Just a Quicky

I have had to put this advert on here as I love it. Truly brilliant.

    

In other news I got over my miserableness and may well be swimming on Thursday! Just awaiting the phonecall.

Exciting times....

Decision Time - Rated 18

The following post is incredibly miserable and should not be read by anybody with suicidal tendencies; those that do read on may well have suicidal tendencies by the end. So I would advise against anybody continuing. I can only apologise, but I take no responsibility for you reading on…

My current state of mind

I have after much thought come to the conclusion that I may well have to cancel my attempt at the Channel. This is not a decision that I have just made over night; it’s just basic common sense.

It turns out after 2 years of training I am a crap swimmer.

When I am accused of being weak I will take it on the chin. The fact of the matter is I have swam over 1.3million metres in the last 2 years, over 280,000m’s of that has been in Dover harbour. That disgusts me just writing it. Over a quarter of a million metres in Dover harbour. Despite all this I still cannot get my head around the Channel. It has completely and utterly broken me.

I have destroyed any kind of fitness I had, going from 14stone with around 10% body fat, to 13st 10lb probably around 30% body fat. I am feeble. This is not a sport in which to get fit.

I spend every week dreading the weekend, then when it comes I generally don’t complete whatever swim I am given and then feel terrible. So basically I feel bad all the time.

Don’t get me wrong I have never been the most happy go lucky man on the planet. I would never successfully audition for Jedward, or be invited to hang around with Alan Carr (both of which I would sooner tear my eyes out than do, so I don't mind) but I am naturally a reasonably happy chap. The misery I have become is something else.

My typical Saturday/Sunday goes like this:

Wake up 6am, struggle to eat breakfast, and usually fail halfway through. I then proceed to gag for 15 minutes through extreme anxiety. I say goodbye to my girlfriend who is still tucked up in bed, fair enough it’s still not even 7o’clock on a weekend morning, then get in the car and drive to Dover.

The drive is horrible, as I become more and more anxious all the way. I want to turn around and go home at pretty much every single junction, I begin praying for some kind of major road incident giving me a reason to head home. If the weather is good, then it gradually deteriorates as I get closer, if the weather is bad, it gradually deteriorates.

My favourite quote of the moment is

“I have found lately that if you can see France it is going to rain, and if you can not see France it is raining.” Eric Hartley

By the time I arrive at Dover I have my first good bit of the day when I see everyone. Everybody has the same haunted look on their face, apart from 1 or 2 who claim to love it and feel everyone should know, although I’m pretty sure they don’t.

This does not feel good.

After checking in and getting a number you are told how long you are going to be in the brown piece of salty spew behind you. This is about the time I start dreaming of a dislocated shoulder, or a severed head. Then I queue up to be covered in Vaseline, I enjoy this bit.

After a quick brief from Freda (a genuine super hero who I constantly disappoint), we hobble down the pebbled beach before slowly immersing ourselves in our freezing home for anything up to 7 hours. This is depressing.

25-30minutes later I am swamped with thoughts and excuses to get out and they stay with me until the 2 hour feed. At this point I stare blankly ahead whilst drinking my beaker of Maxim before turning round and once again heading to the harbour wall.

I hate myself for the next hour.

On the 3 hour feed I have my ultimate test. I know if I head back out after this feed I will generally complete the swim, however turning round at this point is so much harder than it would appear. I have failed at this point more times than I care to remember, as have many others.

When I do head back out to sea I feel good for about 5 minutes, before having an almost unbelievable urge to cry. I am yet to actually cry at this point but it is definitely getting closer. Instead of crying I swear very loudly between every breath, I’m not sure if this helps but the urge eventually goes away. Once this urge has passed I just drift through the rest of the swim, completely numb and reaching acceptance that the majority of my day is going to be spent somewhere that I hate, doing something that I am also slowly learning to hate.

This is a sport that makes you feel like a complete and utter loser if you only complete 4 hours in freezing cold water, outrageous. It’s like feeling like a failure if you complete a marathon in under 3 and a half hours, I know this and yet I feel like this.

When I do complete a swim I do admittedly feel good, but I’m not sure that feeling out-weighs how absolutely horrendous I feel when I don’t complete a swim. That feeling is one that stays with me throughout the entire week.

In short I am unsure that I want to continue putting myself through this, for what seems to me at present, an impossible feat. I am constantly told how I have to believe that I will complete this swim, I cannot believe it. All I want to do is curl up in a ball and for it to be over. I admit to being completely broken.

To all those that have completed this challenge, I take my hat off to you. You are genuinely amazing. More so the people that aren’t world-class swimmers, just regular people who seem to be made of steel. The Channel is something that is very easy to under-estimate since David Walliams swam across it, and lots of people now think they could do it.

People often say to me that they could swim all day – NO YOU COULDN’T!, it is a complete, and excuse my language here, head-f**k. The only people I will accept this statement from are Kevin Murphy, Alison Streeter, Penny Palfrey, Dianna Nyad, Steve Redmond, Jackie Cobell and Nick Adams. There are undoubtedly others but these people make me feel incredibly humbled by what they have achieved.

Anyway undoubtedly I’ll head down to Dover again next weekend full of shame and apprehension, as I am too scared and disgusted with myself to cancel my swim. I will once again go through the motions, wishing my life away, and letting everyone down.

I genuinely apologise for this being such a morbid and horrendous post, but there are plenty of swimming blogs out there full of joy and record breaking swims, the niche I am looking to fill is the 'complete and utter despair' swimming market. I assume there is a market for this?

Another reason for writing this is for the swimmers out there who think they are the only people that feel like this, I absolutely guarantee you that you are not. People don’t like to talk about it as it brings them down, which is fair enough, however due to this everybody thinks everybody else is fine and breezing through their swims. They are not, they are suffering just as much as you, they just keep going.

If by some miracle I do get to France (increasingly highly unlikely) then it will the greatest achievement of my life, no doubt about it. I’m really not sure it will have been worth the 2 years of absolute hell though.

I may never find out…

Trials and Tribulations

I have deliberately not written anything on here for a while, as I was determined to get a positive weekend in at Dover first, as nobody likes reading depressing negativeness all the time. This has taken a bit longer than I envisaged.

Since Dover training begun I have basically gone from pretty confident and loving life, to once again falling into a pit of self-hatred and despair. This has nothing to do with Dover, as a place it’s not too horrific. The people on the beach are brilliant, and if you squint until your eyes are almost completely shut, it is beautiful. No, the problems once again lie within my pathetically weak mind.

Once again my head has decided to smash me to pieces, I cannot beat myself it would appear. I have done a fair bit of mind training and can talk very positively about the swim and about my chances, but as soon as I see the pebbles in the harbour my insides drop out (quite literally on Saturday when I had to stop swimming after 2 hours due to explosive diarrhoea).

The queue for vaseline. Channel swimming is not all glitz and glamour, not at all in fact...

Some of you probably think you didn’t need to know that last bit, and I would agree you did not need to know that, but if you are ever thinking about swimming to France you do need to know that this sort of stuff happens. Yes, despite the photos on here where we all look so stunning, Channel swimming is in fact not that glamorous.  

Other lovely stuff has happened too. I experienced my first sober projectile vomit shortly after my first maxim feed, and when I say projectile I mean it. Whilst treading water I would make a guess that the consumed Maxim left my body and entered the water around 10 feet away from me. It sprayed from my mouth as though it was leaving the blow hole of a blue whale, before making that satisfactory sound of vomit on water and leaving on the back of a passer by.

This of course made me laugh a lot, but it quickly turned into self-pity and made the next hour of the swim a miserable experience. To be fair it’s always a pretty miserable experience.

I also experienced cramp. Cramp so debilitating that I was genuinely concerned for my life. Treading water with a calf that is as solid as a particularly hard rock is not easy, swimming with that calf is even harder. I did at one point look to the beach and quietly, under my breath, mutter the word ‘Help!’, then I just swam in. That cramp lasted for approximately 11 days, until it eventually worked it’s way into the ball of my foot where it still presides to this day (around 4 weeks now).

On another weekend I completed 5 hours in slightly worse conditions than the perfect storm, the next day I again completed 5 hours, this time the conditions were ever so slightly worse. In my 5^th hour of the second day I decided at my current pace I was just going to make it to the far wall of the harbour and back, barely any distance. This turned out to be optimistic, and as my watch reached 4hrs and 30mins I had just about touched the wall. ‘Crap’ I thought/shouted and proceeded to swim the distance back, this time against the tide. Somehow when you know you’re going to finish you swim a lot faster and I was back at the feeding point at 5 hours and 8mins.

The face of a broken man

8 minutes that I will never get back.

The thing to remember when you are swimming in this place is that everyone feels the same, despite the fact that they all look as though they are loving life. They are all slowly dying inside, apart from the odd Australian who is genuinely loving life.

I usually begin my mind implosion at around the 25 minute point, which is absolute hell. I repeatedly tell myself I cannot go on and that I am a terrible swimmer/person. Luckily I have learned to control it, and usually feel ever so slightly better again within 3 days. My mind is a horrible place when it is encased in a cold skull and staring into the brown depths of Dover harbour.

Anyway as I said nobody likes reading negative stuff all the time, so I found this website:

http://www.happynews.com/