’s how the Open Water Sessions go down. You should show up a little before 6 to get a little more warm up in. Me? I get there at six, swim a couple hundred yards, then suck gas for the next half hour because I’m barely awake and certainly not loose.
What you see above is from the middle of our practice. We all started back by that cup on the ledge and sprinted into the water, then swam out around that buoy and back. We did this at least twice.
Before that, we individually ran into the water, swam around that buoy, then ran down the beach about 50 yards, ran into the water, swam out and around a different buoy, then repeated it one more time. We were instructed to swim hard.
About halfway to the second buoy I felt very winded and had to chill for a minute. Sometimes swimming feels nice and easy, sometimes it’s very hard. At that moment, I was struggling big time. I gathered my bearings and finished all three loops, breathing far too hard at the end.
Then we did a couple relays out and around the buoy to end the day. Those were all out sprints and while tired, I was just then starting to feel right.
As I think about swimming 2.4 miles at Ironman Wisconsin, I am almost grateful for the floating start. It will be a cluster-f8ck, but that 10-15 minutes of treading water beforehand may be my saving grace. I should be fairly warm and acclimated to the water. After that, it’s a matter of containing myself for the first 15 minutes. My goal is to not feel out of breath at all, except for maybe a late push at the end when I’m nice and warm.
Swimming, biking, and running are all so meditative when you’re in the right place. Being relaxed while remaining powerful is what it’s all about to me. A solid effort without over-exerting and the key is to push my threshold in training so my comfort zone is a relatively fast one.
It was a hard workout, mainly filled with roughly 200 yard sprints and I didn’t like it much at the time. But, I like it now.