Train-n-Tri: Open Water Swim....Tried my SwimSafe!

Some of my friends from my tri-club, Triathlon Connection, got together this morning for an open water swim at Lake Perris. I didn't make the get-together. No worries. I still swam, just a couple of hours later with my guy. I waited for him to get off work and then we headed out to Lake Perris together. It was warm and sunny and calm and NO one was there...okay, there were a couple of fishermen on the dock, but that was it.

We swam from one end of the beach to the other end.

We swam from the about the bottom corner along the beachy strip up and to the left and back.

Robert was getting a bit nauseous and I'm sure he was getting tired of me telling him he needed earplugs. I thought maybe he was going to get out, but he kept on.

At the end of the beach we turned around and started swimming back. I was having a marvelous time. Well, as marvelous as you can have while thinking your guy is going to puke in the water at any minute.

I tried to keep my mind on having high elbows and dropping my hand and bending my elbow on my pull and having my chin follow my shoulder and keeping all my appendages inside my "tube" so I wouldn't be putting on the brakes and sighting every once in a while by barely lifting my eyes out of the water. My coach would be proud...or maybe he would have just taken a video and pointed out all my errors. At any rate, I was feeling at one with the water.

And then it happened!

I looked down and saw a snake. It must have been 5 feet long and it was laying on the bottom or the lake. I started swimming at warp speed, my heart rate shot up, I lift my head and yelled, "Holy Crap!"

Robert stopped, turned and asked what was wrong.

"I just saw what I thought was a snake," I explained, while massaging my right calf muscle, which had gone into a spasm from the frantic kicking I had just done.

"Do you think there are snakes in here?" he asked.

"No. I just thought I saw one and it scared the hell out of me. I'm okay. Let's swim."

I continued swimming, closing my eyes when my head was down and only opening when I took a breath to the right so I could see the shore.

After about 50 strokes, I was back in my rhythm and the snake was forgotten.

Amazingly, of the 45 minutes it took us to swim the .85 mile, I kept my face in the water almost the entire time. I was thinking of that fact when we were getting to the last red buoy.

If someone had told me that I would have my face in Lake Perris for almost 45 minute straight, only lifting it to breath once in a while, I would have laughed.

And I did laugh because then I opened my eyes to look underwater and there was my son's missing shoe.

I am sure what I saw was not MY son's missing shoe. His is probably under the couch or under the pile of dirty towels in his room. But what I saw was some teenage boy's missing shoe. I think the shoe at the bottom of Lake Perris is going to be missing forever.

When we got back to shore, I though about my little "snake" scare and how wearing my SwimSafe kept me calm because I had thought worse comes to worse, I could always pull my safety cord and be safely cradled until someone came and got me.

"You know," I told my guy, "I have been wearing this thing for a year and really I don't even know if it works. I think I should try it out, just to make sure."

And I did.

I pulled the cord and the inside self-inflated and turned into a flotation device.