She Came. She Swam. She Kicked Our Asses.

So this morning we were hanging out under the coffee tent we set up at Ala Moana Beach Park... Chit chatting with friends and sipping on some excellent 100% Moloka'i (good thing it was so good and smooth and easy to drink that nobody even needed milk or sugar)... when Penny Palfrey walked up to say hello.

She came!

I was stoked to see her. How often do we get to race with super stars like her here?

The swim was hard. I forgot how hard it is to go all out for 30 minutes. Ouch! But it was good. The best part was giving Moana a high five as I ran up the beach to the timing mat! I ended up 13th OA, 6th female and 1st age group. My other swimmers who were there did amazing, really. Nalani was 4th female and 1st in her age group, and Jennifer was 7th female, also first in her age group (yep, she's 50... doesn't she look great? Healthy living will do that for you. Love that!)

And Andrew, who has just recently started swimming for real, showed major gains today coming out in 36 minutes, 4th in his age group! I was seriously impressed. He's come a long way in the last couple of months!

And, um, while I knew that Penny was obviously a good long distance swimmer, who knew she was also so fast?!? She crushed us all, coming out as the first female (at age 48) and beating all of the men save one. Yep, there was only one guy that didn't get chicked today. Love that! I was planning on gifting her a bag of coffee as a souvenir but didn't have to because she won a bag of our Maui as prize for her OA. Too bad I didn't have a bag of Kauai coffee for her. That's the one she probably wanted to take home as motivation to keep training and tackle that channel again...

After the swim the coffee went fast... people flocked to our tent and couldn't stop commenting on how good the coffee was. 6 gallons of the black gold disappeared within about an hour. Then the race director called Penny up for a little Q&A session regarding her Kauai Channel attempt while we were waiting for awards. The local swimmers were psyched to have the chance to fire questions at her.

I wanted to know how she trains for such long events. Seriously. What kind of training is involved in the preparation for a 72 mile channel swim? She said she does 60-80K/week, with a long swim of about 20K on the weekends. The ocean near where she lives isn't safe to really swim in (She said they've got 'crocs' in their water that they pretend aren't there, kinda like we do with sharks here... but apparently box jellyfish in Australia are more dangerous than box jellies here- they're serious down under and will kill you)  but she said they have a section of it shielded off somehow to make it safer so she does her long weekend ocean swims there. Yep. 20,000 meters, 6 hours, back and forth across a stretch of roped off ocean that is only 100 meters long. Every weekend. Can you even imagine? I thought I was doing a lot getting in 20K/week. She's doing that in a day. All of a sudden I feel so much less crazy.

Anyway, she did say that she will likely try the Kauai Channel again in March. Hopefully 3rd time is a charm for her. She was really cool. Very humble and didn't act like a celebrity even though we all treated her like one. And now Penny and I are like BFF's. Lol. OK, well were Facebook friends anyway.