But now I've started to feel a bit of Pressure, not just because I've signed up for an incredibly difficult challenge but because I've started this blog about it and I want people to enjoy reading it. I'm sure this pressure will change over the coming weeks and months into "how am I going to make it across the 22 miles that make up one of the busiest shipping routes in the world" but for now it's about you. The one or two kind souls that haven't got bored with me prattling on, yet...
So to keep it interesting I'm going to tell you about the first time I went open water swimming in the UK. It was last year around the end of April and I had recently signed up for my swim to the Isle of Wight. I hadn't done any open water swimming in the UK and I knew I needed to try it before I went anywhere near the sea.
I turned up at the local lake with my cheap wetsuit that I had bought online. For those of you who don't know, as I didn't at the time, there are different types of wetsuit. Ones that are used for swimming and ones which aren't. Guess which one I had! So there I am in my surfing neoprene shorts and vest top, not a pretty sight, and one of the first comments I get is "That isn't what I would have chosen". Still I'd paid my £5 and I wanted to swim so in I got! I went for it, straight away. I think I got about 100m before the ice headache (that covered my whole body) nearly stopped me dead. I was gasping for air, in so much pain and I was suddenly scared of the water. I've always had a healthy respect for the water but I'd never been scared of it before. I nearly swam back to shore and got out straight away.
I could handle being that "idiot in the surfing wetsuit" in front of the nice ladies who were making sure that no one was drowning, providing no one I knew would be able to tell the story. It's the same reason I jumped out of a plane when I was younger. This is one of the things I'm counting on to get me in the sea with all the wildlife that lives in there.
As luck would have it someone I knew rocked up and I instantly knew there was no way I was going back to shore. 2km later I was still "that idiot in the surfing wetsuit" who struggled to keep his neoprene shorts up while swimming and who also had some nasty wetsuit burns but I'd been round the lake twice and hadn't died or been frozen. It was then I realised swimming in a pool was nowhere near as much fun.