ÖTILLÖ Swimrun Austin 2025 race report
From 2018 until 2024, I raced many swimrun races, and I raced all of them with Trista (or sometimes a threesome with Trista and Anna). For Swimrun Austin 2024, Trista raced with her daughter Addi, and I introduced my friend Kristi to the world of swimrun. Since then, it's been a whole different landscape for me and swimrun!
2025 saw me do one race with Trista, one race with Anna, and one race with Emily. As Austin approached, Trista was again doing the race with her daughter. Anna was taking a well-earned off-season break. And Emily was doing Austin with FuckFuckJulia (look, just don't ask). Should I reach out to Kristi to see if she was interested in racing with me again? Should I finally try out a solo race, as I'd planned to do for Colorado? Before I'd even really had a chance to weigh my options, Sarah reached out and asked if I was still looking for a partner for Austin! To be clear, this is Sarah B. I only mention this, because swimrun is absolutely overrun with Sarahs. We had 3 Sarahs just staying in our airbnb for Austin. It's a problem.
After many disclaimers where I made her agree that this was absolutely just for fun and she wouldn't care about pace (she normally races with her sister, and they are much faster both swimming and running than I am), we registered our team: Adorkananas! (She's usually on some form of Team Something and Bananas, I'm half of Team Adorkable, it all makes sense, just go with it; the important thing is that Mark Finanger, Voice of Swimrun, was completely incapable of saying it when he was doing finish line announcing, despite repeated valiant efforts.)
It turns out sister/partner Kelly did Colorado and Sarah couldn't, Kelly couldn't do Austin but Sarah could, and Sarah had been training lightly because of some knee annoyances, and figured having a goal would help motivate her to train. And then she broke her little toe. So after taking some time off to let that heal, she finally got in some run training in the last weeks before Austin, and arrived undertrained and ready to go Adorkable Fun Pace!
Much like Emily, I've known Sarah for years, and we're friends, but we've never really just sat down together and talked about our lives. I had prepped all sorts of questions to relentlessly throw at her so that she had to do all the talking and I could just listen, enjoy, and breathe!
The day before the race, we hit the Envol race clinic, ostensibly to check our tether length, assess our gear, try out some transitions, etc. This could not have been a better example of how different racing with Emily and Sarah was. At the Colorado clinic, Emily and I did multiple transition practices, calling out gear as we put it on, being super efficient, making sure we had a plan. At Austin, Sarah and I did a little warmup run down to the water with the group. As the group was getting in the water to practice, Sarah got a message from her friend Liz who was coming to hang with us, and so Sarah went back to the parking lot and got Liz and walked back with her. It was hot out there, so eventually I hopped in the water and did a little swim just to cool down a bit and check the water temp. Then I hopped back out and chatted with some first-timers who had a lot of great questions. Then eventually Sarah and Liz got back, and we all hopped in the water.
We had debated whether we were going to get in the water at the clinic. Trista and I sometimes do the runs and go help out with questions and stuff, but don't want to get our shoes or wetsuits wet, so we don't actually swim at the clinic. I asked Sarah if she wanted to swim, she said we didn't have to if I didn't want to, I said I was leaving it up to her, she said she wanted to get in the water. Settled! Except what she was saying was "I literally just want to get in the water", and what I interpreted it as was "we're going to swim". So I brought paddles, buoy, goggles, swimcap, race belt, tether. Sarah wore a bathing suit and shoes and had some sort of belt. We were definitely prepared for different events!
But we got in and I and all of my gear drafted off of her and her complete lack of gear, and we determined the water was warmer than we wanted it to be, which we knew, but not deadly, which sometimes it can be. In the mid to upper 70s.
Also the water was super high! In 2020, the lake was pretty full, and we got to enjoy the cliff jump. Every year after that, the lake has been so low, the cliff jump has been too dangerous, and the swim entrances and exits have been rocky and long and treacherous. Those years the lake was ~20% full. This year it was ~80% full! It was amazing and wonderful, and actually surprising given that since the flooding in July, we've basically had zero rain.
So Saturday was sunny and in the 90s, which was terrible and would have been abysmal race weather. Fortunately overnight Saturday and into Sunday, a front was blowing in. Emphasis on the blowing. The air temps were still warm, maybe in the low 60s, but a north wind was moving in, so the day would never get a lot warmer, nowhere near Saturday's temps. But the winds were supposed to be sustained 10-15mph with gusts 30-40mph. Oof. Could make for some interesting swims.
But it was still overall going to be warm, so I wore my ARK Vigg, and that was definitely the right choice for me.
Just like the night before Colorado, I actually slept the night before Austin. Maybe that's my new normal! I had almost no stress tied up in this race. Colorado had a lot of unknowns: race week was spent exclusively in a car, it's stressful to travel with two puppies, the elevation was a scary unknown factor, the water would be cold, the air might also be cold, I was racing with someone who runs almost twice as fast as I do, and it was a brand new course that we knew almost nothing about.
Whereas Swimrun Austin is a 50 minute drive from my house, and our airbnb was a 5-10 minute drive from the park. Weather wasn't scary. No elevation. A course I've done several times in the past. Just a lot of knowns instead of a lot of unknowns. And Sarah had such a chill attitude about the whole thing, it was definitely contagious, which was great.
And now, before the race even starts, I'll tell you my favorite moment of the whole weekend.
As we were standing around getting ready 15 minutes before the race started, Sarah was holding her goggles and looking at them skeptically. She told me she was considering racing without goggles. That blows my mind, but I do understand that it's a thing that some people do, and they really like it. Evidently Sarah had tried it at the Folsom swimrun and really liked it. But that's a much shorter race, and she wasn't absolutely sure that she was committed to that here.
She went off for one last bathroom trip, and I was shoving things into various pockets, as one does before a swimrun. Eva was doing the same next to me, and all of a sudden she stopped and stood straight up and looked panicked. I asked what was wrong, and she said she'd just realized she'd forgotten her goggles. Not "they're in my bag, I'll dig through it and find them," but "left them back at my lodging, can't get them before the race begins." A TERRIBLE feeling.
And right then Sarah returns from the bathroom. She walked up, I said, "Sarah, we've just made your decision super easy. Eva forgot her goggles." Sarah immediately handed her goggles to Eva, and everyone was happy.
It's things like that that really drive home how amazing and wholesome the swimrun community is.
Okay, so now Sarah was committed to racing goggleless! Spoiler: She loved it and it didn't cause any problems for her or for our team. It also fortunately didn't cause her any problems in the airport on her flight home, despite her red eyes DEFINITELY looking like she was on something(s).
And then it was time to line up at the start line!
I know it seems unlikely given how many words I wrote before the race even began, but there really isn't all that much to write about in this report. Like I told Sarah, the worst race reports are a product of the best races. Good race reports require strife and things going wrong. Our race was great and very little of note happened. I mean, that won't stop me from now producing pages and pages of words about the very little that happened, but I just wanted to lead with that.
We started at the back and watched everyone run away from us immediately in the first run, as happens with me and my slow start (and then continued slowness). I don't remember what we talked about during the first run, but we exchanged banter with some other teams, yelled at Lars (supportively) when we ran by him, and just settled in comfortably with each other.
All the swim entrances and exits looked so different, because the water was so high, and it made transitioning so much less fraught. Fewer rocks, fewer sticks, no mud, just a general reduction in strife which was amazing and appreciated.
We had a nice quick transition into the water, made even quicker by Sarah never having to deal with goggles!, and started our first swim. And immediately swam through a field of sharp pointy sticks in the water. This is very normal for Swimrun Austin, but USUALLY MYSELF AND MY PARTNER ARE WEARING PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR. I was VERY concerned for Sarah's eyes in the presence of sharp pointy sticks (iykyk), and kept cringing every time we swam through a grove of them. But she navigated it easily, and we powered through our first swim, passing many people. I love drafting off fast swimmers, it makes me feel like such a rockstar, even though none of the rockstarness is due to my abilities. This was our first real swim together, and it felt very similar to drafting off of Trista. I could stay in her draft, but I had to work for it. I almost never touched her feet, because I was just out of range, but I never fell out of her draft or let the tether get taut. Perfect.
When we got out of the water, we discussed how that went, and I said it was perfect, and she said that was good, since she was only going to get slower as the race went on.
Our transitions were generally efficient, we both got our gear on and off quickly each time, but they did involve some small amount of lingering when we got into or out of the water, because while one of MY superpowers is peeing while swimming, evidently that isn't everyone's superpower.
We ran through the camp and park and aid station and started really getting into our conversations. We talked about so many things over the course of the race. Jobs. Dreams/nightmares. Books. Kids. Languages. Travel. Religion. Just a lot. Turns out we have a lot in common. We may have hit a slightly rocky patch when I revealed that I DO use a kindle now, after many years of being a devoted physical book reader, and she is still a physical book devotee. But she was willing to look past that, so we made it through the race and we're still friends.
When we got to the second swim and started swimming, I was swimming right up on Sarah's feet suddenly. I thought "Well, she did say that she would slow down, but I didn't really expect it to be this dramatic or sudden." But I just enjoyed the chiller pace and tried not to hit her shoes. When we got out, she said that she had been working through some stomach issues during that swim, but that she was feeling good again. And the rest of the swims, I was fighting to stay on her feet again, so clearly that was true!
We hit the kinda central hub aid station for the first time on the next run, and just before it we got to see Liz and Matt and the puppies! We weren't sure what either of their plans were, but they conferred and decided to stick together to spectate, and we were so happy to see them! Puppies were insane, and man, I was so glad to learn afterward that puppies were just insane when they saw me. They just go crazy when I see them, and I was honestly afraid that they did that when they saw ANYONE on the course. I guess if that were true, Matt would have sold them before the end of Swimrun Colorado.
Oh, and while we were petting puppies, Marcus, who started 20 minutes after everyone else and was doing a Charity Chaser race (raising money for each person he passed on his way to the finish line), passed us, and slapped my ass, as promised. Well, slapped my buoy, anyway, since it was forming a protective shield over my ass.
So that was a fun boost, and then we went through the aid station where the volunteers were a great group of really fun people, and their cheers and dancing really boosted us up further, and THEN just past the aid station, at the top of the dumb little hill leading up to the split, was my friend Cheryl! I'd put out a call to my facebook friends for volunteers, and she stepped up, but had no idea where she would be stationed. We got to see her twice, and that was so much fun! I'm hoping that she decides to do a swimrun next year. She's very susceptible to dumb, fun race ideas, so I think she will.
The next run was across the island, one of the longer ones, and I have to say... I didn't write the distances on my paddles. I've done this race enough to know that most of the runs are 2-3 miles, most of the swims are ~700-1000 meters, and that feels good enough for knowledge. But I know that every time I've raced this race in the past, at some point I've thought "Uuuugh, when will this run end." And I never did this time. Sarah and I were having such good conversations that we'd have to interrupt our chats for the swims, and then we'd dive right back in (not literally) once we were back out of the water. This race just felt like it flew by for me, no dark places, no struggles.
We did get our first taste of the chop from the wind that was building up on some of these later swims. And that wind was COLD. Zesty, even. ("Like.. flamboyant?" "I don't know what that means.") The water temp was warm, the air temp was warm, but when you came out of the water and that cold north wind hit your wet skin, it was COLD. That only lasted a minute or so, but it was a cold minute or two.
The next run was the run with the out and back, and it was fun to see some folks and give some high fives on the way out to and back from that aid station. Longer runs really gave me a chance to go into interrogation mode, which I'm sure Sarah loved. I'm like "So, what do you do?" and she spends a mile or so telling me about her company and who they are and what they do. And I follow up with, "Right. Cool. But what do YOU do, like, on the daily? What does your day look like?" Fortunately she seemed perfect willing to explain her whole career to me, and I enjoyed hearing all about it!
Our next swim brought us into the cove where normally there's a giant cliff to scale to get out, and with the high water, it was only a relatively small cliff to climb to get out!
And then it was time for the cliff jump!
As previously mentioned, there's only been one other year when I did this race where there WAS a cliff jump (the big cliff jump, anyway; there have been some smaller ledge hops). In 2020, Trista and I took Aaron up on his offer to do a photo session the day before the race, at the cliff jump. We jumped off that stupid cliff so many times, at the end I felt like I had bruised my tailbone. And then on race day, when we got to the cliff jump, there was no photographer there, and we had frankly had our fill of the cliff jump, so we opted instead to just run down and hop in the water at a much lower level.
I had no preconceived notions of whether we'd do this cliff jump, but Sarah sure did! Very early on, when it was revealed that there would be a cliff jump, she said "Can we please do the cliff jump?" Turns out one of the agreements that Sarah and Kelly made when they decided to partner up for swimruns is that Kelly would not do any cliff jumps. She does not like heights. So Sarah never gets to do them. And she'd be damned if she would be denied her cliff jumping opportunity now that it presented itself away from Kelly! So.. how could I NOT cliff jump?
(Don't worry, Sarah gets the better end of the deal here, because Kelly is so speedy in the water and Sarah gets to draft off her every race.)
Not gonna lie, the cliff jump area was super confusing when we got there. I knew roughly where it was, and the flags clearly take you over to the edge, but there was no volunteer at the actual jump, and we just stood there looking confused. And then a voice called out from our left, and down at the water was a photographer! He said to move down a little further away from him, and to let him know when we were ready. We untethered, we got all our gear in places, we negotiated positioning, and then 3, 2, 1, we jumped! Or I jumped. Clearly Sarah waited a beat after I jumped for maximal spread/drama.
I really need to work on body awareness when I jump. Look at her beautiful prancy limbs and my ramrod straight everything. Geez.
We hit the water, and my buoy came out from between my legs, but otherwise our paddles stayed on, our caps stayed on, my goggles stayed on, Sarah's goggles didn't exist, and we were ready to do the swim! We decided not to bother fishing out the tether and hooking it up while treading water, since this was such a short swim and it wouldn't be hard to stay together.
AU CONTRAIRE. We started swimming, and immediately Sarah just swam away from me. This has also happened every time Trista and I have tried to just do a quick, short swim untethered. I know that the real problem is that we start out spread apart, so I'm never in the draft zone, and I only have one speed with paddles and buoy, and that speed is sufficient to stay in a draft, but not sufficient to get INTO a draft if I'm out of it. Eventually Sarah looked back and saw that I had fallen way back, and stopped to wait for me. She asked if we should go ahead and tether now, but I am headstrong, and I had committed to a lack of tether for this swim, and I'd be damned if I changed my mind now! So we kept swimming, again starting with her far enough ahead of me that I wasn't in her draft, and she immediately swam away from me. And then I felt bad, because while it wasn't fun for me to not be able to keep up, that was the result of a decision I had made. But my decision also meant that poor Sarah was having to look back over her shoulder every few strokes to see if I had fallen behind again (I had). And then I felt bad that my decision was making Sarah's swim more annoying. Sorry, Sarah! We should have tethered!
But we made it to the shore, and there was Liz, Matt, and the chaos beasts again! We chatted with them for a second as we stashed our gear and started up the trail (trying to fend off puppies and stop them from jumping on me and trying not to slice them open with the carbon fiber paddles on my hands) (they're at a very special age right now; surely this will get better eventually, right? right. RIGHT).
Another round of amazing aid station volunteers and then Cheryl, and this time we took a right at the split and headed toward the finish line!
We hit an aid station seemingly in the middle of nowhere with a super friendly volunteer, and she was so encouraging and told us we only had one swim and one run left. Sarah and I both looked at each other and looked really sad, because we were having so much fun, and we didn't want it to end!
This run is always frustrating, because you come SO CLOSE to the finish line. First you hear it, then you literally see it happening just right over there, and the Voice of Swimrun sees you and is announcing things about your team, trying very hard to pronounce your team name, and you know that you still have to go hop back in the water for one more swim and then one more short run.
Matt and the dogs ran over from the finish line to say hi, and Kayla ran over to let us know the last swim was choppy as hell, so be prepared for it. Got it.
We made our way down to the water, and again, THE WATER WAS SO HIGH. The last two years, the floating dock.. wasn't.. and we had to pick our way around the muddy shore to get into the water. This year we got to do a little hop off the floating dock again!
As we hopped in, Sarah's sights were zeroed in on the people we could see in the water ahead of us, and we powered through the water to pass several people. Wheeeee.
But man, that swim WAS choppy. Definitely the worst of the day, and it made what is actually a long swim feel even longer. It wasn't a problem for either of us, but it was just annoying and frustrating. Fortunately the water was crashing into us from the left, and we both prefer to breathe to the right if we can only breathe one way, so that worked out okay. But that swim draggggged on.
We survived, though, and climbed out to do our last half mile run back to the finish line! When we got up to the gravel road, we found the LizMattPuppies conglomerate again! We stopped to say hi and walk with them, and Liz said we didn't have to walk with them, to keep running. I left that up to Sarah, and we decided to run, and Matt decided to run the puppies with us! So the five of us ran those final meters together, which was super fun. Matt tried to peel off before the finish line, since the puppies definitely hadn't registered and paid to race, but they were having none of that, so we all got to cross the finish line together!
It was a really fun race with practically no stress (#nostress) that went by super fast because I was just having so much fun. Each time we came out of a swim, we had both come up with at least one question, comment, story, and we usually didn't have time to cover all the conversations that spawned before we hit another swim. Notably I was speed-talking AS WE RAN DOWN THE FINISH CHUTE, trying to finish up a topic we hadn't yet completed. Hopefully Sarah is up for another race or two together, just so we can just finish the topics spawned at THIS race!
I'm so very glad Sarah reached out and saved me again from having my first solo swimrun race!
(I'm going to make Sarah read this before I send it out into the world, and she's going to say "No stress?! My necklace chafed the hell out of my neck, and I had to take it off and figure out a place to stow it so that I didn't lose it in the middle of Lake Travis with 4 swims left to go!" To which I say, "Yes. I meant no stress OTHER than that.")
Oh! I forgot! There WAS more drama! Much to the chagrin of everyone who follows me on strava (a very small number of people, sure), I do all my swimruns as the 'swimrun' sport on my Garmin. And each time I change sports, I hit split, because in Garmin Connect, it comes out as a nice, cohesive workout with details for each sport. I can see exactly how long each swim and run was, and what my paces were. I mostly just like to know how fast whoever I'm drafting off of was swimming, honestly. But also the actual distances. I chose a swimrun workout before the race, as usual, started my workout with the gun, as usual, and then hit split each time I changed sports, as usual. At some point I looked at my watch and got confused, because it looked weird, and I honestly couldn't tell whether it thought I was swimming or running. I switched screens to try to figure it out. I couldn't figure it out. I let it go. A couple swims and runs later, I looked again, and I was still incredibly confused about what I was seeing on my watch. It didn't make sense. I may have even hit split once or twice because I thought it was on the wrong sport, but that somehow didn't make it any better. I finally just decided to stop dwelling on it, since it was frustrating me, and just kept hitting split each time I changed sports, and I completely forgot about it. I noticed after I got done with the race and had my phone again that people were giving me kudos on strava, but seemingly only on one trail run, even though, much to the chagrin of everyone who follows me on strava, there should have been 13 or 14 swim and run workouts uploaded to strava. Weird. Then I got home and looked at Garmin Connect, and the entire thing was recorded as a trail run workout. Each time I hit split, it was just splitting the run into a segment. No swims. SO annoying. At first I thought I must have messed up and chosen the wrong sport, but then I noticed the swimrun I recorded from the pre-race clinic was ALSO a straight trail run. In all my years of Garmining, I have never once chosen the wrong sport for a workout, and so to have done it twice in two days really seemed unlikely. But I figured that must have been what happened. And THEN on Tuesday I went to do my first post-race recovery workout. I got to the pool and hit the Activities button to choose my activity. If you have a Garmin, you know that when you go to select an activity, it will default to whatever you're last activity was.
I have no idea what happened, and it makes me irrationally angry. But! Necklace-chafing aside, that's the only negative point in an amazing day and an amazing race, and it's ridiculous that it even irks me as much as it does, so I'm just letting it go, and hoping whatever it was, it doesn't happen again!
And that's a wrap on the 2025 swimrun season. It was a weird one, for sure, for me. After years of monogamy, I raced with 4 different people this year, 4 very different races. I definitely miss getting to race with Trista every few months, but it's not the end of Team Adorkable, just a very different season of life for both of us for a while.
And if you have made it this far, you can enjoy the first formal announcement of this news!
In 2026, the Orcas Island swimrun is moving from September to June (that's not the breaking news, that has already been announced). Matt has been incredibly consistent in his swimming and running the last month, so I said, "Hey... you wanna maybe do your first swimrun with me at Orcas Island 2026?" And after some consideration, he said yes! We have some unfinished business out on Orcas Island, and I can't wait to write a new chapter in our story with that island/race next year. (No bikes will be ridden.)
Stay tuned for the first race report from Team Matt's Revenge Tour!
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