Apparently, I'm not the only one who has had problems panicking at the beginning of the swim. I've been reading a book about peoples first triathlons and some of those people hyperventilated right away too. It gives me a little comfort knowing that I'm not alone in that.
Anyway, after calming down from panicking, I concentrated getting to each buoy ball. I swam passed two and decided to try the breast stroke. However, it didn't make me feel like I was moving forward at all. It seemed like my legs were kicking in the air (which might actually have been true since the wet suit changed my positioning in the water). I pretty much used the crawl (and some treading water) after that.
By the time I reached the first turn of the triangle, most of the women had passed me. I was left with the women who were roughly my level (although they didn't waste their time considering quitting).
One of the women cut just inside the big, orange buoy that marked the turn. I'm not sure if she noticed or decided that it wasn't a big deal because she just kept on going. In actuality, it wasn't a big deal because she only cut a couple meters off the course (and it's not like we were competing for the prizes back where I was).
Along the back stretch, I noticed that my wet suit was filling with water. I'm pretty sure that helps negate the positive affects of the suit. I felt my back and without the collar fastened, the zipper had come half way down. I basically had a small parachute on my back.
I grabbed the zipper cord and zipped myself back up. I tried to get the collar re-fastened but it just wouldn't because it was a little twisted and velcroed to itself. I gave up because it wasn't easy treading water and fussing with my collar. Also, I was losing time. It didn't really matter though, since I didn't have any more problems with my zipper.
I decided to not bother with re-attaching the end of my zipper cord the the velcro patch at the base of my back. I figured that it would just nicely trail behind me as I pushed through the water. I was wrong. It spent the rest of the swim tangled in my arms and around my neck (trying to strangle me).
There were some issues with swimming straight ahead. Since I was breathing on the same side, I wound up swimming in little arcs. My arm hit the inside rope a quite a bit as I arced into it. I was also running into the same people a lot (some of it wasn't my fault but some of it was). After a couple of times I wound up just trying to stay a couple meters wide of anyone else. That only partially worked, as I still would wind up close to people.
When I made it to shore, I saw Arial and the kids. I think Frances was holding a "YAY DADDY" sign they had made (but I can't be sure, my memory of that is kinda fuzzy because my eyesight was fuzzy). Arial told me that I had done the swim in ~35 minutes. That was amazing since I thought it was going to take me 50 minutes to do it. The wet suit helped.
Running up to the road to the transition area, I had to ask for directions since I couldn't see. Someone nicely pointed me in the right direction and I found my station with no problem.
I didn't feel that bad but I could feel that I had used energy than I had thought based on the sprint distance I did. I started to realize that an Olympic distance is much harder than a sprint and that this was going to be a serious challenge.
mwz
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