I looked at my swim GPS from a recent race and it looks like I'm staggering around out there. This is a 600 yd. swim, and my GPS puts me at about 900 yds.of actual swimming. How do you guys swim straight? Do swim files just look crooked? If you have some advice I'd love to hear it.

Some notes: my time was okay, about 1:35/100 yds (given the 600 yd course measurement). That's fine for me for an OWS, nothing earth-shattering, but reasonably in-line with what I can expect. I was out in the open with no one around, it was a pretty small race, could sight reasonably well until the run in to the finish chute, which blended in almost perfectly with the backdrop (!). It's the east-to west (this was a clockwise swim) portion that just looks ridiculous -- I really was just kind of cruising along, sighting at the far buoy (so I wasn't following a crooked picket-fence of buoys, I thought I was on a direct line for the turn to the north). The east-west portion is just a point to point swim - the shortest distance is from corner to corner, and all buoys are on the right.

Okay, gentle or outright mocking, stern advice, shared experiences -- have at it.

All best,
Andrew Moss