Welcome to episode thirty-four of the Low Tide Boyz, a Swimrun Podcast!

On the show this week we Herbert Krabel. Co-race director of Swimrun NC and Editor of Slowtwitch. This was a fun, wide-ranging interview that we will chat more about later. 

Training Update

Our training plans went sideways this past week due to forest fires in Northern California. We’ve had to stay indoors because of the poor air quality so there wasn’t too much training action that wasn’t on something stationary.

Our thoughts are with all the folks that have been evacuated from their homes (including Chris’s parents) and those working day and night to fight these fires and help those in need.

Shout Outs

This week we’re giving prospective shoutouts to a bunch of current and former Ötillö World Champions that are plaining on swimming and running the entire Stockholm Archipelago in three days. That’s 150K of trail running and about 50K of swimming or basically one Ötillö World Championship each day. George Bjalkemo, Pontus Lindberg, Kristin Larsson, and Annica Ericsson are the four athletes doing this. We will try to get them on the show to talk about this feat and ask the key questions: What? Why? What?!

Feats of Endurance Weekly Award

This week’s award is going out to Trista and Amy of Team Adorkable. They’ve definitely been embodying the spirit of this award all Summer with their feats putting in some serious mileage including a “secret” 50-mile trail run on a 1.5-mile loop last week! Keep it up, ladies! 

This Week in Swimrun

As far as we could tell, there were three Swimrun events last weekend (August 22-23) including an Ötillö Merit Race in France. The photos looked great for all three events and definitely gave us some major FOMO. We would like to apologize in advance for butchering the pronunciations.

Skatås Sjöar Swimrun on August 22nd featured a 10km and 15km events. This event took place just outside of Gothenburg and definitely looked like it had a cool community vibe from all the photos that we saw on Instagram.

Immeln Swimrun in Immeln Sweden took place on August 22nd and featured a short (15km) and long (37km) course options. This race is put on by A to Be Events which we think is an awesome name for a Swimrun race company.

Swimrunman Great Lakes of Laffrey by HEAD in Laffrey France took place on August 23rd. Nothing like some swimrunning in the French Alps! The event featured Sprint (14.75km), Classic (22.1km), and Vertical Ötillö Merit race (30.6km) distances. The merit race looked particularly intense with the race finishing with a run-up to the top of Alpe Du Grand Serre.

If we missed any races or you want to tip us off to a future race that you want us to include, send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll make sure to include it.

LTBz Updates

Keep sending in your submissions for our “International Swimrun Adventure Guide.” We got a bunch of entries and we’re almost ready to start putting something up on our site. As a reminder, If you have a great training route that you don’t want to keep secret you can head over to our website and fill out the form on our homepage.

We’re going to have a couple of open water swim coaches from Tower 26 on the podcast in a few weeks and we’re going to this as an “Ask the Coaches” episode. Submit your open water swim questions to us via email or DM and we’ll get them asked on the show.

We just launched our Swimrun Gear Guide! This guide covers everything you need to get started doing swimrun, well for the gear portion at least. 

Interview

It’s safe to say there is no one who has spread the gospel about Swimrun in the United States and beyond as much as Herbert Krabel has over the years. He has down pretty much every type of endurance event that there is to do including being a pro mountain bike racer for a while. When he found Swimrun, he was instantly hooked. We had a great wide-ranging conversation and we think you’ll enjoy it.

In this interview, we chat about Herbert’s athletic background, how he found triathlon, and then Swimrun. He recalled for us his first Swimrun race, Ötillö Engadin, and how that went. We spoke at length about Swimrun NC, his role as co-race director, and how that race has developed over the years. We also talk about the growth of Swimrun in the United States, what makes a good race, and what the future looks like.

You can follow Herbert on Instagram and read his articles on Slowtwitch.

That’s it for this week’s show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, please be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram and on Twitter. Email us at [email protected] with any feedback, suggestions, and/or meme suggestions. Finally, you can also support us on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.