Ötillö Catalina Course Preview w/ The Swimrun Monks

<p>Welcome to episode five of the <a href="https://lowtideboyz.com/">Low Tide Boyz, a swimrun Podcast</a>!</p><p>On this week’s show we chat with the San Diego-based swimrun team Sean and Phillip A.K.A., The Swimrun Monks. </p><p>But first…we wanted to thank everyone that’s been listening to the show and reaching out with questions and feedback. It has been great to see and even though there are people way more experienced than us we’ll keep trying to answer everyone’s questions. We also wanted to give a special shout out to Pepe And Florian from Sweden for being fans of the show and basically becoming our unofficial Swedish pronunciation coaches and meme suggesters.</p><p>We’ve hit some adversity in training with our collective kids being sick and Chris traveling for work but we’re still getting some good training in. We finally got in a swimrun practice in Aquatic Park in San Francisco which was fun. We practiced transitions and swimming with a tether, which is always good to do before race day on <a href="https://otilloswimrun.com/races/catalina/">Otillio Catalina</a>. </p><p>Speaking of Catalina, our guests on the show today helped design the course with the race directors. The Swimrun Monks, Sean and Phillip are pretty bad ass athletes in their own rights and came together in 2019 to race together. Both had interesting journeys to get to Swimrun and were introduced to the sport by Andy Hewitt and Sean Durkin. They raced the <a href="https://otilloswimrun.com/races/otillo/">Ötillö World Championship</a> in 2019 and have a stacked race schedule in 2020 as they gear up to hopefully race the World Championship again.</p><p>The Monks talked about what Ötillö races are like in Europe and how big of a deal it was that they were coming to the United States to put on their first event in Catalina. They also helped Andy Hewitt to design the race course and even put in an 11 hour “training day” when they went from Two Harbors to Avalon to see if that was possible. The official race course will start and end in Two Harb