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Marathon Swimming on a Budget & Getting Experience for "Famous" Swims
polka_stripes
Sacramento, CAMember
Anyone else here trying to do marathon swimming on a budget? I can't afford thousands of dollars for a marathon swim plus travel costs, kayaker/support costs, etc etc.
My local open water group does small events in our lake (really more of a wide river, but less current) - swimming X miles upstream, starting from a different beach than usual, organizing something at a different, nearby lake - which helps keeps things interesting and does give me something to train for, but does anyone else have FOMO when it comes to the more "famous" swims, like SCAR, Swim the Suck, etc?
Based on my financial abilities, I can only do one big swim every few years, but the applications for the swims want to see you have a recent history of cold/long/night swims. How do you get that experience when you can't afford to go to the more well-known and well-regarded events regularly?
Discussion/thoughts on marathon swimming on a budget?
Comments
@polka_stripes Great question-- An important aspect of this sport is the volunteer-community model, where we all volunteer using whatever strengths or skills we have and in return, people in the community support us back. This model drastically cuts down on the costs of big swim endeavors. A great example of this is the "self-organized swim". In this type of swim, you ask your friends to support you and then you in turn either support them on a swim, or offer something else to the community. Beginners can always plan on paying it forward down the road.
Self organized swims can be officially documented and ratified by MSF (in which case they will be added to the long swims database just like formally organized swims), or they can be personal adventures that aren't ratified, but help you gain experience with various conditions.
The most economical way to do a self-organized swim is to ask a friend to kayak support you, design a route and go for it. If you want it ratified, invite two friends: one to paddle, one to document. If you have access to a boat, even better: have your friends ride in the boat. Here is a link to the process for documenting swims: https://marathonswimmers.org/swims/.
You'll notice that there is a fee to get the swim reviewed and ratified. After you have done a few swims and have experience, this fee can be avoided by volunteering your time to review other people's swims
. Voila! Totally budget friendly way to gain a lot of experience for not many dollars! If you need any support getting a swim set up or designing a route, please feel free to post under https://forum.marathonswimmers.org/discussion/1687/faq-best-practices-for-msf-documented-swims, or also just send me a message 
!
@polka_stripes P.S. Here's an example of a documented swim I did a few years ago up here in Oregon. If you ever want to do this one, I'll totally show up and support you for free! https://marathonswimmers.org/swims/2021/kieras-waldo/ Why? because tons of people have helped me out in this sport and at MSF we pay it forward
And this is totally indicative of the problem I’m talking about - no, I don’t have access to a boat! That’s so expensive! And sure, I’d love to travel to Oregon, but travel is expensive! I appreciate the help about getting swims ratified, but when both your solutions are still so blind to economic reality, it’s hard to feel welcome in this community.
Thank you for your input, but I would love to hear more from other folks who don’t have access to boats and don’t have the money to travel and learn how they go about marathon swimming.
I think in 2/3 of my suggestions, no boat is required, although depending on if your friends have kayaks or not, you may have to rent a kayak, and that will cost between $50-100 (not free). You're also correct that gas money from Sacramento to Waldo Lake Oregon would also not be free.
But I offered to support you for free-- which would include the use of the tandem kayak shown in the link I offered. There is dispersed camping at Waldo Lake, which is also free. Such a swim would be a small fraction of the cost of a channel swim or even a group event like SCAR. Still, you refer to my solutions as "blind to economic reality". Ouch! If anyone else on here reading this wants to take me up on my offer, it stands!
@polka_stripes if your response to people’s offer of free kayak support in a beautiful lake a few hours’ drive away is to insult them, you’re probably going to have a hard time in this sport, regardless of your “economic reality.”
Best of luck.
I think my comments are being taken in bad faith, I really don't know how I insulted anyone - but it's hard to tell tone over text at times and maybe I didn't frame my comments as well as I could have. I apologize. I really didn't intend to be hostile. I do hope if you accept my apology we can swim together (or swim + support) one day.
To be fair to me, your options are still expensive. $100 kayak rentals every weekend for long training swims adds up, as does taking the time off work to drive to Oregon (7 hours, plus gas money, as you said, plus food and other camping supplies).
I am quite appreciative of your info about how to get swims ratified, I didn't know any of that and I intend to use that info to put some long swims into the database to support my application for longer swims. That makes some of my "dream swims" seem more achievable.
Hoping more people on limited budgets might chime in with their experiences.
This is a good question. Some of the big swims that people do are a financial and planning extravaganza. I have neither the means or motivation to put so much time and effort into a swim like that. But don't let that stop you. There are a lot of low budget ways to do long swims. Your swim group sounds like a great start and I wish I had something like that around here.
Lowest budget method to get some recorded swims is to get a swim buoy and put your phone in it. There are downloadable apps for tracking that are free. For this method, you don't need money or friends, you just get out there and swim. It's really fun and nobody cares. If you find someone who actually cares just a bit, you can show them a track of your longest swim.
Next method is to find a friend with a kayak. In my case I married my friend and only later got her to buy a kayak. So far, this has worked out pretty well. You could get a kayak and then find a friend because you have a kayak they can use. There are used kayaks for sale all the time and sometimes you can find them for free. Now you've stepped up a bit in the ability to do longer swims and get some documentation. Pretty cool.
I've never tried this method. But you could put your tracking app into your swim buoy and have a friend observe you from shore. They could walk a trail or ride a bike or drive a car depending on what the terrain is like. Now you have a documented swim done in the most bare bones style imaginable. There are threads on here about putting all your feeds on a tow buoy that can give you some inspiration.
If you don't have the money and time for travel and boats and so forth, then that is going to thwart you because travel takes money and time. So stay local and learn every inch of every body of water nearby. Who cares if you've never swum the English Channel. Not too many people have, so you are not alone. Swimming is really fun and there are so many ways to enjoy it. Don't let your financial reality stop you from taking advantage of what you already have.
Yes, I see swims that sound like they would be really cool to do. But like you, I really don't have the means to do them. So I don't. But I'd rather revel in the little swim expeditions that I can do than despair about the ones I can't. I don't document anything, because really, I don't care. But then again, I don't do any of those incredible swims that people should know about. Plus I hate paperwork...
My final thought on this is just the old school wisdom that if you really want to do something, you can do it. There are always obstacles to doing anything. But the human brain is amazingly capable and "where there's a will, there's a way."
@polka_stripes
A very honest question and one a lot of people, myself included, at some point probably had to work through. And I appreciate that written words sometimes loose their context and tone, and can be misinterpreted. I’ll apologize at the outset if some of my context and tone are strong.
Advice is free, Some of the responders here are the most experienced, most knowledgeable in our sport/hobby. Not all of what they say will be applicable to you perhaps. Take what you want, leave what doesn’t spark ideas. But two adjectives that are very synonymous with OWS are adaptability and creativity. The uncertainty and the puzzle of working through difficulties is part of what makes marathon swimming appealing, at least for me,
Main point coming shortly, but first a couple of personal experiences …
1. I live in Ohio. I have a state park that is :15 drive from my house. Open dawn to dusk. It’s not the cleanest lake, but it has a 400yd dedicated swim beach and.. It’s free. Not a lot of creativity to figure that out. Suit, cap, goggles, good to go. And if I’m interested in the Hobby of open water swimming, I’m all set. But in the previous paragraph I purposely pulled apart Sport and Hobby. I look at those words as two distinct subgroups. Financially, right now, you are a open water hobbiest. And that’s okay. It is a physical activity that is, at it’s simplest very cheap. Suit, cap, goggles, find water, go. But the Sport of open water swimming is different. There are costs to every Sport. Insurance, supplies, website, fuel, people, approvals, and time. The event coordinators/race directors can’t take the financial risks of running free Events. I know you know all of that.
So you can take that and go one of two ways. You can say, well that was lucky and I don’t have anyone I know like that…I can’t do that. Or you can say, maybe I could ask around. See if I can help volunteer my time in return for some financial assistance in going to Oregon so @LakeBagger can help me build my resume... I can try to be creative.
Not everyone has the same money. But there are 24 hours in everyone’s day. And there are those just inside of, or maybe just outside your circle of friends/family who appreciate dedication, perseverance, and creativity and are willing to invest in you. You just have to be creative in how you use your time to find them and help them.
Don’t let money be the ‘I can’t’. When my knees were telling me my triathlon days were done, I read about this mythical swim from England to France and said I think I could do that. Then I went to work, learning everything I could about every aspect of it, including the financial component. Like you know, not cheap. I began telling everyone I knew about my goal and was connected with a lady that helped me do a fundraising campaign. We raised $40,000. Three quarters went to her non-profit and the other quarter went to cover my expenses.
It can be done. I follow the Boston Lighthouse Swim on Facebook. They’ve been posting about each entrant attempting it this year and I’ve been impressed with how many don’t have big OWS resumes. I know the Washington DC swim coming up is open and looking for relay swimmers. No big resumes needed. There are financial costs (travel, entry, etc) because, like we know, there are expenses to all Events. But the financial component can be solved. You just need time and creativity.
So my response-question/challenge I have for you is, why do you care about gaining official/documented experience? The Sport of marathon swimming costs money. It just does. If you want to swim for the joy of swimming, as a hobby, great! Just yesterday I met three ladies at the beach who were there just to swim. No aspirations of anything. But, if you want to gain experience with the Sport, and you are only limited by funding, then get creative. Just like a big swim, it can be done. But you have to be the one to get creative and make it happen.
Wow, thank you so much for your comment. It's given me a lot to think about. If I could go back in time, I would write my post differently, because at the end of the day, I don't think what I was actually looking for was what I received, and I blame that on the subject line I chose for my post and asking more than one question in my post, which led to me getting frustrated when I didn't get the responses I was looking for in my heart.
You raise a great point - the HOBBY of OWS versus the SPORT of it. To get to what I actually wanted, I should have ended my post after my first question. Those of us in the hobby of OWS, who want to be in the sport of it but can't (for whatever reasons), how do you deal with the FOMO and other emotions that come up perusing venues like this forum and others. What I should have said, was, where are the spaces for the hobbyists? Where can we connect to celebrate our "small" swims and share the joy of hobby OWS? On the occasion we did get creative to finance a "big swim," how did we do that? And I just haven't seen those spaces. I wanted to create one with my post, but obviously missed the mark.
You've given me much to think about how I approach my OWS experience and this forum, generally. Thank you.