Race reports · 2023 · by Michelle
Waikiki Roughwater Swim 2023: the original Ironman swim
2.4 miles off Waikiki in September, the swim the first Ironman used in 1978. Jay 1:50:49, me 2:02:27, and no bike waiting for either of us.
The official sheet has us both on it, Jay in 1:50:49 and me in 2:02:27, last of the 23 women in my age group and not sorry about it, because two hours and two minutes is a long time to be in the ocean whatever place you come in.
Why this swim
A full-distance triathlon opens with a 2.4-mile swim, and before we put that in front of a 112-mile ride and a marathon we wanted to know what 2.4 miles of ocean felt like on its own. The Roughwater is that swim, off Waikiki, in September, in the open ocean with a current and chop and a horizon that doesn't get closer as fast as you'd like. It's also the swim the very first Ironman used, because in February 1978 the original race was this swim, a lap of the island on the bike, and the Honolulu Marathon, done back to back. We didn't know that when we signed up, and we found out later that we'd done all three of those legs in 2023, just on three different days: this one, the Dick Evans in August, and the marathon in December.
The idea was the same as the 112-mile ride two weeks earlier, which was to do each leg of the full distance by itself before doing them in a row, and the swim was the last one left to check. After this morning every leg of a 140.6 had been done at least once, just never on the same day. It was also the week we started paying attention to zone 2, which sounds like a different subject and turned out to be the same one, because a long ocean swim is an aerobic effort where panic is the enemy, and staying easy in the water is the same skill as staying easy anywhere else.
The leg you can't walk
If you come to triathlon in your forties, the swim is probably the leg you're worried about, and I think you're right to be. You can walk a run and you can soft-pedal a bike, but nobody has ever soft-pedaled the ocean, and two hours is a long time to be out there with nothing to hold onto. I spent a fair amount of it reminding myself that panic doesn't float, which is the kind of thing you say to yourself buoy after buoy when the beach isn't getting any closer.
What an organized open-water swim at the race distance did for me, with kayaks and buoys and other people around, was tell me which of two things was true: either the swim was fine, or the swim was what I'd be working on for the next year. For me it was the second one, and I'm still working on it.