Notes
Age Group US Championship Triathlon swim. Prior to this even I have basically only done time trial starts (send 1-2 competitors into the water every 3 seconds) and a couple of small (25-30 people) wave starts. So lining up with 145 people was overwhelming. I started near the back since I know I'm not a great swimmer and didn't feel like getting run over. The course also had a narrow bridge to go under about 400m in which caused it to be even more congested at the start of the swim. I have been swimming well (for me) in workouts and was hoping to get after it today with the goal of swimming ~24 minutes if I had a good day. The start basically ruined this idea though. It was chaos. I can hardly call the first 200-400m even swimming for me. There just wasn't any room to make a swimming motion. This led to me pulling was to hard with poor form to try to keep up and destroying my left shoulder by the time I got to the bridge. After the bridge things spread out a bit and I tried to get after it, but my shoulder had very little strength. It wasn't really hurting but it was completely numb and not able to push me much at all. The buoys were also confusing. They didn't really have smaller buoys to follow so you just had to sight the big yellow buoys way up ahead and sometimes I couldn't tell which one was closer. They also had big orange buoys for some reason, likely just to confuse me. I still feel like I swam a decent line and got through the swim as well as usual by the end of it. The time reflected that as well. My fastest olympic distance swim but not by a lot and a couple minutes slower than what I was hoping for. This clearly put me well out of reach of a lot of my age (111th fastest swim). Ouch!