Total Distance: 108k
Days until swim: 59
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I enjoy swimming. After five hours in the sea, that reminder starts to echo round my head like I’m wishing Tinkerbell into existence (I do like swimming, I do like swimming). I had to remind myself particularly often in June, over a month of long swims and mental challenges. The novelty of sea swimming had largely worn off (bar the occasional wildlife spotting!) and I found myself facing more swimming than I’d ever tackled before, without the excitement of the big swim itself for another three months.
I found myself in a bit of a slump. I was feeling tired thinking about swims the day before, and apprehensive before swims that, on paper, were well within my wheelhouse. I noticed I was slipping into negative patterns of thinking about swimming speed and how I felt: if I was slow or hurting in ways I hadn’t anticipated, then something must have gone wrong in the way I was setting or completing training. But if things were going well then I wouldn’t let myself enjoy that feeling – it was simply a sign that training was ‘ok’ (nothing more) and I’d force myself to try to replicate that feeling every other day. Looking back, its clear why I wasn’t enjoying swimming. I was putting myself through all the hard work without enjoying any of the pay-off. It didn’t help that, before lockdown cancellations, this month’s writeup should have been full of stories from races and events I’d signed up to.
Some inspiration came in the form of a late birthday present: a pre-ordered copy of The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgeley. Ross won the ‘world swim of the year’ in 2018 for his epic 157-day swim ‘Great British Swim’ around the UK
. This book was the story of that swim, broken up with gobbets of sports science and selected stories of other endurance athletes. There was plenty to be motivated and impressed by (Ross and I share a set of buoyancy-assisting, ‘childbearing hips’ if nothing else), but I particularly enjoyed meeting the cast of adventurer-athletes Edgeley assembles over the book: from Shackleton and Webb, to the Nandi tribe, responsible for a host of unstoppable runners, including Eliud Kipchoge. We also share an admiration for long distance runner Emil Zatopek, whom I’ve mentioned in previous months and who’s advice ultimately helped me find a way round to think about my swimming more positively.
When I first started training in the pool back in January, one of the questions at the front of my mind was how to pace a Channel swim. Is pacing even a concept that still holds water (forgive me) after you’ve been swimming for ten hours? Searching for ideas and plans I came across another legendary, doggedly aggressive runner, Steve Prefontaine, and this gem of pain merchantry: ‘The only good pace is a suicide pace, and today is a good day to die.’ He probably never said it and (take it from me) a suicide pace is not the only pace for a five-hour swim – it’s not a remotely good one either. Zatopek, on the other hand, actually did say something (maybe) that sounds similar. But to me it means something quite different. Zatopek’s was the most succinct of pacing strategies: ‘when it hurts, go faster’.
To me, Zatopek’s understanding of endurance is less about being tough and gritting your teeth through pain, and more about the realisation that often it’s not as bad as you think. My fears of going too fast, feeling too tired and hurting too much were looming larger in my head that the discomfort of actually swimming through pain. Which isn’t to say I’d broken through to a magical world where I could roll out of bed, eat a snickers and swim for six hours and it doesn’t hurt. I had just learnt to take on one swim at a time and listen to how I was feeling a little more, regardless of how I ought to feel within an intimidating 18-month project. Once I started to let myself off the hook a little, I found I was enjoying swims much more. Armed with a newfound enthusiasm, it was time to tackle my most important swim so far.
In order to qualify for a solo Channel swim, the Channel Swimming Association asks that swimmers complete a six-hour swim in water 15.5 degrees Celsius, or colder. With the sea getting warmer, time was running out to get that signed off, so Dad and I headed to the beach off Bournemouth to find a long, straight stretch of water. For this swim Dad was both support boat and referee, with a thermometer in the kayak to check the water was cold enough every couple of hours. If it was too warm, the CSA require that you swim an extra hour. Not fun.
Starting off from just outside the mouth of Poole harbour towards Bournemouth pier, I settled into a steady (not to say, plodding) rhythm. As I moved over the sand, patterns of lines and rivulets helped me find a straight line. After half an hour I saw Dad get out the thermometer, so I started breathing every two strokes to get a better look at his reaction. Was it good news? Dad’s eyes returned to the horizon. Was he calculating how much longer the swim would be, or looking for more helicopters? Another thirty minutes later, the thermometer was back in the water and I began to worry. The plan was very much ‘it only needs to be cold enough once.’ After that, I noticed Dad was directing us deeper and the lines beneath me started to fade into a bottle-green cloud. Two hours came around and it was time for a quick chat after my first feed. I looked up at Dad:
‘So?’
‘How cold is it supposed to be?’ Uh oh.
‘How cold is it?’
‘16.3’
‘Right’
‘Seven hours’
‘…Fine.’
We had only brought enough feed for six hours, so it was time to do some improvising. Luckily, there wasn’t much else to think about for the next hour (or five). With a new plan in place, I had the next four hours to enjoy as the sand reappeared and disappeared, its patterned lines starting to look more like the café wall optical illusion than a helpful lane line. The first few hours are always the hardest and before long time was passing quite quickly. One thing I learnt during this swim was how pain comes and goes. At times it felt as if six different muscles had pinged off the bones in my back and I would never be able to swim again. But, sure enough, half an hour later that soreness was forgotten – if only to be replaced by another.
I remember reaching Boscombe pier after three hours and hearing a roaring sound. Inadvertently, Dad and I chose a day for this swim which made the news that evening. The roaring was coming from the beach, hundreds of meters away, and the swarming crowds there. It was a different world to the calm water beneath me, where knuckled spider crabs sat in silence and schools of whitebait flickered just out of sync with each other like amorphous disco balls.
I found myself thinking back to last summer, when I started down the rabbit-hole of ‘blue’ books. One of the first I came across (via the ‘water’ section of Robert McFarlane’s suggested reading in Wild Places) was Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell. Maxwell writes from Camusfearna and a secluded isolation of Scottish wilderness about his burgeoning relationship with his pet otter, Mijbil. I call it a relationship quite literally, because in the course of the book Maxwell realises he loves Mij the otter more than he has ever loved a human being. Reading this for the first time, Ring of Bright Water seemed to be at least in part a book about a type of masculinity that struggles to articulate affection – a masculinity that crops up a lot in the gruffest clichés of male nature writing.
On the day of my qualification swim, Dad and I were a part of the beach crowds, so it’s beyond us to be disparaging (very ‘you’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic’). But moving from a quiet underwater world to the car park – where a fight was breaking out after someone ran over someone else’s disposable barbeque – I was reminded of Maxwell’s affinity for a world that doesn’t have humans at its centre. Not far from where I swim in Dorset a dolphin recently washed up on the beach; it had been stabbed to death, likely after finding itself the unlucky bycatch of industrial fishing. On another beach down the coast, lifeguards had been called a few days before to protect a confused seal from rocks people were throwing at it. Swimming for just so many hours at a time, I’m a privileged tourist to the smallest slice of life in the sea. Even then, the scale of immeasurable beauty under the water is so wildly disproportionate to the mindlessness of violence committed against our oceans.
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