Point to La Pointe [Chicken Swims]

It only took me 5 days to figure out how to resize photos to fit onto my albums here.

Last Saturday I swam in the Point to La Pointe 2 mile swim race in northern Wisconsin.

I’d originally planned to camp in one of the Forest preserve campsites, but they were full! I had to settle for a Comfort Inn in Ironwood, U.P. My 5.30am wakeup on Saturday morning for the race was too early to make my own waffle. Disappointed, I had a McCoffee and a granola bar and headed to Bayfield for my first ever immersion in Lake Superior. It’s the big lake I call Gitcheegloomy.

Here’s the crowd at the starting line.

Point to La Pointe is a “wetsuit strongly recommended” race, but I’d managed to get permission from the race director to swim as God intended, in all my pale wobbly glory, with nothing between yours truly and the Great Lake except a thin layer of sparkly red nylon.

The entry fee for Point toLa Pointe was almost $90. There was a great hoody included but I got even more value for my money by swimming the route marked by the black line below. The water was 72 degrees and very smooth. Just a slight ripple on the top. Someone at the finish line told me there was a sunken house somewhere along the course, which had fallen through the ice during an attempt to drag it to the island one winter. Glad I didn’t see that!

I took over an hour to swim the 2.1 miles. Hmm. I obviously didn’t swim hard enough and couldn’t summon up even a little reflux to comply with the finish line commandment to hurl in a garbage bin.

Here’s me posing in front of the course, after I’d finished. My hooded towel earned me a lot of envious glances.

I did a little hiking alone the lakefront by the Apostle Islands after the race and saw some sea caves! I guess they’re really lake caves…

I enjoyed a much longer hike in the Black River Falls area the next day on my way home, probably because I’d been able to have the Comfort Inn’s make it yerself waffle for breakfast.

I highly recommend Point to La Pointe. It’s a very scenic swim, which is great for a slow moving tourist like myself. For the super competitive, there looked to be a lot of competition. Lots of skinny triathletes. There’s no separation or even indication in the results of who wore neoprene or not, but I knew that going into it. There were no shortage of kayakers and support boats, and the whole event seemed very well organised.

I’ll do it again! but hopefully without this song playing over and over and over in my head