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August 13 was a busy day for me. I woke up at 5am and was on the road from Crikvenica to Zadar at 5:20am, a total of 220km. At dawn, I climbed the serpentines to the plateau of the Northern Velebit Mountains and headed south.
At 8:20 in the morning, I was already at the Zadar ferry terminal waiting for the ferry to Istria, which meant that after a two and a half hour drive, there were still so many boats.
Already on the ferry I noticed that the wind was strong, chasing the wave crests across the deep blue Adriatic Sea, but I tried to concentrate on the fact that the swimming competition would be held in a sheltered bay, so there couldn’t be too many winds and waves to be troublesome.
At noon, I received the departure number 120, and after a few cups of cereal and water, I excitedly waited for the departure. The place was beautiful, a real deserted island with crystal clear water.
Around 12:40pm, 136 starters climbed into the water, waiting frantically for the start. The water was cold, about 20 degrees. In vain, the cold fronts and strong winds of the past few days have cooled even the coastal areas. After the 12:45 start, I focused on two things: not freezing and hitting the right side of the island. Because the 4200-meter track was painted like this:
I made good progress, although I did not reach the voles swimming ahead of me. I was getting closer and closer to the island and I was getting less and less cold. As I began to avoid the island on the right, I felt bigger waves, and sometimes I was afraid that the waves would throw me onto the rocks along the coast. I had swallowed a few decimeters of sea water next to the red flag ship, but I hoped that the waves around the island would only be so big.
Well, I was wrong. The strong headwind (30-40 km/h) created such big waves that the remaining 2.1 km was almost a nightmare: I inhaled salt water when I breathed, I couldn’t see forward because of the waves, and sometimes there were so many waves in the air in front of me that they also covered my left arm, at which point I found that I was really stopped. I thought that another wave and I was going to return to the island… I had to switch to breaststroke regularly to see where I was supposed to swim. The boy in front of me also suffered a lot, because approx. They didn’t move more than fifty meters.
All I could think about while swimming was the two pints of beer I would have had on the beach if I hadn’t died on the way in. I’m not a big fan of beer but it tasted amazing compared to the salt water.
Finally, I didn’t die, I made it to the shore, although the waves only took me under in the last few hundred meters. My time was 1:17:45, which was not bad considering the conditions. The other swimmers also did not do well in the end, and the Italian said “it was difficult”. It was like a person rolling a bicycle down a steep slope, turning a corner and realizing that he had to go back to the starting point. One word is worth a hundred: in these conditions (water temperature, wind), this competition will not be held in Hungary.
I ended up having two well-deserved beers and a fish head with pasta (swimmers are treated like this). Yes, these things were waiting for us right on the beach without any security. They don’t steal here because it’s hard to hide.
During the boat ride home (which now took half the time of my catamaran trip) and the walk in Zadar, I recovered somewhat, but one thing is for sure: this was probably the hardest race of my life so far!
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