Total distance: 52k in 18 swims
Days until swim (hopefully!): 150
March had gotten off to a good start. I celebrated my birthday at the start of the month with a 10k set, broken up into 20 sets of 20 lengths. A few days later I trialled for the Cambridge open water swim team: a 25-minute pool swim for distance. I hadn’t expected much. I’m not a slow swimmer over longer distances, but I’ve never really held up against the ‘proper’ club swimmers – more of a cruise liner than a speed boat. I was excited (and definitely a little surprised) then, to learn a few weeks later I had made the team for both races in the summer: a 2.1k swim upstream along the Henley Royal Regatta course in June and a relay English Channel swim in July, both, naturally, competing against O*ford. Relay teams swim across the Channel taking it in turns to swim an hour each and I had to give this some thought. I didn’t want to be intimidated by the length of the swim watching most of it from a boat before I got in the water for my solo swim. Ultimately it was too good an experience to pass up and I was just as excited to train with a team after hours of solitary lengths.
My more immediate target, however, was the first race I had signed up to in a season of events leading up to the big swim. The Swimathon 2020 was planned for the last weekend of March across public pools in the UK; I had signed up for the triple 5k and planned to complete all three swims in one day. It would have been the furthest I had ever swum in a day and the cherry on what was supposed to have been my first month of really determined swimming at the volume and speed I would need to swim across the Channel.
Gradually, it became clear that what started the year as a distant news story and even (strangely now) the butt of a joke had become an immediate threat that would change the way we live. The Swimathon was the first to be cancelled, then the Champion of Champions race in Dover harbour. Soon, the British Long Distance Swimming Association cancelled all their events for the summer. We would not be going back to Cambridge next term and all of my written exams were cancelled. Public swimming pools remained open longer than expected, perhaps in part due to a Public Health England Statement (via Swim England) that the regulated level of chlorine in public pools neutralises the virus. Suddenly, the swimming lane was the safest place to be and a lifeguard even recommended swimmers skip the shower after leaving the pool! presumably to emerge into the world with a protective layer of chlorine and more than a bit smelly.
I sent an email to the Mardles (my pilots) to touch base about the swim this summer. Sensibly, they are not making any decisions regarding cancellation, postponement or how any of that would work until the beginning of the season in June. In a sense I am lucky that my tide is late in the Summer, towards the end August and a part of me has to remain hopeful that the swim might just be able go ahead.
Many have lost loved ones too soon and the crisis has put lots of things in perspective. Amidst a whole season of events cancelled and plans ruined, my swim is not a big deal. But there are lessons I can learn and it already feels like I was taking the last few months of training for granted. I can remember lots of conversations in my head – especially towards the end of term – bargaining with myself to skip training sessions, knowing I could catch up over the Easter break at home. The last week swimming in pools, knowing they would close any day, I had some of my most challenging, but enjoyable training sessions and I hope I can hold onto that mindset whenever normality begins to return.
Most swimmers training for the Channel have to bounce back from an injury enforced break from training at some point but I don't think anyone preparing for the swim this year could have predicted these unique challenges. It’s hard to train to swim without a pool. It’s hard to swim in the sea when it’s still too cold to stay in for more than half an hour at a time and knowing that, if something went wrong in open water, I would be placing a very unnecessary extra burden on medical services that are already stretched. It’s hard to train hard for an event that might not even happen. People talk about process goals and outcome goals as different ways of keeping motivated. The latter are often more obvious: events, awards and measurable successes, but process goals are what keep improvement ticking over. Recently a friend lent me his copy of Endurance by Rick Broadbent about the legendary Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek. Amongst other accomplishments Zatopek is the father of ‘fartlek’, or interval training: the paradoxical revelation that preparing for long endurance events requires training at short bursts faster than race pace. Johnny Johnston (who coached Jim Peters, a British marathon runner and one of Zatopek’s adversaries) explained training for process goals in a way that has helped to keep me motivated now that many outcome goals have been stripped away: ‘your body is like a bank book, the more money you put in, the greater interest you will draw all the time and the more you can take out when you really need it.’
I will continue to train in whatever form I can because, while my outcome goal is to swim the Channel, my process goals were always to get physically fit and push myself mentally, both of which I can continue to do. I will continue to train because the only thing worse than having the swim cancelled would be to get the go ahead and have been too distracted or lazy to have put the work in now. I'm also excited about finding creative ways to train because, while I miss the pool, if I'm honest swimming lengths was starting to get a little boring!
Amidst lots of disappointing developments, I received some really positive news last week. At the start of the month I had visited Westminster School to talk to children in Year 10 about the swim and about marine conservation. I talked about why it’s important and how it can sometimes be forgotten because the world underwater is less visible than ecosystems on land. In the same week Piers Morgan made a show of eating jellied eels on GMB . Piers’ characteristic contrariness aside, MCS was right to point out that eels are as endangered as Bengal Tigers, but tucking into a plate of the latter on national TV would be unimaginable. Likewise, roughly 15% of land on earth is environmentally protected against abuse, but only 5.3% of global ocean. So, choosing to protect our oceans is choosing to support a diverse, healthy planet – as opposed to picking and choosing species that serve human purposes. The reality is that there isn’t much of a choice, because the nature of a connected ecosystem is that if one link falls, the whole thing comes tumbling down.
The prospect of keeping children interested on a dreary school morning before lessons was a daunting one, and I was feeling tired on the train down from Cambridge towards the end of term. But the talk went well, and despite the school closing down a few weeks later, the kids took part in a home-clothes day from home. From 50 donations, they raised an impressive £716 to support MCS and I’m very grateful to Susan Joyce for having me speak, and to all of the children who took part and their parents.
It only remains to thank again all of you who have donated and supported so far. I won't know any more about the swim until June and will post any updates on here. Until then I will continue to train and hope for the best!
I hope everyone is healthy and keeping well.
Dan
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