Thursday, June 26, 2008

No Toxins, Maybe Catfish . .

I made the Wednesday swim in the Mon River. I showed up three cars in the lot near the WVU crew dock (not the dock we will use in the tri). I walked down to the dock and all I saw was three pairs of flip flops. I walked back to the lot and three more cars, and a bike pulled in. Two girls, a guy and myself swam at 6pm. Plus one of the girls brought a friend who kayaked for safety.

As we got ready to jump in the owners of the flip flops came swimming back in, they were the 5 pm group. We jumped in. I will let you know it will be nicer not to touch the bottom in the triathlon, Yuck. We swam from the dock to the bridge. Everyone just kept going. I was the second to the bridge. It was about 600m to the bridge. Another person told me this. The girls turned around. The other guy said, you up for 10 more minutes up the river. I said sure. I realized at this point he had been warming up a little for the first segment. He got a head of me and stayed ahead until we hit 10 minutes then he waited for me. We floated and talked a couple minutes.

Then he said this is the fun part. He had noticed they had opened another part of the lock and the water was flowing harder down river, I didn't mention we had been swimming up river against a current. It had taken us about 30 minutes to swim this far (900 m or so). We started out. His position must be way better than mine. With the current to our back he was flying. I think he could have gotten back in less than 15 mins, but he waited a couple times for me and we got back in less than 20 mins. It was nice. I think we did about 1800m in 45 to 50 mins. probably closer to 50.

River was clean. It looked greener, which is better than the recent brown. The others swimming were very happy with the conditions and the two girls in our group didn't even wear their wet suits. The kayak guy came back to us once the girls got out and made sure we got back Ok. It was nice working out with others. I should do this more often.

Oh yea, the water seems clean, I am not suffering any side effects this morning, but they warned me against Catfish attacks. This sounded more like a Big Foot citing, but you can never tell???? (insert theme from X-files here).

2 comments:

catmarlson said...

Yuck to the Muck.
Are you saying that where we swim for the triathlon there is a concrete dock or something which spares us the mud?
I just want to know if I'm going to want a foot bath at the transition.
My bike shoes are nasty enough already without Mon Muck.

CSquared said...

I think we crawl up on to a dock. I think they build some type of ramp where you swim up to it and step out or crawl onto the dock, then run off the dock. This structure is away from the shore. You never touch the bottom.