This is going to be a very interesting week for me. I'm crewing for a friend of mine who is also swimming the channel, we train together and it will be a great experience to see it from the other side. I'm asking a lot of my wife and others to feed and look after me during my swim so I'm glad I'll be able to give some pointers on what needs to be done.
One thing that I knew before this week and that really annoys me is that you are completely dependent on external factors, mostly the weather. It looked like we were going to go on Friday and then it was put back to Saturday night, at 09:00 on Saturday morning he got the call that he should get down to Dover at he would be swimming at midday. An hour into the journey we had a further call that meant we had to cancel, the French border patrol were having issues with staffing and there was a massive queue on the M20 with some people spending over 14 hours trying to get to the ferry. This meant that his swim then slipped to starting on Tuesday morning and now the following weekend. That's the problem, the weather (and on this one occasion the traffic) can cause the start time to slip and move around.
Next weekend I'm getting the opportunity to swim to the Isle of Wight again. This was the swim that started all of this nonsense off. I'm looking forward to doing it again, who knows I might even beat my previous time. It is strange as last time I was bricking it, now I'm a little bit more relaxed about it all. The only thing that makes me slightly nervous is that I'm still carrying a slight shoulder issue so my training distances have dropped off massively.
One thing that I knew before this week and that really annoys me is that you are completely dependent on external factors, mostly the weather. It looked like we were going to go on Friday and then it was put back to Saturday night, at 09:00 on Saturday morning he got the call that he should get down to Dover at he would be swimming at midday. An hour into the journey we had a further call that meant we had to cancel, the French border patrol were having issues with staffing and there was a massive queue on the M20 with some people spending over 14 hours trying to get to the ferry. This meant that his swim then slipped to starting on Tuesday morning and now the following weekend. That's the problem, the weather (and on this one occasion the traffic) can cause the start time to slip and move around.
Next weekend I'm getting the opportunity to swim to the Isle of Wight again. This was the swim that started all of this nonsense off. I'm looking forward to doing it again, who knows I might even beat my previous time. It is strange as last time I was bricking it, now I'm a little bit more relaxed about it all. The only thing that makes me slightly nervous is that I'm still carrying a slight shoulder issue so my training distances have dropped off massively.