All in all, I must say that I am very happy (and proud) how everything worked out, especially since this was Nicole’s first 24 hour swim event. That made it a bit difficult to predict what would happen and schedule everything, but she settled into a nice rhythm very quickly, and after a little while also started to drink as often as she should. People often forget to drink when they are swimming, which can lead to cramps fairly quickly – as happened to Maria, another 24h solo swimmer that I ‘adopted’ after it turned out that she didn’t have any support staff.

The usual mess in the crowded pool was better with the solo swimmers than in the relay lanes.. but after a while people started to switch lanes, and the chaos spread to all the other lanes. Our plan was to try to swim without long breaks, and enjoy the relative peace between 2 and 5am before having a longer pause in the morning.

We also followed that plan fairly well; of course muscular and mental fatigue set in after a while – also with me – but until 5am everything was going along very nicely… however, then things started to deteriorate fairly quickly; I started taking mini-naps (even between taking lap splits, sleeping for a minute or two!) whenever possible, and Nicoles shoulder started to develop sharp pains due to swimming with a wetsuit (which she wasn’t used to). All in all, the swimming intervals grew shorted and the recovery breaks more frequent, until we decided that about 20 hours and almost 580 lengths – so close to 30km! – were enough. There wasn’t really a reason for Nicole to ruin herself entirely to maybe keep her 6th place, so we called it quits a few hours early.

All told, it was a terrific event.. even though I’ll admit that supporting a solo swimmer isn’t really a walk in the park and almost as hard as swimming myself. Especially when trying to shoot a few photos as well…

That event wasn’t only about personal achievements – for each covered length, the Parktherme paid 0,15EUR to the Licht ins Dunkel charity. Our goal, then, was to at least get the registration fee back towards the charity.

On our way to Bad Radkersburg we had al little navigational trouble, but with the help of a GPS receiver and a few phone calls we were back on track. The Parktherme was still empty when we arrived, but we didn’t have enough money for our registration fees, so we set out to find an ATM and stock up on food and other stuff on the way.

Back again, it immediately became obvious that everybody else had arrived in the meantime, so we found ourselves at the end of a surprisingly long waiting line… when it was finally our turn, all the small and medium sized t-shirts were gone (as usual), and we had the choice of L, XL or XXL bed sheets. I will never understand how there are never, ever, too many ‘small’ sizes. Something tells me that there are probably very few participants in a 24 hour event that need XXL sizes..

Anyway, after successful registration we hauled our gear to the cots that our solo starter Hannes Polak had reserved in the meantime. Our places were in the additional sleeping tent, conveniently close to the access to the pool. Unfortunately it later turned out that everybody else I knew (eg. the Tri Stars Koma, the Free Eagles, etc.) were all located in the other area, and I missed all of them.

Damn!

Oh well, after sorting out all our gear we went through our plan again. Pretty simple, really: During the first day 30 minute turns with 2h breaks, in the night two 1h turns (with 3h breaks, as Iris didn’t care to swim those turns), and on Saturday back to 30min turns again, or simply whoever still has anything left in them… After a short round tour of the area it soon was time to get ready for the start.
I had the dubious honor of swimming the first turn, and as expected it was quite a mess. Everybody was pumped with motivation and energy, which lead to any number of unnecessary jostling in the water. At an especially bad encounter my googles began to leak, and it was pretty much blind flying for the rest of the turn. Which isn’t that amusing if you’re passing a slow swimmer and at the same time the guys in the other direction on your lane decide to fight for every centimeter as they pass a guy who’s already passing another swimmer.. oh well..

As the time went by, people began to calm down a bit, and in the evening everything became routine: swim, shower, change, eat, rest, change, swim, …

…and also attend to Hannes on the way, who had been incredibly strong until then, permanently ranking in the top 3 (sometimes even in first place!). Totally awesome.

With the night came the longer turns. The first 1h bout was over very quickly — and the break to the second turn as well. So quickly in fact that I was a bit late for my second turn! Oh well, it’s not as if we had lost our chances for a medal with that.. so off into the water and at least swim the remaining 45 minutes at a decent pace!

The water was quite warm during the night – almost too hot for a long sleeved neo, but quite right considering the low outside temperatures: in some of the paper cups the drinks had literally frozen to solid ice blocks!

The next morning’s sunrise was absolutely spectacular; unfortunately the forecast for the rest of the day wasn’t that good, but at least the early morning brought sunsine and smiles to everybody’s faces.

Back to the 30 minute turns, the rest of the day just flew by. Hannes had to take a few breaks because his shoulder began to hurt under the enormous strain; unfortunately we also weren’t always exactly sure about his current ranking because the hourly lists were sometimes quite late and since we had to swim none of us could track either Hannes’ total distance or the laps of his immediate competitors.

The last 30 minutes were miraculously mine again; since I had covered 302 laps according to the last intermediate result, I thought it would be fun to end with 333. That wasn’t officially possible, as only even laps were counted (even though some intermediates did show odd lap counts), but whatever. The missing 31 lengthts only correspond to an average of 2min/100m, but even that is a small challenge after 24 hours. Of course everybody wanted to do their best for the final laps (especially fun: the 100m turns of the Tri Stars Koma to really blow themselves up); nobody gave up an inch when being passed, not even at the turns…

Well, and then… it was over.

Hannes had also shown a remarkable final performance: Being only a few laps behind the third place, he started an incredible chase that unfortunately didn’t quite work out: only 200m separated him from a podium finish…

Still, what a feat: He did 55600m, that’s more than one thousand lengths, in those 24 hours. Awesome.

Our relay managed a distance of 69400m, of which I contributed 16800m (336 lengths). And considering how I felt afterwards, I don’t even want to imagine how Hannes did when he went (pretty much directly) to a Ball on the very same day, and stayed there until well into the night…

The tri4ce.at team has also created a separate report on Hannes’ performance.

And the Licht ins Dunkel (“Light into the Darkness”) charity probably also has a reason to celebrate: unless I’ve misheard the announcer, the total distance covered by all swimmers was more than 120.000 lengths (that is more than six million meters)!! Which translates to a contribution of about 18.000 EUR to the charity.

In a slightly smaller team, however: On our countless laps, Nicole and I will have ample time to ponder our team name: Can Kiwis swim?!