Team Keith and the Unicorn
Welcome to episode seventy-five of the Löw Tide Böyz - A Swimrun Podcast!
This week we head to “The Shire” (New Hampshire, not Tolkein’s Middle Earth) to chat with Keith Lundquist and Kanoa King of Team Keith and the Unicorn. These guys are one of the up-and-coming American teams and we’re super stoked to introduce them to our listeners.
More on this interview later in the show.
Training Update
The training continues and we put in a 2 hour-plus Swimrun practice over the weekend and we’re definitely feeling like we are making progress. Our transitions are pretty much dialed in and our overall pace is feeling good. It’s almost as if all the swimming and running that we are doing is paying off! Weird! Casco Bay, here we come! #LFG
Shoutouts
This week we’re shouting out the ten folks from the swim club Pool2Lake who all completed their first Swimrun this past weekend at The Box End Bedford Swimrun put on by our friends at As Keen As Mustard events. We have no idea if they listen to the show or not, but either way we are stoked that they all came out to race their first event.
Feats of Endurance
We are going back to the Netherlands for this week’s FoE winner: Elly Dijk. She’s taking part in the Envol Coaching’s “Big Battle” and literally did eight Swimruns last week. Eight!
Need some inspiration in your training life? Make sure to join the LTBz Strava Club and connect with fellow Swimrunners as they train and race all over the world.
This Week in Swimrun (Powered by Raceid.com)
Lots of Swimrun news to share this week.
First off, we’ve got something special to share with everyone. We are debuting our “Notes from the Field” with guest correspondent Shane Chaplin. Former guest of the show (Episode 43) and our favorite Aussie living in Sweden was present at the ARK SUPERSPRINT put on by EX Swimrun a few weeks back and he shares his expert analysis of how the race went from his perch atop a stand-up paddle board on the swim leg for the event. Thanks Shane for your special report!
Ödyssey Swimrun released their latest course overview zoom recording for Luddington last week. Check it out on YouTube to get all the info you need to convince you to sign up.
It’s race week for Swimrun Knox! If you’re in the general vicinity of Tennessee or are willing to travel, registration is open for either the short or long course distance taking place on June 13th.
Week one of Envol Coaching’s “The Big Battle” is officially in the books! Make sure you follow @envolswimrun on Instagram to see how all the teams are progressing. They also have a leaderboard with all the standing at envolcoaching.net for folks that want to check that out. (In case you’re curious about how Team Löw Tide Böyz is doing but are too lazy to go to Envol’s website, our team is not in last place.)
Our friends at As Keen As Mustard events had their first race of the year over the weekend and the Box End Bedford Swimrun did not disappoint. (Fun fact: Google Maps describes Box End Park as a leisure park.) Good times were had by all at their first event of the year. Their next event, Nene Park Peterborough Swimrun is coming up on June 20th, so if you’re in the U.K. and are keen to try Swimrun, we can’t recommend a more welcoming event series. If you want to learn more about As Keen As Mustard events, check out our interview with the mother and daughter race directing duo, Nicky & Chelsea Bailey, on Episode 56 of the show.
The Stockholm Swimrun took place over the weekend. The field was limited to 150 participants for this ÖTILLÖ Merit Race but it looked like a lot of fun. In other news, their winner’s trophy was humongous!
The race (and city) whose name I’ve been butchering for weeks, the Jönköping Swimrun powered by Speedo, took place over the weekend. This race had some heavy hitters in the field and the competition for this ÖTILLÖ Merit Race looked fierce. Shoutout to Marie Anderzén, Annika Westin, and Anders Nyberg from our Strava Club who all raced on Sunday.
In a little bit of a bummer, ATOBE events recently announced that they need five more teams to sign up for the epic ATOBE Ultra at their Immeln Swimrun for it to happen on August 21st. We haven’t chatted with them about this but we’re taking it on as a personal mission to try to get five teams to sign up for this 108km (97km running, 11km swimming) ultra by June 15th so that we can experience the FOMO from the U.S. Registration is open on raceid.com. (if you sign up after listening to this, send us a DM!)
That’s it for this week. Feel free to email us to tip us off to any events or Swimrun news that you’d like for us to share on the show.
Updates
We know that we’ve been mentioning our Ödyssey Swimrun discount code a lot but that only because we love their events and think that you will too! Use the code LOWTIDE15 to save 15% on your registration.
Looking to waste some time on YouTube? Check out the LTBz channel and check out our new How to Practice Smooth Transitions and our Pull Buoy Mounting Options Overview videos. Let us know if you’re liking this type of content so that we can justify it to our wives why we need to get camera equipment in addition to our podcasting gear.
As a programming alert, we will be releasing our Ödyssey Swimrun Casco Bay Course Preview episode next week so stay tuned for that.
Interview
It was great to chat with Keith and Kanoa about their Swimrun journey. While it hasn’t taken them long to start winning races, they definitely passed the Swimrun vibe check and it will be cool to see them at the start line (and then at finish line a few hours after they are done) at a bunch of races in the Fall. In this interview, we chatted with them about how they found Swimrun and each other, the genesis of their Swimrun team name, how they’ve approached training and racing, and even got a mini-race report from their Swimrun Lake James long course win. We also talked about beer miles, gave them wetsuit recommendations, and more. This was a fun one. Enjoy!
That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star review. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and on YouTube. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram. Email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com with any feedback and/or suggestions. Finally, you can support our efforts on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.
Thank you for listening and see you out there!
- Chip and Chris