We had a nice family weekend trip to South Lake Tahoe and I even managed to get in a workout.  I took the chance afforded to me and did a ¼ mile open water swim in the lake.  For a brief moment in time, I was really feeling like I was taking my training seriously but then the universe kicked in with the gag reel.  Regardless of how it went there is no arguing that the venue was beautiful.

The small dot out in the water will be mentioned later on, promise.  When races have an open water swim the course is controlled. There is swim support and normally the only thing you need to worry about are the other racers.  For a free form, off-the-cuff swim like this there are variables that need to be considered.  The biggest one is that you are on your own (or mostly so) and you need to be cognizant of your ability level.  Since I have a certain sense of paranoia I simply walked out into the lake until it was about 5 feet deep, turned to my left and started swimming parallel to the beach.  There was a pier about 1/8 of a mile away so I decided to make that my turn around point.  The waves, and yes there were waves, were small – about a foot or so.  This didn’t seem like a big deal at first but it would be for half the swim.  I always breath to the right when I swim.  Always have and no matter how much I try to turn my head the other way it just doesn’t work (weird, I know).  This meant that on the outward leg I was turning my face towards the waves and getting sort of slapped by them.  I ended up not getting much of a rhythm going but it sure made it easier to deal with the fun ahead.  About 4-5 minutes into the swim  I saw a shadow off to my right and realized that I was about to be run over by a very nice elderly couple in a double kayak (remember that dot in the picture).  It was their first time kayaking and apparently, the people who rented them the kayak neglected to ask if they knew anything about sailing one.  They were very thankful after we had a brief discussion about “back paddling”. They went off into deeper water with a smile and a wave.

Not much more than two minutes later when I came across two women drifting in a couple of inner tubes with a bottle of white zin.  They cheerily offered me a drink and told me I was doing great, but it looked like too much effort to them.  Showing mature responsibility and wisdom I declined the drink and agreed with them that it was more work than I should be doing on vacation.  In mythology, it never works out well accepting things from mermaids and two drunk women in inner tubes is about as close as real life gets to mermaids.  I got about 50 feet from the pier I was aiming for when I realized that someone in a rental speedboat was heading straight for the beach.  Guessing more drunks (wonder if they knew the inner tube ladies) I decided that my turn around point was right there.  Just so you know, it is REALLY bad luck to beach a rental boat in sight of where you rented it.  Not much better to do it in the middle of swim beach either.  People get all excited for some reason.

The swim back was easy and uneventful.  Seems that turning my face AWAY from the waves really helped.  Truthfully though the trip out was really a hoot made and was so much better than just putting my head down swimming.