Total Distance: 59.2k in 18 swims
Days till crossing: 210
January for me was about getting the ball rolling on a program of consistent weekly training. In and of itself, this is about as exciting as it sounds. So, to those that have occasionally asked how things are going, I haven’t had anything more exciting to say than that I am gradually racking up the lengths, and that my room now smells of chlorine more often than it doesn’t.
It’s the kind of thing I’d been doing with my rowing crew last term, but now self-planned and motivated. For those that are interested this is what a target week looks like:
· 3-4 interval sessions: a mix of 50-400m chunks swum faster than my steady pace, broken up with 10-20s rest, all depending on the session
· 1 longer swim: these started as 30-60min swims and I got a two-hour swim in towards the end of the month. Getting comfortable with 10k swims is a goal for Feb.
· 2-3 land training sessions (either weights, circuits or yoga)
In Cambridge, my go to is Parkside Pools: a bright, modern pool with spectator stands for swim meets to one side, and tall windows out onto Parker’s Piece on the other. Afternoon swims are my favourite (not just for the lie-in) but because the pool gradually gets darker as the sun sets, until the lights suddenly flash on. As nice as it is, any indoor pool still means headaches, sore eyes and a 25m joust with other swimmers in the lane.
I’m not complaining, but each pool session certainly makes the prospect of getting out into open water more exciting. In my eagerness, I took the temperature of the Cam one morning, just upriver of Mill pond, and got a rather brisk reading of 5.4C. According to cold water swimming guru, Donal Buckley, 5C is the temperature at which all but the hardiest start to experience memory loss. I decided to leave off until Spring arrives, but if Donal is right I may have taken the plunge after all and had the memory frozen out of my head!
I had initially thought preparation for the cold could wait until nearer the swim, when temperatures were closer to what I could expect on the day (hopefully 16-18C). But in all of the failed attempts I’ve read/heard of, it’s either cold or injury that causes well prepared swimmers to falter. With that in mind, I started to search for a controlled environment to safely dip my foot (sorry) into cold water swimming.
Parliament Hill Lido is an unheated, open water pool near the Hampstead Heath ponds in North London. It’s 61m long and lined with stainless steel, so that on a bright morning the water is perfectly clear and the sunlight spirals across the pool floor in mesmerising helix patterns. It’s been likened to swimming in an iceberg. Of course, I didn’t notice this on my first swim there. Between the entrance and the changing rooms is a domineering analogue sign: ‘POOL TEMP: 7C’. All I noticed was my Dad with a stopwatch on the poolside telling me I had only been in five minutes after what felt like twenty. I remember the pain being like thousands of tiny pinpricks all over my skin. Stranger still was the soft numbness I felt after a few minutes swimming. It felt like a skin of jelly over my own: a fantasy I was disabused of in the hot showers afterwards, when I burnt much of upper body without feeling a thing.
I'd probably say the first swim was the easiest; now that I know what it feels like, I’ll often start to feel cold on the tube ride over. But I’ve been back since, building up the time and distance each time. My girlfriend Tilly joined once, and described it feeling as though she was swimming through molten metal.
I could hardly compare Parliament Hill Lido to an iceberg without mentioning a real feat of cold water swimming this month. On the 22nd of January, Lewis Pugh swam for ten minutes in a tunnel through an iceberg. He adhered to Channel swimming rules (no more than goggles, swim cap and speedos) in water that was just above 0C and emerged to Antarctic air much colder still. In an interview he says they hadn’t planned for how narrow the tunnel would become – at one point too narrow to swim front crawl instead of an awkward sideways breaststroke. The point of his swim are that these supra-glacial lakes shouldn’t exist (at least not in the number that they now do) and are a result of climate change. These kinds of death-defying athletes are sometimes accused of being egotistical or even suicidal, but I think Lewis has backed up the swim convincingly enough with environmental-diplomatic work in Russia and China. It remains to be seen whether this swim will accomplish any real change, but it has certainly given me less to gripe about in my training.
A few thank yous so far: I’m indebted to Simon Rich (a successful swimmer in 2019, whom MCS put me in touch with) for the idea of a monthly blog, formatted in roughly this way, and for lots of advice about the specific details of organising and completing a crossing. Towards the end of the month I also met Julian Critchlow, a long-time student of Channel Swimming, with four solo crossing under his belt and a few more relay swims as well (his blog
contains some fascinating insights into the stats of Channel Swimming, as well as storying his own swims). Ed Williams swam the Channel when he was 19 and now runs a swim school in Cambridge; he was the first person I met to put the swim in context. All of their advice has already saved me the time, effort and potential injury of learning these things by error and I’m sure their help will become even more invaluable when the open water season gets underway.
I'm also overdue a thank you to my little brother Ben who (after some determined pestering) condescended to help his humanities-studying older brother put together this website.
Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported MCS and me through the JustGiving page so far and especially for all the kind words of encouragement. When the swim still seems so far away your support is a big motivator getting me in the pool.
More training and a race coming up next month!
Dan
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