u/pseudoeponymous_rex

After lots of pool swimming and occasional swims at the beach I finally did my first competitive open-water swim this weekend. Or, rather, a "competitive" swim, because while the other people there may have been competing I did my 10k in, well, five and a half hours.

I nevertheless enjoyed the experience and would like to do more but the competition part of the experience wasn't to my taste because, as you can tell, I have no business calling myself a competitive swimmer and I hated to inconvenience the people who actually were there to race. (I'm also new to the practice of following a specified route without convenient lane markings, so I swam over 12k to get that 10k distance.) I swim like I do land-based movement--I'm a hiker but not a runner, I bike centuries but my average speed on my gravel bike rarely reaches 13 mph. And I'm old enough (56M) that radically changing my low-performance, medium-high-duration style is unlikely.

With that in mind, does anyone have any suggestions of a good place to do open-water swims that are more like open-water hiking? I would have enjoyed my open-water swim more if I could have spent more time doing the breaststroke and admiring the scenery instead of having to constantly push on to the best of my quote-unquote ability. I'm interested in both swims I could do as a special event on vacation or something nearby I could do on a regular basis, though since I live in Washington DC and don't own a car I doubt there's much going in the latter department. (Searching I found a story about an open-water swim group in National Harbor, Maryland which is fairly convenient to me as the crow flies, but not so much if the crow had to bike or take the bus.)

A question raised by Police Week, naturally. Off the top of my head the two top contenders might be Police Week and the National March for Life.

Police Week

Negatives: Lasts an entire week. Full of drunken louts seizing control of public space and carrying on like those douchebags who parade their ATVs around doing stunts, but even more insulated from legal consequences.

Positives: I'm told a lot of them are big spenders who tip pretty well, at least when they're drunk. (Which they so often are.)

National March for Life

Negatives: The worst litterbugs in America, who leave everything remotely close to the Mall in such a state that Iron Eyes Cody must be rolling in his grave. A bunch of cheapskates, many of whom aggravate this by leaving as tips those novelty religious tracts designed to look from a distance like a big denomination bill.

Positives: Over fairly quickly. Below-average public urination and vomiting for a major scheduled event.

Opinions? Other contenders?

Currently, the description of the subreddit reads "Centralized location for discussions regarding the profiling of unidentified persons in the United States." That may have been accurate at some point, but in just the past three days we've had posts on two Canadian decedents and one French, and non-US posts appear pretty frequently. (And, I think, ought to be encouraged.) Can we expand the description to reflect this subreddit's value to a global audience?