Good open water swimming website

Triathlon Forum
1

http://www.10kswim.com/

Pretty good preview of the Beijing 10K and some good general info. also…

2

www.oceanswims.com
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3

I was just curious if anyone checked out this site as the guy who made it is looking for some feedback. I can understand why the Olympic Marathon, Tour de France, etc. get more coverage than open water swimming, but I’m surprised that no one on this “triathlon” forum took an interest to it.

4

I think people are interested, I just don’t think that many of the people here on ST do 10k open water swims, I think its awesome, but again, I also think that 100 mile trail runs and deca Ironmans are awesome.

5

i’m glad to know the site is there, and i poked around on it a bit, but i don’t think it’s a site i’d keep returning to. some random comments:

  1. once you read the basic information, you wouldn’t need to necessarily keep re-reading it… seems like it has an emphasis on “how to” (a beginner’s guide to 10k swimming?), and might attract more visitors (and return visitors) if it diversified the content more, maybe including “news,” “results,” “calendar” and “features (of 10k swimmers)” sections (or did i miss those?). maybe something (more) on/from swimmers talking about why they moved from pool swimming to open water–what attracts them to it, why they find it exciting and challenging and rewarding, etc. had a sort of old-time “film strip” feel to it, which almost made it seem dated already.

  2. people interested in 10k swimming is such a niche/small crowd… lots of the info. on the site doesn’t really apply to your regular old open water swims (or swim portion of a triathlon), so i think most triathletes might find a lot of the info. irrelevant.

  3. glad there was an option to turn off the music :slight_smile:

but it’s definitely got some good info. for coaches/swimmers who might be considering 10k’s, so if that’s the intended audience, then i think it’s a good start.

6

www.oceanswims.com is an amazing website, and anyone travelling to Oz in particular should take a look and get a few of those swims in.

7

I was just curious if anyone checked out this site as the guy who made it is looking for some feedback. I can understand why the Olympic Marathon, Tour de France, etc. get more coverage than open water swimming, but I’m surprised that no one on this “triathlon” forum took an interest to it.

I looked at bits and pieces of it. All the pictures are cool but it the format seemed more appropriate for a presentation than a website - I got tired of clicking on the arrows to read the next sentence.

8

I took a look at it.

It looks like a good presentation of 10k competitions that a 12 - 15 year old would look at to see if they might want to move to 10k swims from pool competitions.
Don’t know if that’s what he is after, but that’s what I see. It depends on his audience I guess.

I liked the explanations and pictures of how they take their drinks although I am not sure I completely understand it.

This has nothing to do with the website, I also think the drafting in 10k competitions is ridiculous given that para 6.2 and 6.3 of the FINA open water rules forbid it. The common interpretaton of group swimmig is ok but single swimmer drafting is not is just silly. Even those rules are not enforced.

As for why no one looked, I think you already know the answer, triathletes do not care about swimming. Well a few of us do, but not many.