Last Saturday Jake, Sabrina, Harrison, and I made a trip up to Jordanelle Reservoir so that Jake and I could get in an open water swimming workout. We ended up swimming a total of 2.3 miles and felt pretty good (not getting run over by a ski boat or hooked by a fisher is always a good thing). You may ask, "how do you know you swam 2.3 miles?" Well, I finally figured out a way to use my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch for swimming. I took the band off and put the actual GPS unit in a plastic baggie in between two swim caps (neon of course so that people could see us). It worked surprisingly well and we had a lot of fun looking at where we swam on the map when we got home. Here is the map of where we swam (thanks to the Garmin and MotionBased):
Jake and I (at least I think Jake is going to do it) are training to swim the Deer Creek Open Water Marathon Swim next month. I have been looking around for a while for a race like this in Utah and I'm pretty sure this is the only one of its type in the State. The plan is to swim the 5K this year and then try for the 10K next year.
Despite our family trying to talk us out of it because of little things like sharks, jellyfish, and sea lions, Jake and I are also planning on doing one of the many Alcatraz swims next year.
7 comments:
Sweetie! I love that you are such a great and strong swimmer! Har and I had fun watching you swim.
Can you show or send us photos of your Garmin open water GPS device? The rest of the global open water swimming community would love to learn from your creativity.
Steve from www.10Kswim.com and www.10Kswimmer.com
Hey Steve, thanks for your interest. I love both of your websites and read them all the time! I wish there was more interest in open water swimming in Utah beyond triathlons. We have a lot of really great places to swim here.
I got the idea to use the GPS from this post. There is also a great video using a different method here. The GPS device used in both the blog post and the video is the same one that I use, the Garmin Forerunner 305. This particular unit is fairly expensive but Garmin makes simpler models that should work just as well.
After your swim you can upload your GPS data to MotionBased and see where you swam on the map as well as speed, distance, etc. You can also go to MotionBased and do a search for "Open Water Swimming" and see some of the swims that other people have done.
Hope this helps! Thanks for your great websites!
Hey Josh - I stumbled across your blog looking for others swimming the Deer Creek 5K this weekend! I'll see you there. Should be fun.
Gords
Gords,
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the Deer Creek swim it should be really fun. Do you know of any other open water swims like this in Utah?
From what I saw on the website there were only 15 people who entered last year. I'm not sure how many have entered this year.
I emailed Jim and he said there were 10 last week and he expected more this week.
I don't think there is anything else in Utah like this from the looks of it.
From what I saw on your swimming blog it looks like you have been training hard for this swim. I haven't been training as much as I should, I am hoping for 1:30.
I have been thinking about trying to start an open water swim team/group in Utah but I'm not sure how much interest there is. There are plenty of reservoirs and lakes to swim in.
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