Good Weekend

Dover looking good in the sun

This weekend something amazing happened in Dover Harbour, and I don’t mean the annual Dover Regatta. This was something far more incredible… for the first time the sun was out! This made the weekend far more enjoyable and, psychologically, far easier.

Saturday morning, and the now familiar sound of a 0545 weekend alarm woke me up. This time it didn’t bother me that much at all, as I knew I only had to do a 3 hour swim. The reason for this being we had to be out of the water at 12 o’clock due to a display by the Coast Guard, and a 3 hour swim no longer seemed like a challenge at all. It's made even easier by the fact that we don’t feed until the 2 hour point, leaving us with only one feed. This might not seem to be a factor in making it easier, but it helps to know that once you have eaten, the swim is basically over.

Successful feed

The drive down was uneventful, despite being in a car held together by parcel tape, and we (myself and Angela) actually arrived early. It was a nice change not to have to run directly into the water. I actually had some time to spare to get ready and have a bit of a pre-swim chat. I received words of congratulations for my Windermere swim from several people. It was nice how everybody bothered to find out how I was doing and were genuinely happy for me, the swimming community are some of the nicest people I have had the pleasure to meet.

Lucky pants

I spoke to one of my swimtrek buddies whose Channel window opens in 4 days, so he was on his last Dover session. He has trained remarkably hard and I will have my fingers crossed for him next week. Not that he’ll need it, he is incredibly tough mentally and a very decent swimmer. It will be nice to see the first of our group complete the swim. At the same time it will be nerve racking to start ticking the names off.

Anyway the Saturday swim was not a problem. I covered just under 6km in the first 2 hours, and then shamefully took it quite easy in the third hour. I even stopped for a quick 'tread water chat' and some jelly beans with half an hour to go. Once the 3 hours were up I swam to the start point as fresh as a daisy, knowing that Sunday wouldn’t be so easy.

The hardest part of the day turned out to be trying to navigate Angela back to the car past the hordes of puppies that were visiting the beach for the Regatta. Eventually after several stops and molestations, we managed to get to the car and the day was done.

End of the 6 hour swim

I woke up before my alarm on Sunday, it seemed I was actually quite excited about going swimming. The sun was out and everything looked perfect. I had had a marvellous Saturday night watching David Haye get absolutely destroyed in the boxing, which will hopefully shut him up.  This is doubtful however as he wasn’t particularly graceful in defeat, blaming it on a stubbed toe. I personally completed the ‘P’ company 10 miler with a broken metatarsal as well as an 8 mile warm up run the day before. I assure you I am not bigging myself up, as my foot didn’t hurt at all during the event due to adrenalin. I am merely mocking 'The Hayemaker' and his lame excuse for his loss. The chances are he broke his toe whilst diving to the floor over and over again during the fight.

Anyway back to Sunday… the sun was shining and I was almost looking forward to going to Dover. This is a very rare feeling for me, I always dread it. I knew it was going to be a long swim today, and I also knew the water still hadn’t warmed up at all. I saw Freda and was told I would be swimming for 6 hours, I was actually expecting 7, so strangely 6 hours seemed like a bonus.

After getting greased up I began the long walk to the water, it’s not actually a long distance but it takes a long time to cover the 20 metres or so. There’s the odd person who runs to the water and jumps in, but most of us normal people trudge down the pebbles at a snail's pace, a particularly slow, lazy snail. The tide was quite far out which made it even worse, as you could walk quite a long way out into the water before having to submerge. I promised to myself to jump in on 3 and I began to count, after completing the 3 count about 6 times, I managed to dive in and start the days swim.

The first 2 hours of the swim were fine, I didn’t have a single negative thought, and this managed to carry on for pretty much the entire day. Bizarrely I had the song ‘Maneater’ by Hall and Oates stuck in my head. I honestly cannot remember the last time I heard this song, but I heard the line ‘ooo-ooooh here she comes, watch out boy’s she’ll chew you up’ about 1,000 times over the course of the swim.

Post swim Jelly babies

As I returned to the shore for each feed I never even considered getting out, and I didn’t really shiver that much. I still shivered, as is my trademark, but nothing like I was accustomed to. Over the course of the 6 hours I managed to cover just under 10 miles. Although I hope to be a lot faster on the actual day, I was quite pleased with this. It’s very easy to swim slowly when doing lengths in the harbour.

At the end of the swim we got to watch some of the Regatta, including the ‘Pirate Bears’. These were absolutely massive dogs, Newfoundlands, who were demonstrating their ability to drag people and boats out of the water. It was pretty impressive.

Big dribbling dogs - they were incredible

All in all it was my most successful weekend in Dover. Next weekend I have a stag-do in Ibiza, the perfect training break, which will hopefully not undo all my work so far…