Surely the swim will be canceled?

Dark, angry, waves crash on the pier in front of us.  

Surely the race officials will spare us swimming in these perilous seas?  I stand on the shore waiting for the announcement that the swim is being canceled and replaced with a 5k run. 

When the starting gun is fired I am still in denial - you can see me in this picture gingerly hobbling out over the sharp rocks and into the roiling ocean - I am in no hurry to plunge into the rough currents. 

Funny thing is, the Oshima race is touted as being welcoming for first-time triathlete. Welcoming because of the lack of cut-off times, not because of swim conditions. Swim conditions were certainly not welcoming.  On this day dozens of participants did not make it through the swim - some 20% are listed as "DNF" on the results.  Most of these poor newbie swimmers seem to have piled up in front of me when I arrived at the second buoy (the race's first turn). It felt like the sinking of the Titanic with the previous waves of swimmers in different colored caps, back-stroking and treading water.   

You can actually see my own struggles at the second buoy -- the squiggle in the upper left corner from this GPS image where the powerful waves pushed me back as I tried to get around all the drowning, flailing beginners and sight the buoy.
  

I begin to grow concerned myself that I would join all the DNFers being plucked from the seas. But I managed to calm down and remind myself that I have finished numerous open water swims and some were in even worse conditions. 
















After the slow swim I feel I am just absolutely blowing past these beginner triathletes around me on the bike - "Wow, be careful at such incredibly high speeds"  I tell myself, "I am soooo fast, I must be setting a land speed record"

But apparently I was really not cycling at incredibly high speeds.  

When I check my split after bike I am 3 minutes slower than my bike time at Oshima several years ago in similar conditions. 

So on the run I am just trying to maintain some effort, some intensity, some focus on the present ... though lamentably, I have largely given up on today's event and cannot keep my thoughts from drifting to future races..  

At this point, as you can see,  I have plenty of energy to high-five my fans  

I do manage to summon the will to at least break 40-minutes on the run.  

Splits:
Swim - 36:34
Bike -  1:13:22
Run -   39:45