Going Long Is the Right Move : Swimming: Miller, Rubino are winners in first try at 10-mile race in Seal Beach Rough Water Swim. Shorter races dominated by veterans.

Beginner’s luck reared its head for some, and a handful of veterans relied on repetition to help earn their victories Saturday morning at the 25th Seal Beach Rough Water Swim.

For former Huntington Beach lifeguard Andy Miller and Los Alamitos High graduate Kimberly Rubino, the first time was the sweetest. Both swam to victory in the 10-mile event.

It took Miller 3 hours 13 minutes 34 seconds and Rubino 3:27:50.7 to go from Huntington Beach Pier to Seal Beach Pier in warm but hardly perfect conditions.

Swimmers were delayed almost an hour at the start, scheduled to begin at 6, because of heavy surf that made it impossible for the paddlers--escorts who were required for swimmers in the 10- and three-mile events--to set out to sea.

Once the race started, Miller’s father, Fountain Valley High swim Coach Ray Bray, steered his son in all the right directions.

“The strategy was up to my dad,” said Miller, a firefighter in Alhambra. “He was a lifeguard for 30 years.”

Miller, 34, had won several age-group three-mile Seal Beach races in the past but decided to try the longer distance for the heck of it.

“Just to do something different,” said Miller, who led from pier to pier.

Rubino, winner of three Southern Section team titles at Los Alamitos, had an similarly fuzzy explanation as to why she chose the marathon swim after competing in the three-mile age-group events--she won in 1988--since 1979.

“It seemed like something I wanted to do before I get out of college,” said Rubino, who swims breaststroke and sprint freestyle events at UC Santa Barbara, where she will be a senior. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

Lancaster’s Peter Huisveld, 41, hoped it would be worse. Huisveld, the defending 10-mile champion who made the U.S. Masters’ national team for the first time this year, thrives in rough conditions.

“The more obnoxious it is, the better for me,” said Huisveld, who finished second in 3:14:43.50.

Rubino’s closest competitor was former Mission Viejo Nadadore Eva Zakrzewski, now at Yale, who finished in 3:36:29.99.

In the three-mile race, West L.A.’s Gerry Rodrigues and Encinitas’ Kari Lyderson successfully defended their titles for the third consecutive time. Neither was seriously challenged; in fact, Lyderson, 17, kept an eye on Rodrigues, 30, throughout the race and finished second overall.

Times were not available from race organizers.

“I just tried to follow the men,” said Lyderson, who will attend Northwestern in the fall.

Rodrigues tried to make it a double victory, entering the one-mile later in the day, and would have succeeded had he not veered off course.

“The guy who should have won went the wrong way,” said Pasadena’s Steve Lowe, the overall winner who was in third when Rodrigues and Scott Begi strayed.

Without the aid of a lead paddler, Rodrigues and Begi took a wrong turn at the halfway point.

“We went 250 yards out of the way. That’s a lot to make up in that short of a race,” Rodrigues said.

In the women’s mile, Arcadia’s Natalie Norberg won her fifth title in a row.