I did my third and final open water swim race of the year: Time Kerr Charities' 1.2 Mile Point-to-Point Swim. I finished in a time of 32:06 and I clocked the distance at 2,075 yards for an average pace of 1:33/100 yards. At the start of the race the tide was actually a bit against us but it flipped and was slack to slightly helping over the back half of the race.
I started about 4-5 minutes into the race in the self-seeded time trial start. I entered behind a bunch of my friends--I was about 16-17 seconds behind Dan and a lesser amount after Midge, Bonnie and Tanner. I actually bumped into Dan on the final straight as he swam up on my feet--I must of passed him at some point during the race but I never saw him (or Midge or Bonnie). I passed Tanner early on in the race.
Anyways, I ended up 41st out of 134 OA and 3rd out of 18 in the 60-69 YO Age Group and 1st out of 8 in the 65-69 YO Age Group. I managed to finish 4 seconds ahead of Dan as we continue to have very close finishes.
This race was part of the "Triple Crown Swim Series" and there were 5 guys, relatively close to my age and my times that I tracked against all year. Here are our collective results and my % delta to each for the these three races and for the Triple Crown as a whole:
So you can see, with a little bit of inspection, that Harbison is faster than I by 6.3% on average and the other 4 are for the most just a bit slower. Fabrizio (Dan) is consistently the closest to me although I'm also very close with Arasim as well. I don't know him but learned that he's actually from Wilmington, DE also!
It also looks, at least in comparison to this group of 5, that I was more competitive in the 1.2-Mile swims than I was in the 2.4-Mile swim (the Cedar Island 5k is actually 2.4 miles). That is not a total shock as I definitely cut back on my longer (2+ mile) swims this year with no Ironman on the horizon.
Another way to compare is to look at the two Age Group cuts and Overall and see how my relative %-tile finish compared across the three races:
This data is consistent with my comparison to the "gang of 5" as I consistently did better in the two shorter races than in the bigger 5k race. I do know that the 5k race is the "premier" race of the South Jersey Shore swimming race scene so that probably depresses my relative results in that race a bit.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with these results. I did reasonably well against my Age Group (interestingly the 65-69 Age Group was slightly more competitive than the 60-69 Age Group!) I thought I definitely raced close to my full potential in each of these races as frankly, I tended to be a lot slower in my training swims.
Looking ahead to 2025, I do plan to race these three again (and hopefully add 1-2 more OWS races). One of the things I'm thinking about (but am not ready to commit to yet) is taking a shot at catching Harbison next year. He averaged about 5.2 seconds/100 yards (6.3%) faster than me across these three races. 5 seconds/100 yards doesn't sound like a lot but realistically it really is. It's possible I could make the jump but it would require a very intense first 6 months of swim training starting in January. I'm not sure if I want to focus that much on swimming but we will see!
Onwards and Upwards!
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