Swimming day 514 - Friday 6th July 2012

32 days to go..


Pain pain didn’t go away. The whole night my chest felt tight, but there is no sick feeling, so I recon it must be a strain. I avoided the gym last night and this morning at the sea, despite it being a completely flat glass like sea and very low tide I just swam around the buoys for half an hour and stayed away from fast swimming or crazy depths. I’ve also cancelled my gym today. Time for a few days rest; hopefully that will do the job and I can start again on Monday. It really frustrates me when these things happen, but it’s too close to my swim now for me to take any silly chances.

Talking of the swim; the stats so far in the channel are that only 1 out of 26 solos has made it and only 1 out of 9 relays has made it – rubbish stats and goes to show that both the solo and the relay are massive challenges. The problem this year is that the temperature has just not raised and mid channel it’s under 14 degrees and likely to stay that way now for the whole year. This is a lot lower that it should be and unless one is conditioned to deal with that then failure will come smashing at the door. The whole team have to pull a 2 hour swim this month to enable us to qualify for the team (CSA rules) and whilst I have done a few in the pool I am personally only up to about 1hr 45 mins in the sea. I can def do a 2 hour though and will do it next week by doing a marina & back swim; they usually take me an hour dead o to get there and about 90 mins to get back.

Fiona has also suggested we add a 6th person to the team; either as a backup in case someone can’t qualify or drops out and also as a possibility of having a 6 person relay as in these temperatures a 5 person team has a lot less chance of success than a 6 person team (6 persons being the norm in relays). A lot for me to contemplate this weekend as I need to make sure we not only start the swim but also finish it!