So Nick, how'd your first triathlon in Lake Michigan go?  You mean... my last triathlon in Lake Michigan?  That just about says it all doesn't it?  I did the Olympic distance this time around, which means I was swimming just shy of a full mile in Lake Michigan, in approximately 50 degree water.  I did the polar bear this year, and I think I can say that this was worse.  At least with the polar bear, you're in and out in a relatively short amount of time, and you're not doing much once you're in the water except swearing and jumping up and down.

When you do a triathlon, you actually have to swim in it.  And the slower you swim, the longer you're in the cold.  There was actually one whack job who was doing the swim in just a Speedo!  I'm not sure he actually finished though.  Several people gave up partway through and got pulled out of the water by lifeguards or the Coast Guard.  At one point, I was almost one of them.

Then something strange happened at the turnaround for the Sprint swim (which was only about a 1/4 of the way through the Olympic distance swim).  I stopped noticing the cold, and a calm came over me.  I was wearing a wetsuit, but it's sleeveless, so my arms were bitter numb (as were my feet).  But suddenly I found myself able to just swim.  I wasn't swimming great mind you, but I was going.  And suddenly it all seemed workable, even as the swells kicked up near a rocky area, and the wind started to blow harder.

And after 45 minutes in the cold, I was out of the water and carrying on with the rest of the race.  This race isn't all that superbly run.  They have about 5 different events all going together, and they intermingle bikers and runners through sections of the course.  Parts of the road were in awful condition too.  But in the end, despite a soar ankle by the end of the 10K, I had cut about 3 minutes off my previous Olympic time in Oshkosh (which only had a 3/4 mile swim instead of 0.9 miles).  Here are my results, and here are the results from the rest of the field.