Welcome to episode eighteen of the Low Tide Boyz, a Swimrun Podcast!

On this week’s show we have Mr. Xterra (and Mr. Low Tide Boy for 2020) Marcus Barton. We had a great time chatting with him about his journey in swimrun and we think that you’ll really enjoy the interview! More on that in a bit.

Shelter in place continues in California and we’re still exercising and did some endurance antics this week. Chris ran a marathon on Friday for no reason and Chipper ran 33 laps around his block to celebrate his 33rd birthday. Fun times!

For shout outs this week we are tipping the hat to Bruno Frisch. He’s a Novato resident and stud athlete who’s been giving us great feedback on the show. You can find him on Instagram here.

We also have a special announcement: we are going to start producing some bonus content for everyone in the form of swimrun-specific gear reviews. Our first review will be on the Blue Seventy Alliance wetsuit. The folks over there were cool enough to send us a couple of suits to try out and gave us their blessing to put out our opinions. Not only did they do that, they also created a discount code for all our fans for 20% off on their site. Just use the code SWIMRUN at checkout on their website!

Now for this week’s interview. If you don’t know who Marcus Barton is, well you should. He’s a great ambassador for the sport and we had a great conversation chatting about his love for swimrun and his journey in the sport. 

Marcus started racing triathlon in 2007 and his first race was XTERRA Uwharrie. He was instantly hooked on XTERRA events. He was part of the XTERRA Ambassador team for 7 years and in 2016, he was bestowed with the honor of being named Mr. XTERRA. In 2014, one of his XTERRA racing buddies, Dan Kimball, started talking to him about this crazy race called Ötillö. He started training for to race Ötillö in 2015 and raced his first swimrun in July of that year at Swimrun Rockman. They went on to race the Ötillö World Championship later that year. Since then he's raced a ton of swimruns with Ötillö Catalina this year being his 25th swimrun race. Racing with a varity of partners, his results in swimrun are usually at the top with his teams' efforts earning them the Top Ranked team title in the 2019 US Swimrun Rankings. Although swimrun is his focus these days, he also enjoys adventure races, off-road triathlons and trail running. 

During the interview we decided to name Marcus “Mr. Low Tide Boy” for 2020. Not only has he been super supportive of our show and meme account but he’s opened a bunch of doors for us to be able to get interviews for the show. In all, it was great to hear from Marcus why he loves the sport of swimrun (spoiler alert: the connection with nature) and what he thinks needs to happen to grow the sport in the U.S. the right way.

You can follow Marcus’s adventures at his blog or on facebook.

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.