Wednesday, January 16, 2008

6 hour Lake Taupo Swim

On 12 January Jason and Anna headed to Taupo with their awesome support crew (me, Johnno, Ali, Carol, Martin and Ang) to swim across half of Lake taupo (6 hours). For more information on this check out their website: http://www.fortypointtwo.org.nz/

So for the second weekend in a row we got up at 3.45 am. Jason ate hit massive bowl of porridge, sultanas, brown sugar and milk. All washed down with a coffee and some replace. We left Taupo a little after 4 with the aim of being on the water by 5 - 5.30.
Maarts had a bit of trouble getting the support boat out so we didn't get started until after 6. The air temperature was only about 10 degrees and I was determined not to mention how cold I thought it was (I know how hard it is for Jason when we all go on about the cold). But the water temp was great. About 19 degrees (so that explained all the steam rising off the water). This photo is of Jason and Anna in the new Blue Seventy Point Zero 3 (FINA swim legal) swim suits before we started the swim (apparantly these suits are tight and once they are on, they are not coming off.... it takes about 10 minutes to get them on as well...)

So for the first time in four years I jumped in a canoe polo kayak (eeekkk I was worried if I would remember how) and we headed out from the Tokaanu boat ramp (on the actual swim morning the team will leave from Little Waihi- just round the corner).
It was just a stunning day out there as you can see in the pictures below...



Surprisingly the time seemed to pass pretty quickly as we had food stops for the swimmers (handed out from Ang on the support boat) every 30 minutes:


This is the last photo you will see of me in a polo boat I think:



After about 2 hours of kayaking my legs were fully numb! Just really sore and I needed to get out of the Kayak. Ali (swim coach) took over from me for an hour, but I think that it was a lot more uncomfortable for him than me! At hour 3 I jumped in the kayak for another 2 hours. Both Jason and Anna were preet upbeat and chirpy during this phase!
For the last hour of the swim I jumped in my wetsuit and joined Jason. It was quite a surreal experience swimming out in the middle of Lake Taupo. The top of the water was really clear and we had all these rays of sun light surrounding us, I really don't have the writing ability to eloquently phrase how awesome it was.
At the 5.15 mark, Jason was visibly tiring so after 5 and a half hours Ali asked Jason to step up the pace! So I helped jason out by picking up the pace... for a while he stayed behind me but in the last 10 minutes he really picked up heaps of speed and soon left me for dead!!!
After the swim we had an hour or so on the boat back to our start point and the hungry swimmers swooped on Turangi Burger King!!! A well deserved fatty meal!!!
All in all an awesome effort.

1 comment:

Sar@h said...

Do you swim with palms ? or not ?