Its for the kids! 6 hours of swimming!

I swam 18750m or 750 lengths. Haha, yah in a 25m pool too. Sooo many flipturns. In the end we raised 1000ish dollars for economically disadvantaged youth in my community and money is still coming in.

I swam for 6 hours – First two hours were awesome – on track to hitting 20+ km. Then breathing problems settled in from poor air quality. Coughing fits made it really hard to swim longer than 300m continuously. That lasted for about 2 hours until the guards opened the exterior doors and I could start breathing again. When swimming freestyle I was holding under :45 per 50m, so my body (except my lungs were holding out just fine). Nutrition was great too, my DIY nutrient mix was awesome – maybe more caffene next time (oh there won’t be a next time though).

 

A huge thanks goes out to my dad and Renee Kinnear for helping me keep count of lengths. My mind was a mess at the end, I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. To Don MacIntosh for keeping me company by swimming the last hour and a bit with me. Also a gigantic thank you to PoCo (staff and community) for making the entire thing worthwhile. The support I recieved from the lifeguards was enormous – taking care of me by making sure I was ok the whole way through, and to the community for coming out and cheering me on/donating to the cause.

Keep on… Keep’n on!

RUN – SWIM – SURF: Everything that makes a good post

Vancouver First Half was today – I’ll have to admit, I was a bit worried going into the race because I had disappeared from the running world last year to focus on graduating, and after the thesis defense I had gone off and disappeared for a few weeks. Suffice to say, I was not in the greatest shape at the end of 2011.

I had started training again, but was SUPER careful with a build up, which really only lasted for a few weeks before the race. I went into the race with no idea of where my fitness was, and what I could pull off. Pleasantly surprised! I started off, super conservative becasue I was afraid of falling apart, which I did (in the last km, I had to stop 3 times to stop the legs from cramping).

5k – 18:31
10k – 35:37 (17:05)
15k – 52:38 (17:01)
20k -1:09:52 (17:13)

Total time- 1:16:40

Hot damn, I can run two consecutive 10k’s in under 35min (give or take some change)! I’ll just keep on keep’n on. Also! I had the pleasure of bumping into a lot of the runnners that I used to run with today! They all had awesome races, it was good to see them!

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I also made the front cover of the local rag! On Friday, I’ll be attempting to swim 6 hours to try to raise funds for economically disadvantaged youth in PoCo. The funds will go towards subsidizing their aquatic training in courses such as First Aid or their Lifeguarding tickets. What started as a joke, ended up being a reality. I guess its easy for managers to push things through when they’re not suffering.

The support I’ve recieved in the last few days has been overwhelming! I hope that this swim helps at least one kid get the chance to experience the benifits of being a lifeguard (maybe make post-secondary education a bit more of a reality for them because of the wages that lifeguards make).

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My friend showed me this at work, now I’m hooked. Super chill, and the video makes me want to surf so badly.