Ötillö Catalina Course Preview w/ The Swimrun Monks

Welcome to episode five of the Low Tide Boyz, a swimrun Podcast!

On this week’s show we chat with the San Diego-based swimrun team Sean and Phillip A.K.A., The Swimrun Monks.

But first…we wanted to thank everyone that’s been listening to the show and reaching out with questions and feedback. It has been great to see and even though there are people way more experienced than us we’ll keep trying to answer everyone’s questions. We also wanted to give a special shout out to Pepe And Florian from Sweden for being fans of the show and basically becoming our unofficial Swedish pronunciation coaches and meme suggesters.

We’ve hit some adversity in training with our collective kids being sick and Chris traveling for work but we’re still getting some good training in. We finally got in a swimrun practice in Aquatic Park in San Francisco which was fun. We practiced transitions and swimming with a tether, which is always good to do before race day on Otillio Catalina.

Speaking of Catalina, our guests on the show today helped design the course with the race directors. The Swimrun Monks, Sean and Phillip are pretty bad ass athletes in their own rights and came together in 2019 to race together. Both had interesting journeys to get to Swimrun and were introduced to the sport by Andy Hewitt and Sean Durkin. They raced the Ötillö World Championship in 2019 and have a stacked race schedule in 2020 as they gear up to hopefully race the World Championship again.

The Monks talked about what Ötillö races are like in Europe and how big of a deal it was that they were coming to the United States to put on their first event in Catalina. They also helped Andy Hewitt to design the race course and even put in an 11 hour “training day” when they went from Two Harbors to Avalon to see if that was possible. The official race course will start and end in Two Harbors and The Monks run us through what the course will be like. The water will be clean and clear and the running legs will be all on trails with some good elevation. They talked about race strategy and how to work together with their partner to have a successful race day.

We talked about finding and training together with a partner. The Monks train together 3-4 times per week and are always trying to get in some swimrun-specific training at least once a week. We geeked out about swimrun gear and talked about shoes (Hoka Speedgoat Evos are their current shows of choice), pull buoys (of course we chatted about buoys), wetsuits (they are fans of synergy wetsuits), shin floaties, etc. Finally, we chatted about how San Diego is a great place to train for swimrun and the cool crew that meets up to do workouts.

We really appreciated the guys coming on the show and look forward to seeing them at the start of some of our races this year…and then seeing them at the finish line since we’ll be way behind them on the course!

That’s it for this week’s show. 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. You can also support us on Patreon, if you are so inclined. If you want to drop us a line, email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com.