DY2K

On Sunday I had a much needed sleep in and dragged out of bed around 8am to see if our Canadian visitors wanted to come to watch an Ocean swim and have a dip themselves. It was grey, overcast, windy and looked like it might get drizzly so they decided against it. A wise move that turned out to be.

I cruised over to Dee Why for the DY2K duathlon (or biathlon? – I’m never sure which is which. The website used the terms interchangably). It’s a 2km ocean swim followed by a 4.5km run along the beach to the north end, then up the boardwalk to the top of the cliff and back. I didn’t know what the path would be like at the end so I brought my running shoes and set them up in the patch of grass they called a transition area.

It was pretty gross down at the beach, still quite windy and the water seemed really choppy with some fairly big swell. I actually felt quite relaxed about the whole thing since it seemed pretty much the same as Bondi last week and I know that once you’re in the water, you’re fine.

Anyway I ran into Luke, a guy I knew from school, and we had a good catch up chat and then wandered down to start the race together. It was a strange triangle shape with only 3 buoys – one just offshore, then two about 20 metres apart almost a kilometre away. They were tiny and they were yellow – the some colour as all the caps in our wave. I was sighting like crazy but I never saw a single one until I was almost on top of it, c’est la vie.

The start was fine, got out through the break, turned at the buoy and started cruising north. It was choppy and at points there was some big swell, but the water was warm and clear and apart from the difficulties sighting (to be fair, even if the buoys had been massive it would have been difficult to see them in the surf) it was a nice enough swim. The only weird thing is that there appeared to be a great deal of loud screaming and yelling which I’d never heard before at an ocean swim and got me wondering what it was all about.

When I finally saw the final yellow buoy indicating the turn into the beach I realised what all the shouting was about. A guy just near me stopped swimming, started yelling something incoherent and took his goggles off. I swam over to him and asked if he was ok, and he said “I’m fine, I’m just trying to get this bluebottle off me!” Then I saw about 30 cm from my face a giant bluey the size of my fist. God knows where it’s tentacles were, I took a wide detour around it and sprinted for the beach.

That part of the surf was a big hole and I felt like I was swimming on the spot for a long time, at least everyone around me was doing the same. I was dreading the moment when I would get hit by a bluey… I caught one wave but then couldn’t buy another as they were crumbling. About 10 metres from the sand I caught sight of the guy right next to me… I couldn’t believe it, it was Luke!

We came in and I grabbed my shoes and took off on the run. I wasn’t running as fast as I feel I’m capable of, I just didn’t have it in me. Got to the channel at long reef and took off my shoes to wade across then ran barefoot on the hard sand until I got to the concrete path up the hill. The path was fine, I could easily have run the whole thing without shoes and I ended up carrying them most of the way anyway. Ah well, good to know for next year. It was actually really nice running barefoot along the sand, dodging around the thousands of blueys that had been washed ashore.

Back at the finish line I saw a picture straight out of some war movie. Absolute mayhem, literally every person I could see was hunched over in their speedos, body parts covered in angry looking red welts, grimacing in pain and holding white plastic bags of ice onto their wounds. I’ve never quite seen anything like it, there was a girl near my bag lying almost comatose on the grass and when I asked her if she was ok she roused herself with an effort and looked at me with glassy uncomprehending eyes, unable to even speak. There were people lining up to be treated by the first aid volunteers, people shivering uncontrollably and even a guy lying on the ground being given an oxygen mask and stretchered away. I could not believe that I wasn’t stung, I must have been the only person in that swim who escaped unscathed. Unbelievable.

That was enough for me for one day! I certainly wasn’t going for a long run a week out from Huskisson so I went to mum and dads and then went home to chill out.