Ohio Street, August 22

Today Ohio Street hit us with everything it had, and we survived. When Stuart and Ken arrived at my house, Ken remarked what a beautiful morning it was to go to Evanston, clear skies, 70 degrees and light breeze. I overruled him, pointing out that there was a rip tide alert for the lower 1/4th of the lake and Milwaukee already was reporting 4ft waves, with these expected in the Chicago area a little later this morning accompanied by 15-20mph north winds. Evanston might be unswimmable. We had no trouble getting to Ohio St and parked right by the pedestrian underpass to the beach. Already as we were getting stuff in and out of the car we could feel the strong wind even though we were behind the humongous new building where a vacant lot had been for years. At the beach we could see low breaking waves by the beach, lots of chop and random 2ft waves farther out. The water by the beach seemed to be comfortable enough, we argued 66 or 68? There were fewer swimmers than we would have expected a week before the triathlon but more than expected without wet suits. We waited in the water for Sue, but finally decided to get started without her. Needless to say the swim out was hard, but in addition to the wind and incoming current the farther we went the colder the water became. By the time we turned around at the far red bouy I looked at my watch and it seemed to say 62.4 degrees, but was hard to read bouncing in the surf. That turned out to be consistent with later readings. As we were treading water we could see ourselves floating towards Ohio St beach, if it was 20 degrees warmer we might have tried floating back. Out this far there was not a single other swimmer. On the way back, which was much easier, I looked at my watch temperature several times and it was rising as we swam, with a temperature of 66.7 back at the beach. By then that felt warm and the swim did not seem as bad as it seemed at the other end. By now there were lots of wet suiters in the water near the beach.

As we finished we saw Erin coming in. She told us Sue had sent her regrets by text message. Erin had been a bit late and was finishing a solo half swim. She eagerly joined us for hot coffee. Outside of the freezing cold Starbucks Ken was still shivering so I gave him my jacket that I had brought especially for the trip through Starbucks. He wore it all the way home.