Swimrun 201: Heads-Up Racing

Welcome to episode seventy-one of the Low Tide Boyz - A Swimrun Podcast!

This episode is the latest installment in our ad hoc series: Swimrun 201-Advanced Topics in Swimrun. On this show we discuss in detail the concept of “Heads Up Racing.” Prepare for some knowledge bombs, but first....

Training Update

Chris was out of town for work this past weekend so we didn’t get a Swimrun practice in but our training for Ödyssey Swimrun Casco Bay has officially begun. We will be ramping up our joint training sessions and look forward to sharing our progress (such as it is) with you. Now that we are training, we are going to start working on dialing in all of the key phases of racing to make sure that we’re as ready as we can be. 

On that note, it’s time for our first knowledge bomb of the show! We reached out to our friends at Precision Hydration to share their insight on the unique aspects of hydration for Swimrun and Andy Blow, the Co-Founder of Precision Hydration and previous guest of the show back in Episode 25 offered to share his wisdom as a hydration expert and experienced Swimrunner regarding the unique hydration demands that Swimrun events present to athletes. 

If that knowledge bomb wasn’t enough, Precision Hydration set up the discount code LOWTIDE21 for 15% off of your first order. That code is good through the end of May so make sure that you place an order and help make us look good.

Shoutouts

This week we’re shouting out a couple of our listeners that reached out to us over the past week. First, big shoutout to Alex Linas and his partner Cam Holman for rocking the short course with a first place finish at Swimrun Lake James and then doing it again at Swimrun Maryland this past weeked. These guys are new to the sport but you wouldn’t be able to tell by these performances! Strong work guys.

Our second shoutout this week goes to Scott Turner. He’s been a fan of the show for a while and just raced his first event at Swimrun Maryland. He got second place in the Solo Long Course Category and handled all the weather that got thrown at him (including thunderstorms and hail!) with aplomb. Super proud of you and hope to see you at Ödyssey Swimrun Casco Bay in a few months. 

Feats of Endurance

This week’s winner is NorCal local Jonathan Pascual who recently completed a big 30km trail run in our backyard trails of Mt. Burdell and didn’t invite us! We’ll forgive him this time...

Make sure to join the LTBz Strava Club and get inspired by your fellow Swimrunners as they train all over the world.

This Week in Swimrun (Powered by Raceid.com)

We have a lot of Swimrun news to share this week.

First, congratulations to everyone that raced Swimrun Maryland this past weekend. As far as Swimrun events go, this one checked off a lot of boxes: it was cold, there was a thunderstorm and hail at one point, and there were a lot of smiling faces at the finish line. There were also a lot of first-time Swimrunners at the race which was awesome to see.

If anyone is still on the fence about signing up for Ödyssey Swimrun Mackinac Island we have two pieces of information for you. First, get off the fence and sign up! Second, Aaron and the rest of the Ödyssey recently hosted an info session about the race that you can check out on Youtube to help get you to comply with our first point to sign up! 

Atea Jönköping Swimrun, Presented by Speedo is set to take place on June 6th! This might be one of the first large Swimrun events to be taking place in Sweden this year and we couldn’t be happier. The event takes place in the town of Jönköping in southern Sweden has a 15km distance and a 35km distance that is also an ÖTILLÖ Merit Race. Registration is open now on Raceid.com.     

Speaking of ÖTILLÖ, they recently announced that they will begin hosting live interviews on Facebook on May 19th. The first interview will be with Co-Founder, Michael Lemmel about how the 2021 race season is developing and what participants can expect at the races. They will also be doing interviews the week before their races so that participants can ask questions and get a better understanding of what the race courses will look like and other relevant information. 

Finally, we wanted to give a huge congratulations to a long-time friend of the show and two and a half-time guest, Helen Wilkmar, on being named the CEO of Ark Sports. We are super stoked for her and super stoked for Ark. We have a special place in our heart for Ark since they were the first company to really give us the time of day and not only reply to our DM’s but agree to be interviewed way back on Episode Seven when Co-Founder (and the most interesting man in Swimrun) Christofer Sundberg came on the show. Onward and upward for Ark!

That’s it for this week. Feel free to email us to tip us off to any events or Swimrun news that you’d like for us to share on the show.

Updates

Looking to race an Ödyssey Swimrun race this year? Use the code LOWTIDE15 for 15% off your registration. We anticipate all the races selling out so don’t wait! We’re going to be putting out a lot of Ödyssey-related content in the next few months including course preview episodes for Casco Bay, Orcas, Luddington, and Mackinac Island so stay tuned for all of that. 

Envol Coaching’s “The Big Battle” is starting in less than a month. In case you missed our video, we have a team in the “battle” and everyone on the team has been passing the vibe check (being super stoked on Swimrun) with flying colors. Our team is already half full so if you want to be a part of it, sign up soon. We’re going to try to have a lot of fun with this so even though we won’t be winning, we’re going to look good, real good!

The folks at Synergy Wetsuits were cool enough to send us a couple of their new Swimrun Wetsuits to try out and we’ve put together an overview video that you can check out on our YouTube channel. We will be doing a full review on a future Gear Talk show soon so stay tuned for that!

SWIMRUN 201: Advanced Topics in Swimrun

In this edition of Advanced topics, we dive into the concept of “Heads Up Racing.” In Swimrun, heads-up racing is super important to make sure that event participants have the best experience that they can. We get the race director's perspective from Lars Finanger on what that side of things considers when they are designing and marking the courses. We also chatted with Marcus Barton to get his perspective on heads-up racing during a Swimrun event. Add it all together and the takeaways are this: be prepared before the race, have good communication with your partner and rely on your course preparation and not on other participants, and finally, take time to reflect after the race to come up with areas of improvement for your next event.

That’s it for this edition of Advanced Topics in Swimrun. We hope that you found it useful and we would love to hear any feedback that you might have for us on topics that you’d like for us to cover and/or whether these types of episodes are helpful.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star review. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and YouTube. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram. Email us at [email protected] with any feedback and/or suggestions. Finally, you can support our efforts on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.

Thank you for listening and see you out there!

-  Chip and Chris