Channel Swim 19: Qualifying Swim Attempt 1

The Thames 5:58 am, June 7th

It was a promising morning, blue skies and a dead flat river mirroring me as I batted a tow float into position and pulled my goggles on. There was just a hint of mist rapidly burning off as the sun strengthened, but at that early hour everything was silent and we had the river to ourselves.

As I waded into chest depth, holding my arms above me to keep as much dry and warm for as long as possible Jo called out from her precarious perch over the river ‘Ok, I’m starting the timer…. Now!’. Prevaricating while treading water, I pulled my goggles off to defog them as the cold water rapidly misted them up. ‘Ok, lets get on with the swimming’ Ian gruffly chastised me from alongside.

Reluctantly I put my head down and started to swim. This was going to be long, cold and painful.

I’d been trying to work out how to quickly get a six hour qualifier in before the record breaking spring we were experiencing put temperatures out of reach.

You need to be able to swim a full six hours, in water below 15.6 degrees, following English channel rules (speedos, goggles and a hat, basically). Lakes were already too warm, and rationing swim time. The RNLI was starting to cover popular beaches, but I didn’t want to be swimming amongst thousands, and even the Thames had been sat at 18 degrees, although I knew the good weather had to break sometime.

I’d been running through complicated plans A through at least F, only for Ian to pop up on Thursday on WhatsApp. ‘Hey, Stuart, looks like the Thames has dropped below 15.6 degrees. Why don’t we do your qualifier on Sunday?’. Within minutes, my amazing team had organised the rest of it, with everyone popping up volunteering to swim with me for an hour.

Not all of them are winter swimmers so this was going to be the longest coldest swims some of them had done ever. Jo was also going to have a tough day – six hours balancing carefully on the end of a long narrow jetty so she could observe my swim at all times. We reckoned it was 50/50 on her going in so had packed a change of clothes for her as well.

I was nervous – after two months of very little swimming at all, the longest block I’d done was two consecutive 45 minute lake swims and I was struggling to maintain my concentration even over that relatively short period of time. To add to this, temperatures had continued to plunge dropping to 13.8 degrees as the alarm went off at five a.m. on the Sunday morning. Three months ago I would have eaten that temperature for breakfast – but how was I going to fare after a long break?

7:05 am

We had a route quickly sorted. Blast downstream to the ‘Channel’ warning sign, cross the river, fight the current about a k upstream to the railway bridge, round the bridge and then roll back down to the slipway. We’d had an early moment of cheer when a cyclist yelling from the bank turned out to be Barney, willing me on.

I was swimming like a princess – early on, I broke my towfloat and just handed it to Ian to let him swim into the shore and drop it off. That was deliberate, as I wasn’t going to do anything that endangered the swim. I was also swimming very slowly – I wasn’t 100% sure I was strong enough over the longer distance so was keeping my speed down to make sure I finished, while trying to keep enough flowing that I didn’t get cold. Normally I would have worked harder to try to keep up with my coswimmer, aware that Ian was not working hard at all, but I let selfishness reign.

I needed this swim to be about me.

The temperature was ok at this point – I could feel the cold water against my shoulders with each stroke, but my belly was warm and my hands showed no sign of locking up. I felt bad about my self interest as we swapped over Ian for Hannah – as Ian climbed out I could see he was already savagely shivering. I knew I wasn’t going to change anything though.

Ian was a great coswimmer – always alongside me and pacing smoothly, but Hannah (the swimmer, not coach) was incredible. For her entire hour she was alongside, eyes locked on me and completely engaged with me as we swum, even to the extent that she was pacing her arm strokes to mine and helping to lock a rhythm. She made it really easy to just watch her, concentrate on what she was doing and blank out everything else.

Of course, I kept ruining it all by trying to stop for a chat.

I knew communication with your team is important on a swim. I’m quite a sociable person and I hadn’t seen these guys for nearly three months, and the urge to ask how they were and catch up generally was disrupting everything. I was also in a playful, happy mood and probably needed to get myself more ‘in the zone’.

But it was a lack of communication that was causing the most problems. Quickly summarising, I think the current guidance on nutrition from the Dover Channel Training team is as follows (of course taking into account that individuals vary):

• No feed for first two hours, then 1 per hour
• Energy drink should be the main focus, trying to keep feed stops below 30s
• Drink should be cold, as warm drinks dilate blood vessels in the gut and result in more heat being lost than gained
• Solids are more of a treat/surprise when suffering rather than a staple as you may well be being too sick to eat anyway.

One thing you will quickly learn when channel swimming training is that there’s very little consensus on anything, and quite a lot of the above is controversial still; but I’d been training on that and had prepped appropriate feeds accordingly. I knew I now could get a 750ml bottle of energy drink down in a couple of seconds and swim hard immediately afterwards.

What I hadn’t done was discussed it with the team.

I realised my mistake when at the first handover an hour in, I was offered a feed bottle and waved it off. I’d fuelled before leaving the house and felt good, but I didn’t missed the exchanges of furrowed brows. I wasn’t too worried about this as a specific training swim (I know there are going to be lots of seven hour swims coming up) so when I was led in for a feed thirty minutes early I did what I was told and took the energy bottle. Thirty minutes after that I was eating Jaffa cakes and drinking tea.

Nutrition worked out fine on the swim, but I still don’t think the team think I was going to feed properly and it shows just how important it is to talk everything through.

8:34 am

I’d messed up. Stu had offered to cover two hours and I thought I’d slotted him in for 8-10 when actually I’d told him 9-11. With a few minutes before the handover, Jo had realised there was a problem, and Stu was in a car hurtling over; Hannah was cold and needed to get out and get warm, so I carried on circulating in a shorter loop (Which happened to be significantly warmer, bonus!) nearer to the shore while Jo watched. I was starting to get worried now. I’d been in for two and half hours and I was cold. Not cold to the bone, but cold enough that I was extrapolating where I’d be in another three hours and not liking the answer. As I completed another short loop I was surprised to see another cup of tea and half a banana bobbing towards me in the water, Stu hiding under a bright pink cap behind it. We shouted some cheerful abuse at Jo and Claire selfishly and disgracefully eating bacon baps in full view, and headed off upstream.

I don’t think Stu’s done a lot of swimming this year, and wetsuited up and as excitable as a puppy he kept bounding off in front. It made me laugh and we did sneak a few chats in on the fast downstream stretch as we swam. At one point he was trying to catch bread being thrown for the river birds as we swum past. I’m not surprised a big swan had been eyeing him up aggressively earlier.

Hannah had been yelling at me every time I touched my goggles. She’s got a really good point – on the actual swim you’re covered in grease and sun cream and other muck and as soon as you get that on your lenses you have a problem. But as I mentioned earlier, I haven’t seen these people for months and wanted to see their faces as we spoke.

As we came in for another feed there was someone standing on the jetty with Jo. I lifted my goggles to see who it was, and as I recognised her now dry and dressed, and back to check I was doing ok, Hannah yelled at me again for touching them.

I think in an ideal world there’s a number of things I would have liked to do differently on a qualifying swim. Treating it like an actual channel swim would be one of those things, with nutrition organised and planned well in advance and sun cream and vaseline and goggles all being treated as if this was the real event. I’d even suggest having your channel kit box ready and using this as you would on the day, helping with that ‘I’ve done this before, this is nothing special’ feeling you might need on the morning of the actual swim. Looked at dispassionately, I did everything wrong. I mentioned vaseline above because I have some amazing chafing around my armpits.

If we can take the lessons we learned by me not prepping properly, then it’s an equally valuable exercise, just looked at from a slightly different direction.

I’ll need to have a dress rehearsal nearer the time, where all of this is nailed down.

10:05 am

Four hours in. Stu was climbing out, and Max was already in champing at the bit to get off. Something magical had happened – I was no longer cold. I don’t mean ‘slipping into a hypothermic coma’ not feeling cold kind of way, I mean ‘wrapped in a duvet that’s already been warmed up’ kind of way. That felt brilliant as I’d known from the first arm stroke that this was an exercise to survive the exposure and if I needed to float to hit the time target I would.

Then I panicked. I brought us back to the shore and asked Jo to check the temperature online – what if it felt warm because it was warm? What if it was suddenly back at 18 degrees, and I was going to have to swim longer? Everyone else laughed at this concept and Jo quickly confirmed it was still 13.8.

I did worry a bit from here that this was actually ‘slipping into a hypothermic coma’ not feeling cold, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I decided to take it as a positive.

Max had never swum in this stretch of river before and still managed to avoid the gigantic patch of weed that I’d swum through on every single circuit. As we started I’d told him we’d stay in the warm bit of the river downstream of the jetty, but as we completed the first half a circuit told him I’d changed my mind. No longer worrying about the cold, I’d rather do two or three long circuits upstream than seven or eight more boring smaller ones.

Traffic was rapidly building on the river now – after having seen nothing in the first hour, and a couple of sculls in the second, we had motor traffic, kayaks, and lots of other swimmers. At one point I sat up, concerned as Max came flying back past me at high speed, only to realise it was a totally different swimmer coming downstream.

Thing is, I knew I could do this now. I wasn’t cold, and although I was a tiny bit tired I knew I could swim another two hours from here. I actually started to pick up speed as I put more effort in, knowing I had the reserves to get me through.

If I’m honest, I’d put the training in and I wasn’t expecting the qualifier to be difficult – if you can’t do six hours in channel temperatures comfortably I don’t think you’re going to get across. If I’d been doing this as planned, in 15 degree water in Mallorca in March coming off a winter where I’d built to 40k a week training and been swimming for ninety minutes in 11 degree water, this genuinely would have been a straightforward thing to tackle, even though it was going to be the longest I’d ever swum by about 50%.

But it wasn’t March, it wasn’t 15 degrees, and I’d not done 40 for nearly 12 weeks.

I wasn’t sure I could do it. I was determined to just swim until someone dragged me out, but I just didn’t know if that would be enough. With perfect hindsight I could have been a lot more aggressive.

11:54 am

Some time ago we’d hit the final changeover. Max wasn’t going to miss the finish, so had stayed in with me – there’s been a couple of points now where he’s made a point of sharing what I’m going through so he understands it better. James was my final companion, and had decided to go for the SUP option as he wasn’t 100% certain he’d keep up (He would have done). I think he was trying to warm me up just looking at his tropical clothing. Coach Hannah had even raced over when she finished work, spent some time watching my stroke even though I stayed as far away as I could so she couldn’t see me being sloppy, and had joined us in the water for the final 15 minutes.

We’d worked our way upstream and ever so slightly mistimed the final stretch – faced with going downstream past the exit and then fighting back up for the finish, we turned around and put a couple of minutes going up stream so we could power gracefully into a final, triumphant glide back to the jetty just as the clock ticked around to 12:00.

Channel qualifier swim attempt one. Done and dusted, and all that was needed.

Hannah and Ian had come back to see me out of the water, and it was a brilliant moment to be able to introduce so much of the team to each other. They were all amazing over the weekend, and I think I have the strongest possible set of people trying to help me across.

While the feelings were still fresh I quickly turned to coach Hannah and told her that if she’d told me to get back in and do another four hours I would have sworn at her, but I could have done it.

That’s a powerful statement. With a big interruption in training, big drop in temperature I still could have wildly overperformed if needed.

Thats gone squarely in my confidence bank.

Now I just need a 100% OW training plan.

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