Tuesday 29th June
Have done 6 long sea swims now and it looks like we're all ready to go , spent the afternoon with my pilot yesterday ironing out the last creases in the plan, and will be setting off any time (weather dependent) from this Thursday!
Saturday 12th June
Have been swimming in Dover harbour today, at around 12degrees C. Absolutely freezing, I was shivering after only half an hour, but still managed to stay in the water for about 4 hours, getting about 8 miles done. Am going back tomorrow to try and hit a 6 hour swim, and aim for 12.
Thursday 10th June
Trainings going well- Off for my first major swim in the sea this saturday, hopefully going to get 6 hours down on Saturday and 6 hours down on Sunday, the lakes are getting a bit warm now so aren't really representitive of the temperature I'll be swimming in. Also will be useful to be swimming in the waves etc. Pretty psyched! Have been doing some pretty big Open water swims ( my biggest being around 6/7 miles) recently, and intend to get 12 and 10 miles respectively done this weekend!
Monday 29th March
Term is over and I have returned home to Marlow- which is great for having nice food/clean clothes etc but not so good for training, I only have access to a 20m pool now (which may seem a lot but when a push off accounts for roughly 10m you're only swimming half the time!). Have decided as a result that I'll do some swimming to maintain my fitness but concentrate for this month on gaining weight ( in order to insulate me in the North Sea I'll need a nice layer of blubber!). As such I'm maintaining my calorific intake at around 9000 calories/day but swimming fewer times per week and for less time ( albeit at a higher intensity).
Monday 23rd November
Morning all- 9:30am, just finished a gruelling 3 hour sesh with the uni swim team (10k!)
I thought it would be useful to make clear why I'm attempting to swim the channel and what I hope to achieve from it, so here goes...
First and foremost, its to raise money for DUCK (Durham University Charities Kommittee). I had the pleasure of participating in a jailbreak for DUCK (get as far as possible from Durham without paying for transport in 36 hours, we got to Belgium) last year, and in order to ask people for sponsorship I read up on what DUCK does, and was rather pleasantly surprised.
DUCK is run exclusively by students at Durham and raises over half a million pounds a year; this sum is then broken down and distributed between thousands of charities far and wide, to see the breakdown of donations last year, follow this link:
http://duck.dsu.org.uk/charities/recipients/
The long and the short of it is I want to contribute to this- and aim to raise £4,000 in sponsorship in total ( £2000 to cover the boat and £2000 to be split between DUCK, Cancer Research and a few other Charities). Any sponsorship would be massively, massively appreciated, and I'll link to my "just giving" page in the next post.
Secondly, I feel swimming the channel is the ultimate physical challenge- 1350 lengths of a pool... through the busiest shipping lane in the world... the biggest problem not even being this gargantuan distance but the very real chance of hypothermia. As stands roughly 1 in 10 people who attempt it complete it, and until the late 1990's more people had been in space than had done so. I'm pretty nervous already.
Geraint
Friday 6th November
5:50am , about to head off to the pool, just missed another nights sleep (didn't finish work at the a nightclub where I work until 2:30am), only got lectures until 2pm today though so nice 4-5 hour nap this afternoon. Going to try and get 6 miles done this morning, the university session finishes at 8, but I think I'm going to stay in the pool till 9. Have set targets for weekly mileage until the big swim:
November: 22 miles a week
December: 24 miles a week
January: 28 miles a week
Febuary: 30 miles a week
March: 35 miles a week
April: 35 miles a week (5 of which in open water) + one off 20 mile swim
May: 35 miles a week (10 of which in open water) + one off 25 mile swim
June: 40 miles a week (20 of which in open water) + one off 30 mile swim
July: swim the channel!
Thursday 22nd October
Hey there!
I have created this blog in order to enable people to follow my progress in my attempt to swim the channel in July 2009. I thought I'd put my training as well as any thoughts on here, updated maybe twice or three times a week.
I'm about a month into my training now- and I've been maintaining about 3-4miles a day, every day, for the duration. I'm going to try and up my mileage each month, hopefully culminating in a 30mile swim in the pool before attempting the 21 miles across the Channel. The only slight inconvenience is that I've made the university swim team- but as a sprint freestyler, so I have to both try to maintain my speed in order to not let my team down, and build stamina so that I can swim for however many hours without stopping.
Thanks for reading!
Geraint
