Kelly O'Mara

Welcome to the first official episode of The Low Tide Boyz, a swimrun podcast!

We (Chipper and Chris) will be covering a bunch of topics related to Swimrun from upcoming events and news, new gear and product reviews as well as our own journey in training and racing in this growing sport. We hope that folks will join us on our journey and that we will inspire everybody to sign up for Swimrun events in their area.

By way of background, we are an endurance team out of Northern California. We’ve been training together and racing endurance events for years and raced our first Swimrun event in 2018. This year our “A” race will be Ötillö Catalina (World Series course) and our “a” race will be Odyssey Swimrun’s Orcas Island long course. We might try to do some more events…if our wives give us clearance. Our upcoming Catalina race in late February will consist of 30k run and 7.6k swim or 18ish miles of running and 4ish miles of swimming. This will be our first hilly Swimrun race with over 4,000’ of climbing on the course so we are excited about that!

We’re about to really start “training” and we will be chronicling our built for Catalina on the show. We are hoping to have a good race, but have no delusions about winning anything, we’re just looking forward to working hard and experiencing an official Ötillö race. That disclaimer aside, we will be doing a pretty heavy swim build for this event and will be doing a diabolical swim program that will likely render us unable to do high fives…so we will see how that goes.

Our guest this week is Kelly O’Mara. Kelly is a writer and reporter in Northern California. She is also a professional triathlete. She’s the co-host of her own podcast called If We Were Riding (available everywhere) and is an all-around awesome human being. She joined us on the podcast to talk about her own journey in discovering and racing Swimrun and about how she thinks that the sport could/should grow in the US.

Kelly first heard about Swimrun from a friend at Triathlete Magazine who had done the Ötillö World Championship and she just heard a lot of buzz about those events. So she signed up for Casco Bay/ Cole Classic Swimrun event in Portland, Maine put on by Odyssey SwimRun in 2018 and returned to race in 2019. We hung out with her on the ferry in 2018 and that’s where she first met Chipper. (Chris and Kelly used to go on training rides together in Marin back in the day.)

Kelly sees 2020 as “the year of Swimrun” and thinks that there will be many more events coming online as folks learn about the sport. We agree! It will be interesting to see what happens now that Ötillö has their first event in the US and the growing trend of endurance athletes compete in a variety of things to get a variety of experiences.

If you are enjoying the Low Tide Boyz, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. We are on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. You can also follow along on Instagram and Twitter. If you want to drop us a line then email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com.