The Wall

This week, for the first time, I have broken the 50km barrier. Nearly 32 miles of swimming. It has been a tough time, but actually hasn’t been as hideous as I would have expected it to be. 34km have been in the pool, and nearly 17km at Dover. I also completed 7 hours in the sea, so it has been a week of firsts.

The pool swimming has involved a lot of sprinting and some long aerobic warm-ups. I have managed to get a new P.B. in pretty much every distance I have attempted, still not amazing times but not too shabby. Better than the celebrities that are attempting to cross the Irish sea in September anyway, in ‘the SWIM’. 

My thoughts on this are very mixed, it’s obviously good that they are trying to raise so much money for Cancer research, but the way they have gone about it has been almost farcical. Jenny Frost for example is currently learning to do front crawl in Ibiza, and Ronan Keating has confessed to hating swimming. This is an excellent attitude which I’m sure will not encourage anybody else into the sport. They are getting some excellent swimmers involved, who I'm guessing are going to end up doing the majority of the work.

Also don't fool yourself into thinking that this is a hard challenge, if it were a hard challenge then people would be required to swim far further than the 3km's they are asking for in the trials. Good luck to everyone who attempts it, but there are far greater challenges out there that deserve far more recognition. When I see the amount of graft people put in every weekend at Dover and struggle to raise sponsorship, it's frustrating to me how willing people are to sponsor 'celebrities'.

Anyway who cares about celebrities? The whole celebrity culture is ridiculous, and it’s nobody’s fault but our own. Why do we want to read about these people’s lives all the time? Who cares? On the same day that many innocent people were murdered in Norway, Amy Winehouse is top news, an average singer with a drug habit. This is surely not right, but this is the world in which we currently live. This is nothing against her, although I don't think she should be revered as a great, but it really needs to be put into perspective.

Again who cares about celebrities? let’s talk about swimming. That’s far more interesting I’m sure...

Perfect conditions (minus the Sun). What a difference a week makes

Simon, Angela and myself arrived at Dover harbour early this week, which was an absolute pleasure. We had time to get everything sorted, and be truly ready to get into the sea. The weather was not too bad and the water was delightfully calm. The sun was occasionally poking through the clouds, but only very occasionally. After my beast in the pool this week I knew I still had a big swim ahead of me. I thought it may be 8 hours but Freda instead prescribed me 7. To be fair I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two (until I do an 8 hour next week).

Simon suggested we swim together and I accepted, quite reluctantly as I don’t mind swimming on my own, but it turned out to be the right decision. We set off at a very decent pace and managed to keep it up for the majority of the swim – Simon kept it up for the whole of the swim. I faded badly in the last 90 minutes, again hunger struck me massively.

The first 2 hours of the swim were an absolute pleasure, although I feel the cold a lot more when there is no sun shining on me. This makes such a difference it's unreal. When the sun is out I am happy and loving life, but as soon as it drifts behind a cloud I slowly become a mess. Fingers crossed for a sunny day for me in August.

Towards the end of these 2 hours we had managed to swim far too far out to sea and were near the end of the harbour wall, so we decided to swim back towards the shore. This was when I hit the wall, not the metaphorical wall, the actual wall. I smashed my hand against the corrugated iron after drifting to the left and managed to cut my wrist open. This was a very unfortunate thing to do so early in a 7 hour swim.

My horrific injury. Many men fainted upon seeing this

When we arrived for our first scheduled feed I had quite a lot of blood seeping out of my hand, it looked pretty cool to be fair. The bleeding soon stopped when I started swimming again, the cold water made sure of that. Every time I came into feed from that point onwards though, all the blood came back to the surface and it looked worse and worse. There’s nothing better than a wound that doesn’t hurt that much but looks bad, it’s very good for street cred.

At the 5 hour point I really wanted to get out of the water, I was starving. The milky ways are just not satisfying my hunger. From now on I will be taking down some sandwiches to eat when I come to shore, I have been told to do this already but constantly forget (sorry Cameron). The good news is that, hunger aside, I had no real problems. The bad news is the hunger was unbelievable and it really, really affected me.

I only covered around 3km in the last 2 hours, which was a shame as me and Simon were going really well for 5 hours. I was so weak and feeble and constantly thinking about eating. Nutrition is so important it cannot be emphasised enough. Especially for me, I’m a big fan of eating even if I’m not doing anything.

By the end of the swim I was very happy to be getting out of the water, but I was happier to have stayed in for the whole time. There were many times towards the end where I was very tempted to get out and eat everything in sight.

There are just 26 days to go now until my Channel window opens. I’m guessing I'll have one more major weekend in Dover with big back to back sessions, followed by a little taper. Then I will have the main event. 

It’s been a hard year so far in the Channel with a fair few excellent swimmers being pulled out of the water. I won’t be one of them… (please!)