One of the USA Swimming members, Steven Munatones, twittered the race here. Steven will also be twittering live from Fort Myers next week as Karyn does the 5 and 10k swims out there. Check his website - 10kswimmer.com - for updates both from MIMS and from next week's races.
On Friday I fly into Newark, NJ airport. I had an interesting travel day as I took the redeye flight from Vancouver to Chicago, then Chicago to Newark. Once in Newark I took the airport monorail (AirTrain) to the train station, where I hopped on the NJ Transit train over to New York's Penn Station in Manhattan. From Penn Station I went onto the Subway down to the southern most tip of Manhattan Island, where I got the ferry over to Governor's Island for the pre-race meeting. I made the ferry trip with 5 minutes to spare!
The prerace meeting was pretty amazing. Each athlete introduced themselves and those that are doing the race solo all have very impressive resumes. For some of them this would be their first Marathon swim. Each of those people were raising money for very respectable charities in their home countries, like one woman raising money for Children in Guatmala to get a specific surgery. Others had done TONNES of marathon swims, for instance a few of the swimmers had done the English Channel swim multiple times, including some double-crossings! Very elite company indeed.After the pre-race meeting we went back "uptown" to the hotel, before going to meet with our kayaker, Dan Starer. Dan is one of the most experianced NYC kayakers around. He's circled the island of Manhattan many times, and this year is going around once per calendar month... he said January and February were both quite cold! As I've mentioned before there is a documentry being filmed about the race this year, and the filmmaker came out to tape some of our meeting.
That was all for the day before the race... then it was time for an early night as we had to get up at 3:45am the next morning!
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