Reinfeld Swim and Run: Totally Shelled!

This weekend, I was doing a fun little event here in my local town: a swim and run. This started as a relay (with four runners and two swimmers), and also added an individual event a few years ago. The distances are pretty short (about 300m swim and a 3k run), so you can actually take part in the individual event and in a relay.

On the picture you can see the beach where the start is. The swim is across the lake to the right, and the run goes along the perimeter of the lake to the tip you can barely see in the background and back to the little beach house.

It is a “different” event for me, especially this year when I was just doing longer events. In fact, the “shortest” race I had done this year was a 19k run in January … It turned out that the high intensity still hurts pretty much.

The swim was okay (considering I had barely swum at all this year), the transition was okay as well. But as soon as I started the run I was light headed and had to concentrate really hard. I was puffing really hard, but at least no one was overtaking me. (The people in front of me were better runners than me anyway.) I had to put in a little extra surge towards the end to hold my place and that really killed me. It took me about 15 minutes to start breathing normal again, and the pain took a while to go away. Then my legs went rock-hard (but luckily no cramping) and I was really exhausted.

It was a good thing we had about an hour before our relay, so I had some time to recover (and eat some food). Some easy jogging, some stretching, and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to run really hard for my 900m in the relay. Good thing that our first runner already had a sizable gap, so I could pretty much cruise my leg of the relay. I don’t think I would have been able to run head-to-head with another guy. We actually won our wave, and strangely we also managed to have the best time of the day. (Must have been the others that did it.)

Totally shelled afterwards. Hadn’t eaten all too well during the day, and I was really ravenous afterwards. Then I overate in the evening and wasn’t feeling to well during the night. I’m so not used to any faster stuff ... good thing I don’t have any races lined up so I can properly recover!

The weird thing .. I still enjoyed the event very much! We had so much fun with all the people from our club. I probably have to do some more speedy stuff next year so I’m not going to be quite as grumpy after the race.