Day 110 – 6th October 2010

Now that was a serious swim!

6.30am – 10.30am; 4 hrs non stop in the Pool at Falmer. That was my longest Pool swim to date and I’m really proud of myself that I did it.

The first hour really seemed to drag, in fact the first 10 minutes felt like a hour. However, the next 3 hours went by quickly. Fiona came along about 7ish and jumped in the lane next to me and then swam the rest of the time with me, which was great as it meant I had someone telling me when I needed to adjust my stroke or breath differently as well as letting me know when to feed; she’s such a fantastic support to me, I really am amazingly lucky to have her.

As for the boredom factor, which is the real challenge of a long pool swim, it wasn’t as bad as I had envisaged. Throughout the whole 4 hours I only had the lane to myself for maybe a combined half an hour; the rest of the time I had one or two people in the lane with me, as well as people in the lane next to me. It was interesting to see so many people come and go and for me to still be there plodding along. You had the “quick” and “strong swimmers”, you had the “technically bad swimmers” (all of a sudden I know the good from the bad!), you had the slow swimmers and you had swimmers of all sizes; some in for 5 minutes and some in for 30 minutes; but only me in for 4 hours! I think I enjoyed the last 15 minutes the most from the perspective of company as I was joined in my lane by two very fit young ladies in their early 20’s and wearing very tight swimming costumes; of course at that point I may have sped up a tad; boys will be boys!

After the swim I came to the office to do a days work, but to be honest my head was a little floaty and my breathing a bit uncomfortable; perhaps the effects of the chlorine or the shallow breathing one does whilst swimming. Apart from that though at the moment I am feeling strong and surprisingly not too achy.

The food intake was a bowl of rice crispies at 6.10am, then a small bottle of water mixed with maxim every hour during the swim, then a protein shake and a health bar after the swim and now I’m about to have a chicken salad sandwich (and maybe, only maybe, a cake of some kind!!).

With regards to distance today, I have brought this very cool watch that is motion sensitive and counts your lengths, stroke rate, time etc; super cool. It told me I did 324 lengths of 25 metres each, which means I swam 8100 meter, which is about 5.003 miles, or 8.1 kilometres.

Tomorrow, hopefully not too achy, I’ll do a sea swim in the morning; but just a short one. Apparently today there were 10 foot waves in the sea and hardly anyone could get in; that would be a cool playground for the morning after today.