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).
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| 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 5th 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.
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| 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:
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