Hi Everyone.
Here's some pictures and the newpaper article from the Fairbanks Miner about the Chena Spash that was held in Fairbanks last weekend. I see several names I recognize Samantha, Mimi, Robin, Dave and would love to hear your tale of the swim. Great job! Looks like this swim might be a great one to put on the calendar for next summer.
Shannon T.
Photo by Eric Engman
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Photo by Eric Engman
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Photo by Eric Engman
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FAIRBANKS — Wetsuit or petroleum jelly? That was the question for competitors in the inaugural Chena Splash on Saturday at Chena Lake Recreation Area.
For Kathryn Niemi and her three teammates from the University of Alaska Fairbanks swim team, there wasn’t much choice.
“We’re poor college students, so we just go with what we’ve got,” Niemi said as she and teammates Kinsey Laine, Heidi Tilicki and Courtney Nichols smeared gobs of Vaseline on their bodies Saturday morning to protect themselves against the cold water.
Call it a poor man’s wetsuit.
“If we die, we die,” Laine reasoned.
It’s not every day that people go swimming in a lake in Alaska, but that didn’t stop a field of 18 swimmers — seven in the 1K race and 11 in the 5K event — from taking the chilly plunge in the first annual Chena Splash, sponsored by the Fairbanks Arctic Swim Team, a masters group that meets weekly to swim at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The 65-degree water in Chena Lake, however, was a little cooler than the 80-degree water in the Patty Center Pool.
“That’s a wicked swim,” a shivering Mimi Cook of Eagle River said after emerging from the water in third place in the 5K race and immediately retreating to a hot shower nearby, despite her wetsuit. “It’s long and cold.”
Cold water wasn’t the only obstacle participants faced in the 1- and 5-kilometer open swims.
There were leeches, dive-bombing seagulls, jumping rainbow trout and the ability to swim in a straight line.
“It’s an acquired skill,” Drew Harrington said of staying on course after finishing first in the 5K race with a time of 1 hour, 6 minutes and 48 seconds. “Every third stroke I picked my head up to see where I was.”
Laine wasn’t as fortunate, though she did manage to stay on course.
“The whole time I couldn’t see anything,” said Laine, who finished fifth in 1:18:45. “I rubbed my goggles before the race and got petroleum jelly all over them. Everything was foggy. I was just trying to stay at somebody’s feet.”
The courses were marked with orange buoys, and officials in canoes and kayaks paddled next to the racers for safety purposes.
The water temperature didn’t bother 20-year-old Laine, one of five racers in the 5K race who chose to swim without a wetsuit.
“After a while, I just got numb to it,” she said.
Numb was a feeling that Niemi, 20, could relate to after finishing eighth in the 5K race in 1:22:52 without a wetsuit.
“I can’t feel my feet at all,” she said.
Her head was warm, though, because Niemi wore three bathing caps.
“I’m determined to keep my head warm,” she said before the race.
Dave Schmidt, 63, of Anchorage wore only a Speedo bathing suit in the 1K race.
“It was warmer than I thought it was going to be,” Schmidt, an environmental coordinator for Alyeska Pipeline Co., said as he toweled himself dry. “It’s always cold for the first 100 yards, and then your body temperature comes up.”
The race was split into categories for swimmers who wore wetsuits and those who did not. More than half the field chose to wear wetsuits.
“In a race like this, you lose so much energy trying to stay warm without a wetsuit and it helps with flotation,” Harrington said. “You don’t have to worry about keeping your body up.”
Race director Robbie Herrick, who finished sixth in the 5K event in 1:19:00 without the benefit of a wetsuit or Vaseline, said a wetsuit “is good for three or four seconds per 100 yards.”
But it wasn’t the cold water that Robin Murphy was talking about when she climbed out of the water after placing sixth in the 1K race in just under 20 minutes.
“There was a leech between my toes,” Murphy, of Eagle River, said. “I kept thinking, ‘It’s going to be huge by the time I get done.’”
Sam Wuttig, the fourth-place finisher in the 5K race, had to contend with angry seagulls.
“They were dive bombing me,” she said.
Herrick, who thought up the race, said he hopes the Chena Splash becomes an annual event in Fairbanks.
Niemi might have summed up the Chena Splash the best when she said, “It was an experience.”
Or as Tilicki put it, “It’s something to tell the grandchildren about — I swam a 5K in Alaska.”
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