Moving on...

This isn't really about swimming...although with only 5 weeks to go before I fly to New York for MIMS, and about 10 weeks before my Channel swim, pretty much everything is about swimming anyway.

But the big news is that I am going to be leaving my current job at Warwick University at the end of the summer to take up an exciting new post in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds University. There are many reasons for making this move now, both professionally and personally, but the most immediate positive is that Peter and I can finally look forward to abandoning our two-city working lives and consolidate our efforts into a more coherent life together. After 8 years of commuting between jobs, houses and cities, it's almost too good to be true for us both to have great jobs in the same city and institution.

And inevitably, this too is about the swimming, and I'm not ashamed to say that in my 'shall I / shan't I?' deliberations about whether to go for the job, 'will I be able to swim?' was one of the many factors we considered. And of course, the answer is a resounding yes... but also a (qualified) no. There is a reassuring plethora of lakes, rivers and pools with which to feed my habit, plus a robust community of swimmers to train with. So while this doesn't really resolve the problem of being a sea swimmer who lives nowhere near the sea, there are plenty of beautiful places to get my swimming fix. The qualified no is really about time and priorities - moving houses and jobs is disruptive and time-consuming, and while it's definitely a case of long-term gains all round, the reality of the next couple of years is that I need to focus on getting settled in my new job... plus the swimming book is still more unwritten than written. So, less time swimming, and more time writing about swimming.

So, I'm not going to stop swimming - how could I? - but after the Channel swim this summer, I'm retiring from the long swims for a while to focus on other important bits of my life.

And none of this changes the (slightly terrified) excitement of the next few months of long swimming. The lakes round here are opening, the weather's finally warming up and I'm ready to give it my all.

Facing up to cold...

I have to confess that in spite of being determined to move on from my unsuccessful Cabrera Channel swim, I've been struggling a bit with it. I can sometimes have a slightly unhelpful response to both success and failure - unchecked, success feels like I've 'got away with it', and failure can feel like I've been 'found out'. It's a very unproductive, all-or-nothing view that I try to step outside of, but which creeps in occasionally. But some quiet thinking about this, some advice from a sports psychologist, plus time and perspective, mean that I've been feeling much better and am now positively focused on MIMS.

But I also realised that I was experiencing a new 'fear' of the cold...or perhaps, fear of getting very cold in the wake of my run-in with hypothermia in Mallorca. The speed and potency of the cold on the Cabrera swim really took me by surprise, and I have found myself starting to bargain with the cold  - 'if it's over X degrees in the Channel, I'll be fine'; 'I can't swim MIMS unless it's Y degrees...' This is no good. When I was training for the Channel last time, I very deliberately avoided any talk of the 'If I had a good day, I could....' variety. You get what you get, and whether you make it or not, it doesn't help to be setting the conditions for failure in advance.

So, rather than let this newly gestating fear of cold take root, I decided that I needed to nip it in the bud by getting properly (but safely) shiveringly cold. So, off to Lake 32 I trundled this morning. It's a long drive from Coventry (about 90 mins), but it's the nearest swimming spot to me that is open this weekend, so off I went. I have to admit to having some doubts when I had to pause before setting off to let the ice on the windscreen defrost, and the Met Office weather forecast for morning air temps of 4 degrees (down to 1 degree in the wind) didn't fill me with enthusiasm. But if nothing else, I could be sure that my goal for the day - to get really cold - would be achieved.

Out of the wind at the entry point, the water really didn't feel too bad, and off I paddled. Out of the shelter of the trees, however, I could feel the biting wind slewing across my back and shoulders and the water started to feel far icier than the 11-12 degrees recorded last week. I kept swimming, enjoying the crisp, clear water - still too cold for the weeds to have sprouted from the lake bed. Stupidly, I realised I'd left my rings on, but rather than going back and taking them off, I paused to take them off and thread them on to my watch strap -  a dexterous feat with stiff, clawed fingers. And on I swam, although the buoys on the lake seem to have proliferated over the winter and the official 750m circuit escaped me. I settled instead for a 1km loop achieved just by swimming towards the next orange thing and seeing where that took me. After my first lap, I felt like my body temp had settled; my skin felt like it was burning with cold, but unlike in Cabrera, where the cold got into my very core and seemed to be eating its way to the body's surface, the cold was moving from the outside, slowly spreading, but in slow, incremental nibbles from the surface, rather than gnawing away from the inside. Before Cabrera, this is what I understood as being cold in the water; it can be uncomfortable, and even painful, and you have to keep an eye on it, but it's okay. I still don't really understand why I got so centrally cold in Mallorca - probably because I was cold for much longer - but it felt great to supersede that memory, that fear, with this much more familiar, manageable cold, nibbling from the outside in, rather than the inside out.

I got out after an hour, chilled but satisfied, and got changed in the van, followed by a splendid display of some of my very best shivering and comedy coffee-drinking before retreating with pals Neil and Steph to the cafe for a delicious breakfast. Perfect.

It's hard not to let that memory of being so scarily cold and impaired in Mallorca dominate when I think about the cold and particularly for the next month of hard, but inevitably quite chilly, training, but perversely, having got properly, but safely, cold today has made me feel so much better about diving in to the OW training without getting knotted up in those fears.

When the wheels come off...

Sooner or later in a sport like marathon swimming, something will go wrong and you won't be able to finish a swim. It's an occupational hazard. Even with the hardest and most meticulous training, this can happen; but with an early season swim in unseasonably low temperatures, the risks are increased. And so it was that my attempt to swim the Cabrera Channel on 10 April ended with me being hauled out mid-Channel, too cold to continue.

We set off from the port of Sa Rapita at 7am and motored over to the beautiful island of Cabrera - a closely protected nature reserve to the south of Mallorca. The journey was thankfully quick (bearing in mind my uselessness on boats), and after a few moments to settle my stomach, we started getting ready for the swim. I felt great - full of energy and optimism. The water in the sheltered bay was glassy and clear, and even though a thick mist hung low on the water, I was looking forward to some warming sunshine later on. Jumping in, I felt the usual rush of adrenalin - the mild shock of the water, plus the excitement of the swim to come. And off I paddled, feeling good, with the team from XTRM of Toni, Rafael and Laura on board the boat, along with Peter.

It's difficult for me to pin down exactly what happened in the hours that followed, but although the boat's thermometer was showing 15 degrees, it felt SO much colder - perhaps as a result of my lack of acclimatisation beforehand, or the weight I have lost over the winter, or windchill, or the sapping effects of the cool mist that hung low over the water for the first few hours of the swim. Or perhaps it was just cold. By hour two, I was heart-sinkingly cold; chilled right through to the core. And I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It was like being eaten by cold from the inside and my positive mood was being eroded with it.

Out of the shelter of the island, I started to have trouble staying with the boat. The winds were making it difficult for the boat (or me?) to keep a steady course, and even after a cycle of just 6 strokes, I would look up to sight the boat to find a large gap had opened up between us. As a result, I ended up making some eccentric loops in my efforts to get back to the boat, probably adding considerable distance. This explains in part my shockingly slow progress on the swim, averaging just a couple of km per hour (as the crow flies, but probably not as I swam), as well as my rather erratic pace - sometimes under 2km / hour, and at others, closer to the 3km/hour I was anticipating (and which I certainly do consistently in pool training).

The crew were fantastic - working hard to keep me and the boat together and on course, and offering relentless positivity on feeds. But in the water, by hour 5, the wheels were well and truly coming off. I knew I had to try and stop dwelling on the cold, and at each feed, tried to convince myself that I was just having a bad patch and that a feed would sort me out. But I think it was just too late - the cold had well and truly got me, and at the feeds, my hands were shaking with cold, and it was hard to swallow the liquid down. Even the big green jelly baby couldn't save me. I hacked on as best I could, but the crew were looking worried now too. Peter asked a couple of questions to check my mental state, and I was fine the first couple of times, but at 6.5 hours, he asked the name of our cat and I just stared back at him as I was being pulled further and further away from the boat (or the boat from me....I don't know which). It was such an odd moment - I knew exactly what he was asking, but couldn't quite formulate an answer. I wanted to tell him that I was busy and would answer in a minute. And then Peter made the hard, but utterly right, decision to pull the swim. If I'd been close to finishing, I think I would have fought to stay in (and perhaps they would have let me push on a bit more), but with probably another 5 hours to go, sea conditions worsening considerably, and with me succumbing progressively to the cold, there was no way I was going to make it.

I paddled round to the back of the boat, struggling to negotiate the rungs of the ladder in the bouncing sea. Then suddenly, hands grabbed hold and I was hauled swiftly out. Too cold and confused to participate actively, I was wrapped in layer upon layer of blankets and clothes; my cap and goggles were slipped off and replaced with my woollen hat; unable to find my socks quickly enough, Laura sacrificed her own and flurry of hands wrestled my numb feet into them. So there I was, bundled up in an eccentric heap of blankets and clothes, being tightly hugged by Peter and Toni as I began to shiver my way slowly back to warmth and the boat bounded its way back over the increasingly agitated waves back to Sa Rapita. 

One of life's odder moments, and certainly not what I'd been hoping for when I jumped in to the water that morning.   

***

The next day, I felt sore and a bit drained, but okay and none the worse for wear apart from a slight niggle from the back injury I picked up a few weeks ago, but which eased off with a few days of stretching. But I did find myself, rather self-indulgently, churning over and over what had happened, second-guessing everything I had done, and speculating about what I could / should have done differently. I felt a little embarrassed by how badly and quickly it had all gone wrong after so many people had put in so much effort to make it happen, and I was also quite shocked at having suffered so badly from the cold, since this has really never been a problem for me before. 

But after a few days of pottering around in the sunshine, I was able to get a better perspective on the whole thing. The core problem was the timing of it - I didn't go to Mallorca specifically to do the swim so early in the season, but did the swim because I was going to be on holiday in Mallorca that week. I think that it would have been a very different experience later in the season....or even if the spring weather hadn't been so poor. As it happens, the air temps in Mallorca shot up 5-6 degrees by the end of the week, and the forecast for next week is hot, sunny and calm. Such is life and this was the gamble I chose to take. The second aspect of the timing is that it limited my own preparations, not only because it meant that I wasn't able to get any substantial open water training before the swim, but also because of the unanticipated difficulties I've had this year balancing work obligations and training. Consequently, while training should really be about preparing for when things go wrong, my preparation was such that I was only really sufficiently prepared if things went right. Again, this was the risk I chose to take and I gave it my very best shot but it wasn't enough.

So to think about it more positively: It was a great training swim for what's coming next (thanks to Kevin Murphy for reminding me of that). I also got to meet some fantastic people (Toni, Rafael and Laura) - the failure of the swim is all on me; they were superb, both when it was all going well, but perhaps more importantly, when it all went wrong. I also think that there is some value in having had that experience with the cold. Bodily, it is a quite extraordinary thing to experience and adds another dimension to some of the things I've been writing about in the book about my own experience of swimming. And it's also a good learning point - a chance to think about developing new strategies for intervening early in situations like that to try and stop the cold getting such a tight grip. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Mallorca is beautiful, and even an unsuccessful swim is an amazing adventure. 

Many thanks to Peter, Toni, Rafael and Laura - I'm sorry that it didn't work out as we'd hoped, but hopefully I'll be able to come back and have another crack at it...preferably when it's warmer!

Onwards now to Manhattan in June. 

The small defeats...

After the small victories of my last post come the small defeats....or at least the defeats that I hope are small. For the last week or so I've been experiencing quite a lot of stiffness in the upper back between my shoulder blades. I thought that this was just the result of the muscles adapting to the increased training, especially given the change in my stroke over the last year which now relies much more on the big back muscles than it used to. I've been stretching a lot to ease it out and assuming that my body would adapt to the training. But in the last few of days, this has morphed into something much more painful, especially when I'm lying down, causing trouble sleeping. I've had two days of enforced rest from swimming while my tooth recovers from my latest bout of dentistry which has helped a little, but it's definitely not right. I seem to be falling to bits. I've made an appointment to see the physio on Monday and I'm sure it's nothing that time, rest, and a bit of poking and prodding won't fix. But the timing is terrible with only two weeks to go before I go to Mallorca, especially since I already feel like I'm on the margins in terms of adequate training.

With this in mind, the urge to press on with training regardless is very compelling - each day of rest no doubt improves my chance of fixing the injury, but each day without training feels like it pushes me further away from being able to do the swim. Grrr.

But I am a grown-up, nominally at least, and will be sensible. For now. I need to keep my eyes on the bigger goal - MIMS - and can't risk messing things up by not fixing this properly. As I said....hopefully, just a small defeat.

The small victories...

Sometimes training can feel a bit of a slog. Especially with the pool training, it can feel like a lot of going nowhere. So, since Christmas, I built in a weekly 1500m time trial to get some sense of progress (or not). The results have been a bit mixed, not least because I usually do this on a Tuesday night at the end of a long day of teaching that starts at 10am and finishes at 8pm. But still, with the 1500m time of 24.40 that I put on my MIMS application last November in mind, I've been inching this down slowly. On bad days, it's been around 25.15, but this is usually because I haven't been able to grab food between classes and am too tired and hungry to swim well. But recently, I've been dipping consistently below 24.30, and yesterday, I managed a PB of 24.15. As usual, there's probably no need to alert the swimming authorities, but still, I was chuffed.

I've been using the Tempo Trainer, and have discovered a weird psychological quirk that really helps me. If I set the TT to 1.37 / 100m (which would equate to 24.15 for 1500m), then I get all stressed and tense and inevitably slow down and miss the turnarounds. But if I set it to 1.40 / 100m, I feel buoyed up by the fact that for every 100m beep I inch further ahead of myself, measuring my progress at each beep against the pillars and piles of kick boards and pull buoys along the side wall of the pool. This is what I did yesterday, and the sense of progress takes the stress out of it and makes the beeps more encouraging than tyrannical. It's a bit daft, but whatever works...

But the good news is that I am slowly speeding up, and I'm getting better at keeping my stroke together under stress, only lapsing into my drowning chicken display under extreme duress. I have now set 24.00 as my 1500m goal for the end of the season. Watch this space. But in the mean time, the small victories help on the way to the bigger swims to come.

But you swam the Channel....

This week, I had to go to the dentist. It is a mundane bit of everyday life that has no obvious place in a swimming blog, except that it's not at all mundane to me because I am scared of the dentist. And historically, I have dealt with this rumbling fear by easing myself into a powerful state of denial and simply not going. I eat well and clean my teeth with almost religious fervour, and in exchange, I have allowed myself to give in to my fear of dentistry and only engage with it very sporadically. In this case, it has been 4 years since my last visit. But then, last weekend, I munched on some delicious wholemeal bread, packed full of seeds and grains; biting down on a hard seed, a chunk of one of my back teeth broke off.   Even in my well-rehearsed state of dental denial, I had to accept that I couldn't just leave this - I'm a coward, but not an idiot.

Setting aside the cruel irony of busting a tooth on a food product presumed to bestow all kinds of health and well-being, the reason I'm telling you all this is what followed. I told a few people what had happened, no doubt seeking sympathy and support for my imagined ordeal to come. Several of my confidantes expressed surprise at my fear of the dentist, probably because I'm 45 years old and should know better, but also explicitly because they saw it as at odds with the swimming: "But you swam the Channel..." they exclaimed. I've noticed that this comes up at other times too - for example, if I complain that I'm very tired, or if I express disgust at something: "But you swam the Channel...".

I'm intrigued by what this says both about how I am seen, and about how Channel swimming is seen. When I was training for my Channel swim in 2010, my colleague and friend, Rachel Cohen, categorised for me the negative responses that I had received (and that she had received when telling people about it in her role as vicarious follower of Channel swimming) in the following schematic, drawn on my office whiteboard:

There's a lot of talk within the marathon swimming community, especially in the ongoing debates about maintaining the 'purity' of the sport, that people outside of the sport might underestimate its challenges in the wake of high profile or undeclared 'assisted' crossings. But my experience is really the opposite - that people overestimate it, often projecting their own fears onto their imagination of what the swimming involves. Many people, including competent swimmers, fear deep water because of the inability to see what lies below; others are disgusted by imagined slicks of pollution, sewerage and other sordid nasties. As an aside, my favourite response so far to the news that I'm doing MIMS is: "But isn't it full of bodies?" By extension, then, these assumptions also presume my own bravery in overcoming these obstacles (and perhaps the foolish pointlessness of doing so) - a bravery that is projected into a universal character trait that then presumes my immunity to fears in other aspects of my life, both irrational and rational. This is very far from the truth. 

Firstly, fear is highly contextual and idiosyncratic, especially where fears are irrational or disproportionate. Someone who fears the pollution of dead bodies floating in the waters around Manhattan does not necessarily fear the dentist. And secondly, it's only brave if you're afraid of it in the first place. Swimming the Channel says nothing about my ability to overcome fear, since there is little about it that I find frightening. I have certainly felt moments of fear: for example, at the start of my Catalina Channel swim I was almost paralysed with fear about sharks when it was time to jump in. I have also had moments of profound disgust; a shiver of repulsion still runs down my spine when I recall getting a jellyfish full on in the face in Dover harbour - squishy body, then long tentacles dragging across my face and then down the full length of my body. It was toe-curlingly vile, and it was only the embarrassment of having to explain why I was getting out that kept me in the water. But in the bigger picture, I am neither afraid of, nor disgusted by, Channel swimming, and as a result, I don't experience it as a 'brave' thing to do. (I do think it's pretty pointless, but for me, that's the glory of it). 

In short, then, having swum the Channel did nothing to help me when I sloped reluctantly to the dentist last week, just as my ability to be in cold water for long periods has done absolutely nothing to change my complete intolerance of the cold in any other setting (central heating, layers of clothes, electric blanket...I want it all). Context is everything. 

And my tooth is fine, thank you for asking. Or at least it will be after next Wednesday when I've had the permanent repair done. Perhaps I'll just go swimming instead....

Inspiration...

It's been a difficult month or so, with more work than I had planned for and a lot of disruption to my already tightly packed schedule of eating, sleeping, working and swimming in constant rotation. It turns out that training for long swims while on research leave (as I was for my English Channel swim) and training with a full teaching workload, a big admin job and an endlessly unwritten book are two very different beasts, and I have found myself wondering whether it's even realistic. It's certainly felt rather inhumane at times this term. I have even been thinking about pulling out of one or more of my swims for this year (crazy talk....but it's been a tough term!).

And then two things came along. Firstly - the sunshine! It's about time, but at last, Spring is well and truly in the air. I can almost hear the water warming up, and the nights of trudging to the pool in the cold and dark will soon be replaced with the open water evenings. And secondly, Emma France posted this video - a slide show she made for the CS&PF dinner last Saturday (which I wasn't able to go to, but which looked like a good night). In many ways, training has been a bit of a chore lately than it should be - more like work than leisure. But this reminded me of the reasons to stick with it. Only 5 weeks to the Cabrera Channel, with plenty more fun to come.