First Waves

Hello peeps!

So we had our first team ocean water swim today. After many adventures of Caryn trying to find a wetsuit, we finally found one. None of the women’s sizes fit so she now has a men’s suit. But hey, whatever works right?

Now that we both have suits we decided to take a dip in the ocean. To say that it was an adventure would be a bit of an understatement. We did our first workout in the pool, had a snack then decided to find some open-ish water. First of all, for those of you that have never put on a swimming wetsuit before, it is a workout in itself! Many a weird poses were struck. After that we finally entered the water… man was it chilly! We managed to last about an hour, before Caryn (being the ginger that she is) started to burn. The worst part was probably the water trickling slowly into all of the spaces in the wet suit. It’s almost easier if you can jump in and just get cold all at once. Unfortunately that’s not really how it works with a wetsuit. After that weird form of water torture was over, it wasn’t too bad. After about 10 minutes we were almost fully acclimatized to the water. We did a loop of Esquimalt Lagoon (not the cleanest water, but better than nothing). I think we probably drank a fair amount of sea water, which also unfortunately included a lot of goose poop…but our swim also included a lot of laughs which made up for it. (We may have spent more time laughing at each other than actually swimming.)

Before

After

Tomorrow we have another dip in the ocean, hopefully it will go equally as well. It was a bit choppy today, but that was probably good practice for the actual swim. The ocean swim will be after a 10km pool adventure… which will be tiring but I’m sure we’ll be happy we did it when we’re swimming in the Strait!

Check back for another blog post to see if we survive tomorrow! 

Fundraising Time!

Hi friends,

As the swim date nears we are hitting the water hard for the next couple of weeks. Literally 6 hours a day… We eat all of the food. All the time. But we’re getting pretty excited! We have a good plan to keep us on course during the swim and we’ve started planning some more fundraising events. We’re hoping to have a booth with t-shirts and baked goodies at Uptown Mall (Victoria) next week. Still in the works but we’ll keep updating as we figure it out. We are also hoping to head to Vancouver for a fundraiser hosted my Amarose Events sometime either before or after the swim. Thank-you to the lovely ladies at Amarose for the support, we really appreciate it!  In case you want to check them out here is their facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/AmaroseEvents

Enjoy the weekend, and you know where we’ll be (hint: it involves water)! Until next time,

Caryn

Time to travel...

Kaylynn and I are meeting in BC later this week. Exciting stuff! I’m flying home from Ontario on Tuesday, and Kaylynn is driving from Calgary to BC on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to getting in the ocean water later this week, although it’s going to be mighty chilly. Still looking for a wetsuit… hopefully I will have one in hand soon. Kaylynn has done her first open water swim session… let’s just say it’s going to be an adventure trying to stay in the water for over 8 hours in July! We have time to get adjusted to the open water, but it’s going to be a chilly swim!

Thank-you to everyone who has donated so far to the cause through the Canadian Cancer Society and through Indiegogo! We really appreciate it. We’re still trying to come up with more fundraising ideas. I’m hoping to have a booth set up in one of the malls in Victoria for when we’re not swimming or eating or sleeping. Hopefully we can get t-shirts or something, and who knows… There may even be free food!

Free food = best

Next time we blog it will be from Victoria – can’t wait!

Caryn

June Update!

Wow, I can’t believe its June already. Time is flying by! My training is ramping up leading to when Kaylynn and I are going to meet in Victoria to start training in open water. My search for a good wet suit continues. I’ve found a few good ones, I’m just nervous to commit to one….

E-bay does have some decent deals... still can't commit to it.

They’re just so expensive

Oh, student budgets....

Kaylynn and I both arrive in Victoria June 24^th, so we’ll hopefully be able to get into open water swimming right away. Kaylynn flies back to Canada on June 10th I believe. Safe travels!!

I’ve been trying to set up our Indiegogo account, finally got it up and running yesterday! For anyone who doesn’t know what Indiegogo is (I didn’t): it’s a sort of crowdsourcing fundraising website where you can help raise money for your fundraiser. In our case, we obviously want people to donate to the cause through the Canadian Cancer Society. However, we need funds for the actual event itself. We need money for fuel, wetsuits and lifesaving equipment. All of these things are expensive and although we have a lot of people willing to donate their time like our lovely yacht Captain and our Lifeguards/paramedic friends, we can’t ask them to pay out of pocket for all of the equipment they need to help us. Indiegogo should be able to help us with these expenses.

The catch to this Indiegogo business is that you need a bank account to put it into, so I went to TD to open a non-profit business account. TD was wonderful and very helpful, but it took about 5 days to activate the account. I felt really important after I set up the account though - I'm the Chairperson. Probably the first and last time I will ever get to say those words! After that, you need to register for either credit card payments or paypal payments (or both). In order to open a paypal account, you need the bank account. In order to set up the paypal account with the Indiegogo page, the paypal account needs to be verified. I thought this process would take a week, maybe 7 business days. Unfortunately I was wrong a vastly underestimated the complexity of this process. I'm happy to report that I managed to get it up and running with minimal blood, sweat, and tears! Hopefully we can start getting some funds to help with our expenses.

Speaking of next week, it’s my convocation! Hurray!

Although hopefully I'm not like Sean Bean, because he dies in everything.

Looking forward to it. Going to be tricky balancing hours of swimming and weight training with family time, eating, sleeping and celebrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I can rely on my usual strategy

Not ALWAYS how I roll... but sometimes. My time-management strategy is a work in progress.

Until next time,

Caryn

Indiegogo!

Just launched our Indiegogo page, check it out! Funds raised through this campaign will help with the costs of the event, and anything left over will be donated directly to the Canadian Cancer Society.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/waves-for-women/