I have been looking around at a lot of different distance open water swimming sites lately and then looking at the times. It seems to me that the times are way to fast. Then again I'm not an open water swimmer, though that will change this year. I'm still confused by the times and speed I seem to be seeing. Here are just a couple of examples:
Little Red Lighthouse swim, best time: 1:07 for a 7.8 mile swim!
Manhattan Island Marathon Swim, best time 5:45 for a 28 mile swim. Heck you have to finish in 10 hours.
And then from here: 47-year old Slovenian ...He also broke the world record for non-stop swimming when he covered 313 miles of the Danube in just 84 hours in 2001. That's an average of 3.7 miles an hour.
I can see that the tides and water flow would help, but still I have seen a lot of averages of 3-4+ miles an hour. Those would be close to 1500 WR times in a pool. How can people sustain such speeds for so long? What am I missing here because I'd like to be able to do those kinds of speed.
Parents
Former Member
The 2nd time I swam Alcatraz back in 1998 with my then 12 year old son Matt, we got bumped over to the right side of the entrance into the lagoon in front of the National Maritime Museum. The outgoing tide was so strong we were almost unable to sprint the 10 yards back, to make it into the lagoon. From my experience the year before, I knew that if we did not line up exactly right...we would have never been able to swim against the tide to make it into the lagoon...Gosh, getting bumped to the right of the throat by other swimmers; we just missed the throat, which almost cost us a DNF.
The 2nd time I swam Alcatraz back in 1998 with my then 12 year old son Matt, we got bumped over to the right side of the entrance into the lagoon in front of the National Maritime Museum. The outgoing tide was so strong we were almost unable to sprint the 10 yards back, to make it into the lagoon. From my experience the year before, I knew that if we did not line up exactly right...we would have never been able to swim against the tide to make it into the lagoon...Gosh, getting bumped to the right of the throat by other swimmers; we just missed the throat, which almost cost us a DNF.
