Big Shoulders 5K Swim 2010

My rotator cuff made me a DNS as of a month or so ago. But we were in Chicago anyway so I decided to walk to the site and snap some photos.
My photos are here; down load whatever you like.

Update: there are better photos with a link to a pdf file with results here.

It was brutal; windy, rainy and the water was choppy. It was so brutal that the elite wave took 35 minutes to finish it’s first loop (28-29 is more the norm for these swimmers). Many (including some from the elite wave) dropped at the end of the first loop; several took lifeboats back and a few swam to the seawall and walked/ran it in. I’d never seen so many drops in a swim.

So, if you finished, you did well!

I didn’t catch the results and they aren’t up yet.

Note on my DNS: I have finished this swim 3 times: 2001 (1:43), 2006 (2:03) and 2008 (1:36) and had swam 1:34 for 5500 yards early this year; my last 5K plus swim was on April 28. But by mid May my rotator cuff had flared up and it was gone by May 19. Since then I had tried to rehab it with weights on my own; no avail. So I saw a doctor about a month ago and am doing supervised PT.

Why my rotator cuff went: in April I switched to pull buoy swimming because a knee ache, which had plagued me since September of 2009, was getting worse even when I quit running and walking and was only swimming.

It turns out that I had a torn meniscus in the right knee (surgery in July).
So torn meniscus (knee) —> swim with a pull buoy but didn’t decrease yardage —-> biffed rotator cuff. Let that be a lesson to you.
Symptoms of the rotator cuff injury: night pain; I’ve frequently lost 1-2 hours of sleep due to shoulder pain, even when i didn’t lay on it.

So, I had PB’s in the 5K and 4 mile swim but only in the pool (no flip turns). That will have to do for 2010.

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