...Windermere: Part I - The Longest Journey

On the 26^th June 2010, I swam my first ever open water mile. I was in a wetsuit, in the Thames, and it took me 38 minutes. 364 days later I was going to attempt to swim Lake Windermere, the longest lake in England at 10.5 miles.

The following Windermere blog is a trilogy. Although in 3 parts and starring a strange hobbit-like creature (me), it has no association with the Lord of the Rings. If by any chance any relatives of J.R.R. Tolkien read this, please do not sue. It would be nothing but spiteful.

The longest lake in England

Anyway, the story begins on the 24^th June, my birthday eve. The weather was looking nice and I had just received a very nice birthday present from the lovely Clare. It was a sat-nav and pretty much guaranteed a stress free trip to the Lake District. I had already picked up a rent-a-car after losing faith in the Saxo for some reason or other, and as luck would have it managed to get a VW Golf. The car was loaded with my amazing swim box and Clare’s 3 separate bags of clothes (bare in mind we were going away for 2 and a bit days), and our trip began. This is about the moment we plummeted into a massive journey of hell.

I reached the end of my road, literally 2 minutes from the house, and immediately disagreed with the sat-nav. After deciding I obviously knew better, being a man (the sat-nav has a woman’s voice, I couldn’t possibly take directions from her), I took us off on a route towards the M25. Upon reaching the junction for the M25 I suddenly realised that I was in fact horribly wrong. After embarrassingly apologising to the lady on the sat-nav I followed her directions – unfortunately it was already too late, we were stuck in London.

2 hours and many, many traffic jams later we finally got out of London… 2 hours! Luckily I had remained super calm throughout and managed not to lose my temper at all. I may have lost it a little for a brief moment, or possibly massively for the entire time (I’m sorry Clare).

Must trust the sat-nav

The next pressing issue was the fact that I believed we had to be at Lake Windermere before 1730hrs. This was to pick up the boat that would accompany me on the swim the following morning. I was also meant to be picking up Tom and Rachel, who were going to crew it, from Lancaster train station. It was still possible to make it on time but it was going to be tight. Luckily the M6 was pretty clear, apart from the thousands upon thousands of static vehicles. I HATE TRAFFIC!

After a few telephone conversations and texts with Tom, the new plan was for them to go straight to Tom’s mothers house (our base point for the weekend) and for us to meet them there after picking up the boat keys. Now we just had to work out how to make the Golf travel back in time, or alternatively break the speed of sound, and get to Shepherds boat hire in the next 30 minutes. After searching frantically, and in vain, for the flux capacitor it looked like we were going to fail to get the boat. This would have a domino effect on the swim, as we would have to start a lot later than originally planned the following day thus finishing later and missing the planned birthday meal.

Suddenly Clare had what can only be described as a brain wave, you could almost see the light bulb above her head – why not phone the boat place and ask what time they close, rather than just guess? It turned out they closed at half 7 and we still had plenty of time. I almost wish we had phoned straight away.

Our boat 'Karen'

To cut an unnecessarily long story short(ish) we arrived at Windermere at 1845hrs and picked up our magnificent vehicle for the next day. It was actually a pretty cool boat, a lot better than I was expecting and everything felt better. We had our briefing on how to use the boat, how to navigate the lake, and what all the different coloured buoys meant, asked any questions that were bugging us and were sorted.

It turned out that another chap was having a crack at swimming the whole length the next morning as well, and was starting at the same time as me. This was good news, as it’s always nice to have some idea how you’re doing compared to somebody else, plus there was absolutely no chance of starting or finishing at the wrong points as the other fellow was a seasoned swimmer and this was his second attempt.

We finally arrived at Tom’s house at just gone 8 o’clock, just 9 hours after leaving London. This was the absolute perfect preparation for the next day’s event. Penny (Tom’s mum) had made an excellent spaghetti bolognese which was exactly what I needed, all I had eaten that day was 4 packets of crisps and a bowl of Sugar Puffs, which I assume is a very similar diet that Paula Radcliffe would follow before her marathons.

After eating and finalising exactly what was going to happen the next day it was bedtime. The alarm was set for 0545 and then I was out cold. The next day was going to be an epic….