SwimRun Victoria athletes line up at the start.

SwimRun Victoria Recap

ByMike Neill

This year’s event almost did not take place and was added to the long list of 2020 cancelled events. One week before SwimRun Victoria was scheduled to take place at Thetis Lake, the lake was closed to swimming due to a Blue Green Algae Bloom. Thanks to race director Rob Dibden’s quick actions and the CRD for their approval an alternate venue was organized and a race was planned using the XTERRA Victoria swim and run courses at Durrance Lake.

While this race did not have the point to point swims and different run courses that athletes would have experienced at Thetis Lake, the course did end up being an extremely challenging affair with 750m loops in Durrance Lake followed by 4.7km loops of the XTERRA Run course with a trip up “The Beast” each time around. (2 X swim/run for short course athletes and 4 X swim/run for long course athletes).

Due to COVID 19, the race was limited to 50 athletes and it did have some changes to comply with social distancing. A few of the changes to running a socially distanced event included the following;

  • A starting grid. Instead of athletes standing shoulder to shoulder a grid using cones was set up on shore to keep athletes 2 meters apart before the starting gun went off.
  • No Aid Stations. In order to keep both athletes and volunteers safe an aid table was put out, but athletes were responsible for labeling their own nutrition and putting it on the table.
  • Post Race Celebration. Unfortunately we were not able to celebrate after the race as we normally do with post race refreshments and an award ceremony to recognize athletes accomplishments as well as our fantastic volunteers and sponsors. This is definitely one of the highlights of any race and it is the one experience we can’t wait to bring back.

Congratulations to our Long Course Champion Nico Lightbody who finished in a time of 2:25:50 and Charlene Waldner who’s winning time was 3:15:54.

In the short course event Bertrand Bozek was the overall champion in a time of 1:23:51, followed closely by our women’s champion Stephanie Kieffer in 1:24:15.

Full Results and Photos can be found here.

A BIG THANK YOU to all of our volunteers! We were extremely lucky to have such a great turnout of volunteers who kept all of our athletes safe and on course.