Water temperature in San Francisco Bay at the moment is in the low 50’s which is too cold for me to be doing distance sets. I’ve pretty much abandoned all my open water training in favor of pool sets as I try and ramp up for the Rottnest Channel swim in February.

I’ve found that doing longer sets (~2 hours or more) in pools often results in a horrible runny nose for a day or so after the swim. The actual threshold that induces this condition varies from pool to pool; but equally unpleasant in any case.

A simple bing search did lead me to the remarkably simple solution: a nose clip.

My Friday swim (2 hours) was without a clip and resulted in the nasal drip, my Saturday swim (also 2 hours) and Sunday (3 1/2 hours) were done with the nose clip and resulted in no runny nose.

Only downside is that is slightly harder to chug a feed when you can’t breathe through your nose, but in my pool swims I’m not so worried about that aspect of things.