Welcome to Gear Talk! As always, this show is co-hosted by our friends Annie and Brooke from Swimrun Labs.In this installment of Gear Talk, we review one of the hottest new pieces of Swimrun Tech on the market: Frank Paddle’s carbon fiber swim paddles. The founder of Frank Paddle, Fredrik Bengtsson, was cool enough to send us a medium and a large pair of paddles to check out and--spoiler alert--we’re super stoked on them. You can learn more about Fredrik and Frank Paddle on Episode 50 of the podcast.But first, we have an untethered thought submission by our friend (and previous guest on the podcast way back in Episode 18) Marcus Barton blew our collective minds.New Gear First ImpressionsWe have a couple of new items to discuss this week. Swimrun superstar Trista Mennen mailed Brooke her KORP suit that is a size small for her to check it out. We’ll report back.Chipper tried LMNT hydration after hearing that friend of the show, Adam Skolnick, had tried it during his recent feat of endurance. LMNT has some pretty cool flavors and Chipper has been digging it.Will Watt from Above Below recently sent us one of their super popular RuckRafts to test for the show. We are super stoked to check it out in open water soon. The RuckRaft is an inflatable raft that comes with a built in dry bag to tow pretty much anything across the water. This thing looks perfect for a true Swimrun adventure. Stay tuned for a full review of the RuckRaft coming soon.Untethered ThoughtsMarcus reached out to us in response to our last Gear Talk show where we reviewed the Ark Sports KORP wetsuit. He mentioned his thoughts on what the back zipper pocket was for after hearing us go on and on about how we thought the placement was weird. Essentially, the zipper is for your partner to easily access, not yourself. You carry your partner’s nutrition or what have you and they carry yours. Not only does this make a ton of sense, it’s also totally in the spirit of the partner aspect of Swimrun. We then go philosophical for a bit...We collectively loved Marcus’s reasoning so thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. You can learn more from Marcus on his website.Tethered ThoughtsWe wanted to remind everyone of the new Swimrun Swap Meet forum on FB. This is a forum for people that are looking for Swimrun gear to buy, sell or trade. So if anyone got one of the KORP suits on faith but the sizing didn’t work out, we have a place for you to try to trade it. Join the Swimrun Swap Meet today! Frank Paddle Gear ReviewThese paddles are the original carbon fiber swim paddles. Fredrik’s story is a great one and it’s hard not to root for Frank Paddle as a company. These paddles are essentially made by hand and a lot of thought and experimenting went into creating these. You can check out Episode 50 to get the whole story.We were sent the following size paddles:M: length: 21.5cm, width: 19cmL: length: 23.5cm, width: 20.5cmSince we only had one set of each, Chris sent his Large paddles to Brooke to test and Chipper sent his Medium paddles to Annie.So they look cool, they are super light and really stiff. Now, do they work?Swimming ImpressionsFrank Paddle is something completely different. They feel super light and it was a different swimming experience due to the stiffness of them and how much water was being moved. The only way to get to how they perform was to test them.Brooke tested the paddles (with the caveat that the Frank Paddles are larger than the ones that she normally uses) and was about 2 seconds faster per 100yd even though her stroke rate went down noticeably. Over a longer distance, she did two 1-mile (1,650yd) swims, one with her normal synergy paddles and one with the Frank Paddles. In that test the Frank Paddles were almost 2 minutes faster than the regular paddles. Shoulder fatigue was enhanced using the Frank Paddles. Brooke wasn’t a fan of the paracord attachment.Chris saw similar speed improvements to Brooke, albeit less scientific. The feel of the water was ver