Channel Swim 11: Unload week, or the psychology of swimming

Unload Week

You know you’ve made some poor choices in life when you find yourself celebrating that you ‘only’ have to swim 3-4k five times in a week.

After a steady, but cumulatively significant rise in each swim’s distance Hannah has introduced unload weeks to give me a chance to recover.

As the first swim sheets dropped I was as excited as a six week old puppy that’s just discovered his first slipper.

I found myself making a proper pain of myself in the pool as I attacked the shorter sessions; I’m specifically surprised I didn’t get kicked out of the club session as I completely failed to listen to the coaches and had no clue what drills we were supposed to be doing.

As well as physical recovery just finding the time to swim (carving out an hour instead of two and a half) was an order of magnitude easier and I joyfully embraced the extra time in bed in the morning.

Of course, when the sessions jumped straight back up to 7+k each the following week, that’s tough psychologically, but at least physically I was in good shape to deal with the three long sessions I’d been forced by work commitments to schedule on consecutive days. I was expecting to suffer by the end, but I sprinted the final 1500m of the third swim at a pace I couldn’t have covered 100m at in October.

Something is clearly working on the training.

Building my psychological toolkit

Dealing with psychological challenges is going to be a big part of the day. There’s still a point (usually just before halfway) in almost every single swim session where I just want to get out. I’ve had to keep a careful eye on myself as the tedium of training means I notice every minor grumble or complaint my body makes. There’s that constant balancing of ‘I’m listening to my body and preventing injury’ vs ‘I secretly can’t be arsed and really want a hot chocolate’.

They are very minor grumbles. I said to Hannah this week ‘If the bit of me that’s complaining the most today is my right ankle, the rest has to be in pretty good shape’.

“People consider channel swimming to be 80% mental, and that’s because I think you’ve got to be 80% mental to do it,”

Beth French

If the challenge is really 80% mental, as Alison Streeter also says (with 20% being everything else. I’m honestly not completely sold on her maths), I think I’m going to be spending a lot of the next 16 weeks thinking about the psychology of swimming. For example, when I see ’16 weeks’ my immediate knee jerk reaction is huge panic; my Jo’s slightly more sanguine response is to say ‘For gods sake, get a grip. That’s almost a third of a year’.

That in itself is our different psychologies in action. Or is it just that I’m more invested? I do suspect if our positions were reversed, her mindset would be significantly different. If I tried to raise this with her I know her response would begin and end with ‘But I’m not stupid enough to put myself in your position’. I find it hard to argue with her position.

I think I’ve been really successful in visualising success – anytime I think about the swim itself, the first mental picture is of myself, standing on a beach in France and sticking pebbles down my trunks.

If that’s your mental picture now too, sorry/not sorry. If it helps, I plan to stick as many pebbles as I can down what are by regulation a pretty skimpy pair of speedos.

The power of music

I’ve decided that one tool I want to use is to try to ‘program’ myself to respond to music. I cannot wear headphones on the swim, but maybe I can zone out while humming uplifting music to myself.

I reached out to my friends asking for some suggestions and quickly had a playlist of hundreds of songs. Some I should have expected (‘Theme from Jaws’, Tiffany’s ‘I think we’re alone now’), and some I certainly didn’t. I was strongly recommended to use ‘Let it go’ from Frozen, complete with a analytical breakdown arguing the point. I have promised to give it a go!

I’ve discovered that the music only seems to work if the tempo is right but I also have to have an emotional connection to it – I’ve been surprised to find a hell of a lot of 80s cheese in the playlist (St Elmo’s fire was an inspired suggestion). I was assuming it’s because music has a stronger connection for us when we are younger and everything is fresh and new, but it turns out there’s more to it than that. Songs that came out just a couple of years ago work as well if I enjoyed belting it out in the car.

Carly Simon’s Let the River Run wasn’t a song that I remembered, but I have a brand new and strong reaction to it thanks to a video Emma of Dover Channel Training shared with us to kick off the seminar a few weeks ago. The song is the second in the soundtrack to the video of the 2018/9 swimmers and as we watched all the swimmers struggle through their year and time after time eventually stand on the French beaches I may have found something in my eye.

I am rationing myself to one session with music a week as I really don’t want to become dependent on it; but it does seem to be working and I can merrily dispatch an 800m main set while singing to myself even if I don’t have any music playing.

Continuing cold water acclimatisation

I’ve managed a number of OW swims with friends over the last few weeks, with a number of twenty five minute stints in local lakes at six degrees and a shorter swim in a fast flowing Thames at five degrees; although I have been absolutely fine getting into the water I really (and I mean that really) don’t want to put my head under the water so found myself mostly doing breaststroke. This meant, swimming slower in the river, I was seriously planning a bail out at the nearby pub if I’d been washed downstream, before managing to make it across the body of the river and start making progress upstream once I was hugging the bank again.

This weekend as Storm Dennis hit I was told as I disrobed on the pebbles that the lake was seven degrees. As I marched in up to my knees I turned and glared at Hannah stood on the shore; after a quick conversation with the safety kayaker the temperature was swiftly updated to six. I’m still not convinced it was that high.

Checking back in my swim logs, I’m basically swimming in 5 degree water with exactly the same bodily reaction as I was in 12 degrees back in October, which is utterly unbelievable. Acclimatisation does work, although I continue to wonder how much is physical. I think the cold winter swims I’m doing are going to be hugely important in giving me more mental tools I can use on the day (and also on the longer training and qualification swims). Just knowing you’ve done worse is 90% of the battle.

I could really do with it warming up a bit so I can go longer. I’m far enough away from the sea that I don’t want to drive a couple of hours in each direction for a forty minute swim, but the frustration of waiting is starting to chafe.

On the plus side, the next unload week is only two weeks away…

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