Cold Water Swimming Articles Index

When you’ve swum in snow, you’re a true cold water swimmer

This article is a bit of much-overdue site maintenance. I’ve used cold as a category, but doing so allows a few less relevant articles to creep up higher in results. Therefore this post is an index with a very brief explanation of the article so you can scan the entire list for what is most relevant for your question or to your area of specific interest.

I was a bit surprised to see just how many I’ve written, though obviously I knew there were a few since it’s my favourite subject.

Articles sometimes tackle a similar area from a different angle, some focus on one small aspect of the cold-water swimming experience. This is a body of articles with which I’m quite happy.

If I had one simple message it’s that cold water swimming is dangerous, difficult and requires repetition to improve. No-one does it naturally or easily.

By exploring the many aspects of cold; environmental, physiological and psychological, I hope to help you understand cold better and therefore become a more confident cold water swimmer. These articles therefore are intended to help swimmers adapt to cold water swimming.

It is really important to repeat that most of us are not naturally good at tolerating cold. (I certainly am not). Cold should be seen as something you train for, the same as any other aspect of your swimming.

Habituation. The process of getting used to getting into cold water. This is where it all starts and was therefore the first cold water swimming article I wrote.

Acclimatization. the process of developing tolerance for staying in cold water.

“I just can’t handle the cold”. Part 1, Part 2 (What is the Vagus nerve and why is it important?), Part 3 (Fear). This is a phrase I hear a lot. Why this belief is irrelevant and why you, or I, are not special when it comes to cold.

One of my hypothermia experiences. It happens to us all. That’s part of the deal.

How To: Prepare for cold water swim. Practical precautions around cold water swimming.

Prepare, Monitor, Recover. A short article on part of experienced cold water swimmers’ ethos.

Men, women and cold. Understanding gender differences in cold water exposure and tolerance.

Brown Fat vs. white fat. Interesting and very relevant recent scientific findings that have direct relevance to cold water swimmers.

Brown Fat. A revised version of the previous post.

Merino wool, my favourite cold weather clothes for per & post swimming.

“What temperature of water is too cold to swim in”. The most common search term into this site.

“What temperature of water is too cold to swim in” Redux. An updated version of the above post with a fuller list of factors affecting the answer.

The cumulative effective of cold water swimming. How it feels to swim in really cold water for many consecutive days.

Six hour swim in sub-eleven degree water. The second toughest swim I’ve ever done.

Christmas and New Year’s Day swim advice. Comprehensive advise for irregular swimmers in cold water. Applies to any irregular swims and swimmers.

Extreme Cold Water Adaptation in Humans. A five-part series trying to tease out all the various factors of cold adaptation: Part 1 Asking the questions about individual variability, Part 2 (habituation and acclimatization), Part 3 (metabolic responses), Part 4 (further physiological responses), Part 5 (conclusion).

How we FEEL cold water. Concerning the body’s thermo-receptive response to cold water.

Always wear a belt. A lesson learned (and sometimes forgotten) about cold water swimming.

Peripheral vaso-constriction. The bodies primary physiological response to cold, in picture.

Wearing a watch. The primary safety device on cold water.

The important of stroke and the deficiencies of Total Immersion type swimming in cold water. Following the wrong advice for cold water is dangerous. Stroke rate is very important.

“Is the water too cold to swim”? Another different take on this popular question.

Winter. I like it. I hate it. The dichotomy of a cold water swimmer’s thoughts.

Introducing a Precise Open Water Temperature Scale. This site’s most popular article.

Come with me on this cold water swim. As close as I can take you to my experiences of swimming in cold water during the Irish winter.

Cold water swimming and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Another experiential post of cold water swimming, with some musing.

Understanding the Claw. What is the Claw and why do cold water swimmers get it?

“W here did my Claw go?” Further discussion on the Claw amongst experienced swimmers, the Claw being a common occurrence for cold water swimmers.

How To – Understanding Mild Hypothermia in swimmers. To address hypothermia, it is best to understand it. Mild hypothermia is more common than not amongst cold water swimmers.

How To – Understanding Moderate and Severe Hypothermia in swimmers. There’s nothing moderate about Moderate hypothermia.

How To – Diagnosing and addressing Moderate Hypothermia in swimmers. Understanding cold for support crew.

Cold water and cold immersion shock, the first three minutes. It’s really important to understand what happens the body in the vital first few minutes of swimming in cold water.

Speaking as a Coldologist… Analysing (and debunking) a claim to cold adaptation through meditation.

WHY would anyone swim in cold water? Trying to answer the LEAST asked question about cold water swimming.

Cold water swimming and alcohol. They don’t mix and are a dangerous combination. This is important.

Loneswimmer returns from the sea, with the commandments of cold water swimming

The Ten Commandments of Cold Water Swimming. I am the prophet of cold water!

Ice Miles: My First Attempt, Part One (The swim). My First Attempt, Part Two (Post swim and analysis). My Second Attempt. Ciarán Byrne’s report of the successful Lough Iochtar Ice Mile.

What is Cold Water Diuresis in swimmers? Another physiological response to cold explained.

The relevance of shivering in cold water swimming. Yet another important to understand physiological response to cold.

The Magic Number. A consideration of transitional temperatures in cold water swimming.

“How much do I need to swim for – x – open water distance?”

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With the Northern hemisphere open water season getting underway, and temperatures in many locations edging around the magic number, (10C/50F) , open water related questions inevitably arise as each year brings new swimmers and more triathletes.

A common question is some variation of:

I want to swim 1.5k/3k/3k/10k, can I do it or what should I do to prepare?

There are different answers for this depending on many factors:

What is your swimming experience?
What is your current swim training?
What is your open water experience?
Wetsuit or not?
Sea, river or lake?
How long do you have to prepare?

I have covered many aspects of these questions, such as getting started, essential rules of cold water swimming, basic skills, swimming in different conditions, etc. (The How To category has more of these).

To swim any significant distance in open water the first requirement is regular swimming every week. This seems obvious but some people seem to think it isn’t. For almost any distance from 1k up, you should probably be swimming a minimum of three times a week. If your intended swim is over 5k, three times is probably not enough. Less swimming experience means that building up to regular swimming should be a longer transition as sudden increases will lead to a) injury and b) burnout.

The second most important requirement, and one of the biggest mistakes beginners make, is to not get sufficient or even any open water experience before the actual event. Open water is De Facto not like a pool. Every day is different: Winds blow (or not), from different directions at different speeds in different weather conditions. Water conditions change dynamically, even during events. **You MUST get appropriate experience beforehand**. You must practice your skills, especially sighting and navigation, but also pack swimming, rough water, fear, contact with other swimmers.

* **A wetsuit is NOT A SAFETY AID**.

Many experienced open water swimmers feel very strongly that people substitute wetsuits for training and experience. A frightening video that was pointed out by Evan on freshwaterswimmer.com of 2012′s Escape From Alcatraz. Watch it. Experienced open water swimmers view this video with genuine amazement at the ineptitude on display both of swimmers and safety crew and logically therefore of the organisation. This is a lumpy day by OW standards but certainly manageable for experienced swimmers. Even has also previously discussed the matter of wetsuits and safety in open water swimming and made the excellent point that while a wetsuit may confer some protection for INDIVIDUALS, in a GROUP of swimmers the use of wetsuits lessens overall safety because organisers use them as a safety crutch, so to speak. See also Phil’s comment on this point in the comment section below. Swimming in rough water is something that requires practice.

YOU CANNOT SUBSTITUTE A WETSUIT FOR TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE.

Just because an event allows you to enter with your limited experience means nothing. Some just want your money. Events which have real qualifications requirement are not elitist. The organisers are experienced and aware of the dangers and attempting to reduce risk beforehand. As I’ve said before, safety decisions are best made outside the water. These are the *good events*. We all have to build up through various qualification levels to get into longer swims. This is the smart way to do it and organisers that understand this are to be trusted. Faking your qualification puts you and others in danger.

* You cannot safely swim 1k this week, 10k next week and do a 15k swim in the third week. Increases in training should be limited to an average of 5% per week. You shouldn’t go above this unless you have previous experience in ramping up swimming volume. That means if you swim 5,000 metres this week, in a month you will be swimming barely over 6,000 metres. You can prove me wrong, maybe, in the short-term, but in the long-term to do otherwise will lead to inevitable injury.

BUT HOW MUCH DO I NEED TO TRAIN?

There is no simple answer. However…

Endurance swimmers and athletes have a few rules of thumb:

You can swim in a day what you swim in a week.

This is a reasonable guideline for medium to longer distances. I find it is most used from about 20k to 45k distances. If you are swimming these distances then you likely have your own opinion and may disagree with me. This is absolutely fine, since you know what you are doing and we all are different and I’m not trying to give an absolute rule. If you don’t have experience however, this is a reasonable rule.

This rule breaks down at the lower end. If want to swim 1k open water, you should be able to swim 1k in the pool without any difficulty and you should be swimming at least three times a week and more than 1,000 metres. If you struggle to swim 1k in the pool, you shouldn’t be swimming open water at all.

You can swim 4 times longer than your longest training swim FOR ONE-OFF EVENTS.

This is a very old rule. The last part means that doing this in the absence of regular training means injury is more likely. You may get through it on grit but you won’t do it regularly.

So, I haven’t given you a clear answer. That because there is no single formula.

Open water requires training, experience and a realistic approach (because it’s dangerous and anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong).

Here’s a very loose training guideline that should help you swim your events comfortably, assuming you also have the open water experience. All of these assume one day of swimming open water per week from spring to your event. This is a much larger subject and this is very brief thumbnail sketch.

Target event: 1k. Swim 2k at least three times a week.

Target event: 1.5k/1 mile. Swim 3k at least three times a week, or 2k four times a week.

Target event: 3k. Swim 4k at least three times a week, or 4k three times a week

Target event: 5k. Swim 4k at least four times a week. Swim 5k once per week.

Target event: 10k. Swim 5k at least three times a week, but swim at least 4 times a week. Weekly target of 15k minimum.

Target event: 15k. Swim minimum of 20k per week.

Target event: 25k. Swim minimum 25k per week. There’s more variation here. Some experienced swimmers like to train less for marathon swims. I’m not one of them and my own experience and what I’ve seen of others means I believe strongly that in marathon swimming you have to be trained for when things go wrong.

A Tale of Two Swims in San Francisco Bay (freshwaterswimmer.com)

Illness and injury breaks – Do we ever really learn?

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I did a 17k pool swim with Gábor at the end of April. It went fine but the next day I developed a head-cold. I doubt they were related as I’ve never been sick after a long pool swim previously and I’ve done quite a few over the past three years, but it was co-incidental, I think.

I’ve mentioned previously that I have asthma, which could be considered mild in that I have a generally good understanding and control of it and the triggers, and make sure to use a steroid preventer while pool training. I very rarely get a head-cold, maybe once a year. Not so mild however should an asthma attack develop. Like many asthmatics (I hate that word, it leads people to make incorrect assumptions), a head-cold or ‘flu may lead to a bacterial chest infection, which always signals trouble for those with asthma. This inevitably means a drop in lung function and aerobic capacity, and therefore swimming capability. And I did indeed develop a chest infection within three days of the head-cold. A course of antibiotics swiftly followed, I recognise the symptoms by now and don’t hesitate. Swimming was out for over a week. But when I returned the first day, I felt fine. However I deteriorated again within a few days, my lungs feeling like they were full of broken glass.

The symptom for me while swimming is always first a light tickle in my throat, then a mild cough, which will increase in intensity and urgency as I swim further and longer, until I am coughing underwater and struggling to take in enough air to breathe. It’s always a losing battle so I’m better off to just stop. I almost never do this in time for some stupid reason.

The next two weeks were typified by feeling recovered, going to the pool and then deteriorating in the next day or two and then having to break again. it also led to a second course of antibiotics and oral steroids.

This isn’t to share my medical history but is just a long intro to the short lesson that like a lot of people used to training, and maybe especially swimmers, the thing I often struggle the most with, is taking a necessary break for illness or injury. Whereas at other times when I am actually healthy, I might not feel like training at all.

I have gotten used to both training hard and needing and taking weekly rest breaks. I think rest breaks are the most difficult thing for athletes to learn and taking breaks because of illness and injury, like on this occasion, are the second most difficult. (Overtraining is a whole other subject, and one that is too often invoked). I took my initial enforced break because I actually couldn’t swim. I had thought I got the timing right of returning but when I did return and that didn’t go well, that’s when I made the mistake trying to continue training. At that point, it was difficult to know how much more time to take on the second or subsequent break and consequently I probably prolonged my recovery. I know I lost at least 60,000 metres from my target over the course of those three and a half weeks, which is how long it took before I was sure I was recovered and could start swimming properly again.

And then when I could swim again, my conditioning felt like it had reverted to that of early winter. Not really because of the break, but more because of the deterioration in lung capacity. And therefore needing to repeat all the winter work required to get fit once again, not a pleasant prospect.

One of the reasons we struggle to take a break is because it’s tough to look at what training you’ve already completed and know that you are going to lose some or maybe even a lot of your gains. I don’t think I have any particular advice here, just that even with experience, getting the timing right can be difficult as illnesses can take individual recovery trajectories and it’s sometimes very difficult to estimate the time off and the recuperation necessary.

That’s the thing isn’t it? We all keep making mistakes, and we all keep learning.

Half-arsing transition week

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In 2010 during English Channel training Coach Eilís imposed certain strictures and deadlines. One of these was that on the first week of May we would swap from primarily pool training to primarily sea training.

May. It’s a word and name laden with the promise of summer. In Ireland and the UK may is also the name for blackthorn trees which cover the landscape, and are one of the primary trees which appear especially in hedges. (The old saying Cast not a clout ’til May is out, is often a misunderstanding, that the May referred to therein is the month when it is actually the tree. It means to not remove winter clothing until the blackthorn has blossomed). But for swimmers May can mean warming air temperatures but can also mean lingering bone-chilling cold water.

Sea pinks and vetch on the Newtown cliffs

The days of short winter weekend 10 to 20 minutes swims are over as swimmers feel they have to start lengthening out their training times.

In 2010 the training schedule called for an hour on the first day. And that time to increase every subsequent day. The first hour was done on Sunday, the temperature was ten degrees. The second day I swam one hour and ten minutes and was moderately hypothermic, not remembering a conversation I had with one of the Guillamenes locals afterwards. Each subsequent day became harder and my times never got any longer. By Thursday I cracked, phoning Eilís and, shall we say, haranguing her.

I’ve thought of the first week of May ever since as Transition Week and I think it is the toughest week of training of the year for Sandycove Channel Aspirants. Each day is slightly tougher, each day’s cold bites a bit deeper and lasts a bit longer, and each day’s recovery takes a bit more from your reserves.

I didn’t do Transition week last year and this year I had no plans to do it until, deep shock, we actually got some sunshine on the May Holiday weekend and the tides were lining up nicely. So I decided to half-arse it. By which I mean I wouldn’t do anywhere the same amount of swim time, but I’d have a go at trying to get a swim each evening.

I started at Kilfarrassey on Saturday. The tide was high late morning and the wind was onshore. It was a longer than usual lumpy swim out to the far side of Burke’s Island where it was too rough to swim in the centre channel or through the arch. I was back at the beach after about 45 minutes and a bit chilly.

On Sunday I swam at Ballymacaw, as you’ve already seen, about the same time. But due to the cold water outside I got a bit colder.

On Monday evening I swam to Tramore Pier, just around high tide. The water was a bit choppy, the swim down took 18 minutes and the swim back against the tide took 32. I’m so used the location that I forget that it can actually display an adverse tidal current at high tide on an onshore wind. Total time was 50 minutes but I wasn’t very cold.

Tuesday evening I swam out to the Metalman, second of my usual swims in the bay. The other include under Doneraile Head and back, the beach and back, or the Tramore Bay Double, Guillamenes to beach to Guillamenes. Conditions were still choppy and the evening was cloudy and cooler. I only swam 45 minutes.

Looking over to the Guillamenes in rough water

Throughout Wednesday the winds were building, but they were south-westerly so I hoped for some shelter from Great Newtown Head. However conditions were quite rough, with about a three metre swell. I love swimming in swell, even if, as was the case there was chop on top of the swell, but as I’ve said previously, the exit in choppy conditions is usually the most dangerous time in rough water. If the water is surging up the ladder and steps more than about six feet I forego the pleasure in favour of safety but this evening displayed the exception makes rule to my own safety rules. Because high tide was now in the evening, and it was also a spring tide with a strong onshore the water was washing up to the top of the steps. I timed the swell for ten minutes and found a period of about 10 to 12 seconds, despite the onshore wind.

Gorse and pinks on the cliff above an unswimmable Newtown Cove

I went back to the cliff top and looked at Newtown Cove just in case, but it was an unswimmable whitewater maelstrom and anyone trying to get back into the cove from outside was asking to be shredded on reefs. I returned to the Guillamenes and got changed. I very gingerly but still trying to be brisk used the railing to make it to the dropoff and threw myself extremely ungracefully into a gap. I swam very wide around the outside, heading east toward Powerstown Head for 50 t 75 metres before swinging south and down into the washing machine. This is the area directly outside Newtown Cove, along which runs a reef perpendicular to the coast which cause larger waves passing over it to rear up steeply, but usually not break. Swimming through or avoiding the washing machine was one of the early peculiarities I learned about Tramore Bay. I sat in the water and tried to take a few photos, and shot some video, just for fun and swam a few circles. In these conditions I was very wary about changes to the swell period or height that wouldn’t be apparent to me in the water so I didn’t want to stay out long. After 15 minutes I was back at the cove and I carefully watched a few waves while I set my position; not too close to the steel railings to be washed on the or the rocks right beside, not too far to make it in quickly. I darted in swimming well over the steel railings usually and grabbing the left side, trying to get braced before the next wave washed around the platform and across the steps. It was close, my footing was taken but because I was the seaward side of the railings being pushed onto them I was still braced. Had I grabbed the railings on the inside or on the right side, I could have been ripped off. Sharply to my feet again and out. A very short but fun swim.

What a 3 metre swell at the the Guillamenes looks like in the water

What a 3 metre swell at the Guillamenes looks like in the water

Thursday’s winds were even stronger and ended the hoped-for seven days of sea swimming. Not a huge amount of swimming, but it was a fun start to the summer swimming. (Not a single jellyfish yet seen, which is becoming increasingly strange. I’m beginning to worry they might be preparing an ambush).

And so I call it “half-arsing transition week”.

The Magic Number

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Cold water swimmers have a finely tuned thermo-receptive sense, an ability to judge water temperature reasonably accurately, just from how it feels on our skin. It’s something that develops with time, experience and swimming.

As an experienced pool manager my friend Clare told me that regular bathers will notice a temperature difference in warm water of half a degree. So you can imagine that cold water swimmers will probably have a similar ability.

I’ve written and often referenced my Precise Open Water Temperature Scale, one of this site’s most popular articles. It was a humourous attempt to convey some of that precision and personal experience. And the search term that still brings people in for this subject and is another of the site’s other most popular articles “what temperature of water is too cold to swim in“.

We refine this innate temperature-sensing ability as a result of regular immersion and the training of various aspects of the physiological response; habituation lowering our pre-immersion heart rate and eventually lowering stress hormones, and acclimatisation improving our cold exposure times, and we also get better at evaluating our thermo-receptive reaction. Of course you can only say that water feels like twelve degrees, if you have an actual thermometer so that you can do the comparison.

In those previous posts I’ve deliberately not put a precise figure on the question of what is too cold, because there are too many variables: the person experience, height and weight, the ambient air temperature and the local climate, the wind, the person’s drive to swim and more. I once read a Philippines swimmer say that water temperature of 21 degrees Celsius was too cold to swim. Of course the climate and ambient there is not just warm, but hot. Relatively cold water occurs at a higher temperature the higher the air temperature. The burden of constant cold for open water swimmers in Ireland, the UK and some other locations such as the Atlantic coast of South Africa, having no choice but to swim in cold water, is also an advantage, as we must acclimatise.

Nonetheless it is a fact that here in Ireland and in the UK and many other places such as the swimmers of San Francisco or Chicago, there is a Magic Number. That number is ten degrees Celsius, which (helpfully) is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. 10°/50° we could call it.

The Magic Number comes and goes. It goes when we get it in November or early December when the temperature is dropping and there’s rarely any temporary recovery. Once the water drops to 10°C, winter is here and there is little impetus to try to extend swims.

On the other hand we wait anxiously for the Magic Number to arrive, for the water to reach that level after the six long months of cold. The cold isn’t gone but at ten degrees hour-long swims can occur, often much more. Ten degrees, fifty degrees tease us more. The Magic Number may slide up for a weekend or a week only for the water to dip back to nine degrees again. It will probably, in a normal year, make its first appearance in April and dip again in early May.

Locations that were out of reach over the winter are once more attainable. Tramore pier and back or Doneraile Head laps can resume. I can start swimming to the Metalman or around Brown’s Island again, each year like rediscovering those locations anew. The Sandycove swimmers will be double-lapping the island. Our swimming range extends and the world grows large again.

At ten degrees Celsius, fifty degrees Fahrenheit, the watery world is ours once again.

What temperature of water is too cold to swim in? It’s not 10°/50°. That’s the Magic Number.

Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 2 – Environmental Factors (loneswimmer.com)
Spring is swum (loneswimmer.com)
Temperature Conversion Guide (swimmersrock.com)

Ballymacaw – Swimming a new location 2

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I love swimming at my favourite places such as Kilfarassey, Sandycove and the Guillamenes. but I also love swimming at new places and there aren’t that many left to me on the Waterford Coast. It’s been some time since I did Project Copper Coast, swimming from Powerstown Head as far as Stradbally. There’s a gap of about two kilometres still unswum at Ballyvoyle Head, then all of Dungarvan Bay is swum (I hope to close that gap this year). There’s a long inaccessible stretch of coast with high cliffs from Helvick Head to Ardmore Bay, which stretch of coast is home to Ireland’s highest lighthouse at Mine Head and also still untackled apart from a couple of swims off Clare’s boat back in 2010. In 2011, I wrote a post on swimming a new location (Whiting Bay) and how I went about it, and this covers a similar theme of swimming a new location, but with different considerations.

Last year I travelled away from the Copper Coast closer to the Waterford Estuary, on the far (east) side of Tramore Bay and before Dunmore East, a less-travelled stretch of coast, and did an exploratory swim out of Portally Cove, where I discovered strong westerly currents running toward Dunmore East.

The May Holiday weekend brought some very rare sun and a little bit of warmth, and a belief that I was finally recovering from a protracted chest infection. The water temperature seemed stable at around 10 degrees in Kilfarassey, so I decided I’d spent the day on the coast at the far side of Tramore Bay again.

Saleens warning sign

We started the morning at the Saleens, the beach and channel at the east side of Tramore Bay. The channel separates the Back Bay, a tidal lagoon from the main bay and as such has a very strong current running through it.

From there we moved onward to Ballymacaw on the far side of Powerstown Head, which I’d only ever visited twice previously on a bad day and low tide. This occasion was a nice day, close to high tide. Like Portally, Ballymacaw is another tiny narrow and short high-sided cove, on the west side of the estuary but away from any main road. If you remember, tidal range here in Ireland is about 5 metres average so at low tide both Portally and Ballymacaw Coves are almost dry and at high tide the coves are completely flooded. Prior to swimming Dee and I walked the path through the dense gorse bushes out to the old slipway, and then out beyond the cove entry for a good look outside the cove. Eastwards the next headland is Swines Head, to where I had swum from out of Portally. West from Ballymacaw is toward Powerstown Head and inaccessible from land, though the coast and cliffs are typically only about five to ten metres high, there are no roads.

Ballymacaw Cove & the old slipway – (the new lens Polarizer is working out!)

The wind was fresh, about Force Three and there was plenty of movement in the water. With still cool water, it was earlier than usually to be doing an exploratory swim so it would need to be short. Not least because with my weight loss and less exposure training than usually, I’ve lost some of my hardening and feeling 45 minutes is about enough currently without wanting to push hard into a colder state. For this short exploratory swim at a new location, I had a number of things to evaluate and weigh beforehand

Swimming time
Currents
Rocks
Water state (roughness)
Wind direction

Looking east from Ballymacaw to Swines Head

Our walk out to the cliff outside the cove entrance gave a good view of the coast on either side. Also the water state of the sea and a good look at the rough water around the cove entrance. The cove itself was completely flat but right at the ten to fifteen metre-wide entrance there was a lot of movement in the water and reefs just visibly breaking the surface on the west side. The sea outside the cove had plenty of onshore wind, blowing south-westerly onto shore at a slight angle and the water was very choppy though with no big swell. Chop waves were one to two metres high.

Ballymacaw Cove entrance and the old slipway

Back at the car, I changed and explained my plan to Dee. The cove is about 300 metres long at high tide, it might take me four to five minutes to reach the entrance and the rough water at which point I would disappear from her view. With the wind blowing onshore but with a slight westerly element, I would swim into the chop. It was high tide, and though most people don’t believe me, high on the Waterford coast is NOT slack tide and I knew the tidal current would still be running east, though I couldn’t estimate any local eddy current effects which would run anti-clockwise. I also knew that there had been strong westerly currents from the west moving in this direction previously when I’d swum out of Portally and I would always choose to swim into an unknown current when heading out. The obvious rationale is that I don’t want to get carried too far away from a starting place by a strong current, and possibly have too difficult a swim back while getting cold.

So I would swim west for 15 minutes after leaving the cove, evaluating travelled distance as I went. If there was no current I would be then have 15 minutes back, plus another few minutes getting back to the beach, 40 minutes total. I wear a watch always when swimming open water so I’d be able to judge. Dee asked at what point should she start worrying, so I said 45 minutes, at which point she could walk up on the path to give her a better chance to see me.

As I was about to get ready a couple of guys were also getting changed into scuba gear. They were somewhat familiar with the cove, and indicated no items of concern, except a steep drop-off to 10 metres at the eastern exit of the cove and a consequent sharp drop in temperature. Just before I was ready to get in however, the worst of all possible arrivals, appeared in the bay: Three jetskis. Even in the flat water of the cove I didn’t want to risk getting in so I got back in the car. The jetskis tied up to the outside old slipway, and the guys came inland along the winding gorse path. they could only have come out of Dunmore East, the only possible water entrance for many miles. They came along the path, obviously heading for the pub near the cove. I had a chat and let them know I was heading out and there were already divers out there. They were nicer chaps but while I can’t be certain they were going for a drink, there was no-where else to go on that road and drinking and being on jetski isn’t illegal here, as far as I know. Another reason to add to my nervousness about jetskis.

Ballymacaw angler

It’s a very long lead-in for a short swim. As expected I reached the cove entrance after four and half minutes and immediately hit a line of choppy water. Just under the surface was a long reef reaching out from the west side of the entrance. I passed an angler who was positioned on rocks at the est side of the entrance and headed westward. The chop was coming south-westerly with the wind, about a metre and a half high. The jetskiers had warned me it was “big out there”. One a half metres of chop isn’t big, just messy and slow. After fifteen of grinding through it, I had travelled the glorious distance of maybe 400 metres! The westerly tidal current I’d expected was running strong. I released Duck #4 and turned back to the Cove entrance, impossible to see from seaward unless you are directly in front and close. The swim that had taken 15 minutes out took 5 minutes back!

Ballymacaw Cove entrance from the sea

Getting into the cove was quick over the reefs with the waves at the reef entrance providing a quick surf into calm water. I’d had been 30 minutes, so I swam to the beach in the warmer water at the high tide mark, and turned back for a couple of laps. I’d forgotten how tough it was to swim out of water that had helped you recover from much colder water. Warm water feels nice…if you are not leaving it for cold water. Swimming back out the cove was brutal. The warmer water had restarted my circulation so I had inadvertently initiated Afterdrop, cooling faster, and now I was hit by colder water again. I lasted another 10 minutes before I I was out of the water.

But the purpose of the swim, an initial scouting swim at a new relatively unknown location, though short, was successful. I’d like to stress that when swimming a new location, having a plan, an understanding of the constraints and possible problems and an idea of how to approach it, are all important.

I repeat that tides are a vital consideration for many locations and a solid understanding is essential for safety and swimming new locations in tidal areas.

Sea pinks against the sky. yes, it's time for me to start taking lots of photos of sea pinks again.

Sea pinks against the sky. Yes, it’s the time of year for me to start taking lots of photos of sea pinks again.

How To: Using Tide Tables (loneswimmer.com)
Spring is swum (loneswimmer.com)
Swimming a new location (loneswimmer.com)

How To: Using Tide Tables

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Because I live and swim in Ireland, I am constantly made aware of the large tidal range here.

I’ve written extensively about tides previously because I feel they are an aspect of open water swimming not appreciated by enough swimmers and because global variations can mean that many people never see nor even realise the apparent extremities of a higher tidal range in other locations. I therefore think a better understanding of tides is important for open waters for safety reasons.

To understand tides better is to increase your knowledge, your range of options and responses and locations and therefore your safety around the coast. Combined with this is that tidal knowledge is sometimes incorrect, that people make very basic incorrect assumptions, that the tide goes directly in and out from the shore regardless of the coastal position, is amongst the most common misconception (which is only true in some locations).

Because of this North East Atlantic tidal variation, most experienced Irish and United Kingdom sea-goers are used to checking tide times when the sea is not immediately visible to them daily.

You can revisit some of the more detailed tide articles I’ve written but for a brief recap let’s remember that each tide is about six hours and fifteen minutes, which means that high and low tide times change each day. A practical consequence of this is that Sandycove, which is usually swum above half-tide, usually only swim times designated for group swims every second weekend. (I am luckier at the Guillamenes as it is deeper water and can be swum on any tide).

Let’s a look at some graphs and data of a daily tide cycle, for the week I’m writing this. This data comes from MagicSeaweed’s Tramore tide report. The undulating sine wave indicates the rising and falling tide. You can see that there are four tides in each 24 hour period and that each tide on this current cycle varies from just under six hours to about six and a half, with rising tides being longer than falling tides. On each chart you can also see the tide heights of high and low tide. As the four days pass the range between high and low decreases, and the high tide gets lower as the low tide gets higher, all indicators that the tide is moving from a Spring tide to a Neap tide, this pattern of changes from springs to neaps and visa versa repeating every two weeks.

Tide programs and applications are usually similar in this presentation and a good understanding can mean a quick glance at a tide table can tell you a lot. Since I know that spring tides here are over 5 metres, I can tell immediately from this where in the lunar tide cycle we are. Lower tidal range means lower tidal currents, (not usually a concern for me anyway), important information for some locations.

The other usual tide tool, which I prefer myself, is an annual national tide table. These are currently about €3.00 for the pocket-sized book and I keep one in the car. There are two types of tide table books. Those often issued by the local port or regional publishing company, and a national one. Ireland is small enough that a localised tide table is too specific and of little utility if one is visiting the far side of the country.

I find physical Tide Tables more utilitarian. Always to hand when needed, and useful for longer term planning many months in advance. Free and online tide apps usually don’t provide future tide times.

More importantly in Ireland, the island nature of the country makes the tidal situation far more complicated than many people realise, with the tides washing around the coast in diverging or even opposing directions. Therefore the Tide Table is sub-divided into five regions with further tide time offsets (delays) to even more localised ports. This provides a level of forecasting that gives a far greater level of accuracy.

The detail is of the same type, date and day, high and low water (tide), with tide heights and in this case, moon phase to indicate more easily the spring and neap tides. On the page above can also be seen the variation of other locations from the Cobh location, Cobh being the Standard (reference) Port, i.e. the main tidal location, for the south-west to south-east Irish coast. A fuller list of Secondary Ports for each region is also included.

What’s equally important about these tide tables, and hidden in a note inside the back, is that the data is compiled from the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, which, bizarrely and which I haven’t mentioned in a couple of years, owns the tide data for all of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and from which it must be licensed. Not that I am in favour of this arrangement, but it does mean you can be sure of the table accuracy, unlike with many free tide applications where license fees haven’t been paid.

A local sources of tidal information if you are unsure or without any better information is to check any RNLI or local inshore rescue stations across Ireland and the United Kingdom which at least usually display the month’s local tide times on the outside of the stations. These always use the accurate UKHO (below) tide data. Some broadsheet newspapers can carry the information also in the weather section.

The important points therefore are:

* Tide tables are essential for coastal safety in area with high tidal ranges, such as across the continental European coast.

* When using tide tables note the tidal height as well and high and low tide times.

* If you are using tide prediction tools, safety is important and to this end, the origin of the data is vital.

HOW TO: Tides for Swimmers, part 1 – Theory (loneswimmer.com)
HOW TO: Tides For Swimmers, Part 2 – Local Effects (loneswimmer.com)
Explaining a critical open water swimming factor: Tidal Range (loneswimmer.com)
Circles (loneswimmer.com)
Tide Tables. Copyright and Safety (loneswimmer.com)
There’s no such thing as a freak wave – coastal safety is your own responsibility (loneswimmer.com)

Spring is swum

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Real spring arrived most tentatively and late in Ireland this year, following the coldest early spring in 50 years. The water has been cold at its usual lowest point in late February, but recovery from the bottom took longer to occur than usual and many of the coldest days swimming have occurred after the normal coldest point of the year.

My swim times have stayed short, shorter than in a few years, swimmers have widely been commenting about the combination of cold water and cold air making weekend open water swims difficult and brief, not complaints often heard amongst Ireland’s experienced cold water swimmers.

But finally, only two weeks, the northerly air flow shifted away and temperatures moved about low single digits.

This prompted my first visit of the year to Sandycove. How did it get so late? Only a week previously the water temperature in Tramore Bay had still been only seven degrees, but the Sandycove visit provided a lovely ten degrees. Having been ill with a chest infection for a few weeks, I’d approached the swim with slight trepidation (the only time I’ve ever thought I might have a problem with a lap) but on measuring the warm water that concern disappeared and Owen, Dave Mulcahy and I each cruised around for a pleasant sunny lap, Owen being faster was first around and utilizing his new Finis GPS for a map of a standard high-tide island lap. Some chat was had afterwards, with Mike Harris and Ned Denison out for a visit also. Ned indicated that he wouldn’t be integrating my suggested Copper Coast swim into this year’s Cork Distance Camp, “as it doesn’t suit“, whatever that means. I’ll just have to get some of the swimmers over myself!

Saturday just gone was also a mild sunny day, with light fresh northerly breeze not being too cold and therefore ideal for jellyfish-hunting. This is what I call my early spring loops of Kilfarassey’s Burke’s Island. I abandon Kilfarassey’s playground except for beach walking during the winter months as its southerly aspect is too exposed for the depth of winter and I can look forward to returning to it with increasing anticipation as spring progresses. With a light offshore and a sunny sky, the island, whose nearest point is only about ten minutes away, looked inviting. The tide was low, just off a spring and the guard-line of reefs that separate the island from the mainland were showing.

Burke’s Island, low tide, offshore

I was concerned that Waterford’s deeper and more exposed water, almost always colder and slower to respond than Cork’s, despite being only about 60 miles apart, would still be only seven to eight degrees, but it was also ten degrees in the sun-warmed beach-edge water of Kilfarrassey, I doubt the Guillamene’s deeper water would have so improved.

It’s a shallow entry, and as I waded in there was a horse being ridden out in the shallows, the rider looking askance at me. The island and a string of reefs protect the beach, but once past the half-way point of the island the water depth starts to drop and I swum counter-clockwise around the outermost reefs, stirring up all the sea-birds who are far out from the mainland and therefore unused to much human traffic excepting the occasional kayakers or local fisherman. As I passed the island the temperature gradually dropped, and I guess the water around the island was about nine degrees.

The channels at the back of the reefs & island – my playground

Apart from the main island, there are actually lots of reefs and rocks and I swam into the main channel at the back of the island through many of these, my secret playground. The tide had now bottomed and heavy kelp was visible above the water. The first sea-anemones I’ve seen this year were visible on a couple of the deeper rocks and the water was crystal clear.

And what would a day to Kilfarassey be without a swim through my favourite arch, which I’ve termed the keyhole, about 25 metres long and always fun even on a calm day, though narrowest at low tide.

Kilfarassey is the location where I see (and suffer) jellyfish the most, it’s exposed and deep enough with enough calm pockets, reefs, currents and caves to hold many of them in place, but there were no jellyfish this day. The first jellyfish scouting expedition returned without a single one encountered, but it won’t be long now before our annual battles begin.

The swim was only forty minutes. But forty minutes of cold, clear heaven. Forty minutes where for the first time in weeks I felt I was where I was supposed to be, the first place where I’d felt truly and utterly free for some time, when I remembered that I started this blog over three years ago by exhorting you all to seek freedom. I write about the safe way to swim, the educated way to swim and I write about the mechanics. But it is this sense of freedom that is so essential for my own psyche and so fundamental to my own reasons for swimming. In the water, outside the island, over half a mile from the mainland, that I am ineffably myself and in that place of so little control that I feel so much confidence.

Product Review: FINIS Hydro Tracker GPS (fermoyfish.com)

Fitocracy; a swimmer’s review

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What is it?

Fitocracy is a “social media fitness website”. It is intended as a fitness goals and tracking site integrated with an online community. I received an invitation for the beta (test) version in 2011 but didn’t avail of it for about a year afterwards. I signed up on a whim in January of 2012.

The day that I signed up was the first day of a 50k training week, 10k per day, which was probably the origin of the whim. After signing up I figured out the navigation pretty quickly and then entered the first 10,000 metre swim. Once that was saved I was met with a slew of popups and notifications. I’d apparently been awarded a range of Swimming Achievement badges and a lot of Points and Level-Ups.

How does it work?

At this point it’s worth explaining that the idea of Fitocracy was to replicate the idea of a video game, with Bonuses, special Quests, Achievements and Levelling Up. One enters each workout that one does and the Fitocracy system allocates a number of points to the account. The number of points allocated dependent on sport, duration and difficulty. You can’t enter previous workouts more than I think 10 days old though it may be two weeks. If you are entering workouts regularly this isn’t important and stops people entering a lot of fictitious history/workouts when they signup.

Apart from the regular ongoing training one can set out to reach Quests, which may be a combination of sports. And there are cumulative Special Achievement awards when you reach particular targets like running or cycling a total distance. Each of the Quests and Achievements are accompanied by badges.

Levels are awarded by total points, and each level is progressively harder to reach. The lowest levels may take only a couple of hundred to reach, by the time you pass above Level 40 each level is over 100,000 points and still climbing.

I can’t recall exactly but what I didn’t realise for a couple of days that by having my very first swim that I entered as 10k, I’d collected all the swimming achievements on my very first day. I also went immediately to about Level 5. By the end of the first week I was Level Ten. Over the next few months my upward climb was apparently pretty steep. The Administrators/Designers are constantly on the watch-out for trolls who join up and spent time logging lots of activities to get on the Leader-board and annoy the general members and these are nearly always obvious.

It should also be noted, that as with most Social Media sites, the designers need to be paid. In Fitocracy this is achieved by converting free members like myself into paying month repeat customers. Paying customer have more options such as their full workout history, special Fitocracy Hero titles, and the ability to duel each other. I did not convert to being a paying member.

There are Leaderboards for weeks, months, 90 day and all-time periods to facilitate tracking. Afterall without the tracking the points accumulation is useless.

The other key aspect of the site along with fitness tracking to be mentioned is the Social aspect. There are Groups and Friends and Followers and a feed like a Twitter Feed. There’s a Swimming Group and an Open Water Swimming Group, the former is large, the latter is tiny. Any member can start a group so there are the humourous groups, and shared interest groups or Location groups etc, with no limit on the number of groups you can join. And there are Props which are like, well, Likes, I guess.

So when you log you see the Feed of Everyone or your Fitocracy Friends or Groups (you can choose). The Feed includes the details of their workouts and comments recently also images and video links. All very Twitter-like. So you can interact with similar people to yourself, or people whom you think you can help or learn from.

Fitocracy Feed

How much did I use it?

I used Fitocracy from the middle of January until about June. I logged my training every day, which was easy for me and second-nature, as I’ve been logging my swimming into a by-now complex spreadsheet of my own for years, so I’d give a couple of minutes logging into the site. Then, just about the time swimming Manhattan last year I stopped for a few reasons I’ll outline below. I restarted about November of 2012 and stopped again a couple of weeks ago.

By the time I’d stopped using it the first time, I was in the Top Twenty of the all-time leaderboard, the only swimmer in the Top 50 at that point. When I restarted in November it was more a challenge as many of the leaders had continued to log and I’d dropped my mileage. By the time I stopped a few weeks I was back at the entry to the Top Thirty and I’d accumulated just over 1 million points. That’s sounds, well I don’t know what it sounds like. I stopped playing PC games after X-Wing in the mid-90s if that means anything and I have zero interest in them. I guess it does indicate that a swimmer with a constant training schedule can easily accumulate points.

The Pros and Cons of Fitocracy

Fitocracy’s utility is dependent on a few things, not least of which is your level of experience. I think the less experience of fitness you have the greater the benefit as you can follow and interact people with a greater level of knowledge. You can get advice on food, technique and programs. (At least, I gave advice to people on those subjects). Another benefit for those with less of a lifetime of exercise behind them may be the actual design, the incentive of chasing points or achievement badges. The social aspect will certainly appeal to many people.

If you are into gym work (why are you here) Fitocracy seems like it’s a far better fit. The gym people are by far the largest group and have a lot of granularity in their workouts, because the designers come from that background. However the site is really poor at understanding swimmer’s capabilities and goals. One of the reasons I stopped logging was that every day the default swimming distance measurement was …. fathoms. It wasn’t even a joke and it couldn’t be changed and it became increasingly frustrating. Every single time. That got fixed while I was away but the current default for swimming workouts is that it’s calm open water with assisted drills, what can only be called an unusual setup for any swimmer. So you have to change that every time you log. And the Swimming Group size is almost 30,000 with an average level of 8. By the time I stopped I was Level 43, the last swim I logged was 17k with Gábor and the system still wouldn’t let me do that would breaking it down.

There are four swimming Quests, the biggest individual Quest for swimming is 10k. There are three cumulative swimming total Achievement, which are 5km, 100k and 500k. Given I swim about a million metres a year… that 500 isn’t extraordinary. And recall I achieved all the Quests the very first day I logged on. Swim workouts are capped at either 20k or 5 hours. Sure, for most people those are inconceivable targets. But to the readers of this blog they are quite common. To work around this you could enter lots of individual sets but that again shows that a year after me starting doing these swims, and communicating with the designers, I’m still too far out from the mainstream to accommodate and I was never interested in breaking my sets down into the individual components to maximise points (which a lot of people do). If you are interested, as a distance swimmer, I can guarantee you will climb the leaderboard pretty quickly, even just doing a 20 or 25 kilometres per week average. I was, to the best of my awareness, the only marathon swimmer there, and while there were swimmers faster and younger than me the distance work accumulates points. But I doubt like me that as a distance swimmer points will make much difference to you. It was somewhat entertaining but that was pretty much it. If you cross sports more than you can find plenty of quests. I think I logged hiking once, never bother logging anything else.

Pros and Cons.

Pros: Fitocracy is free to join and will stay free if you don’t wish to become a Hero. It has interest groups, which can be on any subject, not just sports or fitness. The commenting and navigation is easy and quick if you are interested. There are nice supportive people on there and I didn’t see much of any aggressive or bullying behaviour and what I did see was in the earlier months of 2012. If you are getting into a program of exercise and fitness it’s probably a good supportive place. At the top of the leader-board, maybe the top 100 or 200, of the million plus subscribers, there is a lot of knowledge about various aspects of exercise and fitness and experts in many. There are both iPhone and Android apps, though I never used either. You can change User name without losing anything else which is a nice feature more sites should have. The later you join the less chance you have of moving high up the leader-board. In fact I’d say there is no chance of anyone joining now making it into the Top 30 or 40, if that’s your goal. Though you can still target the shorter duration leader-boards for motivation.

Cons: Fitocracy, make no mistake, is geared for gym goers and beginners. The social aspect may be to more or less of your taste. The restriction on swimmer’s requirements in logging is frustrating and are specifically annoying for distance and open water swimmers. The forums which still existed when last I looked were useless. On the opposite usability side to the User Name change, there’s no way to delete your account. You have to ask in the useless forums and hope someone does it. On a free you don’t have full access to your own history. I see no reason to spend money on more detailed tracking which will always have less detail than my own logs which don’t cost anything.

This annoying animation now comes up everytime you log a workout.

Fitocracy failed for me in a few main areas.

Lack of awareness or response to swimmers needs. Just a lack of understanding of swimmers in general, with little apparent signs of improvement despite the numbers of swimmers. I didn’t really learn anything from it. In retrospect it was only habit that kept me logging.
The social aspect deteriorated. I knew maybe 20 people before I joined from elsewhere and none of them were swimmers. The feed became full of people thanking each other for Follows and Props. A bit like Twitter can be some days.
The tracking gave me nothing I didn’t already have in my own log, where I have more detail. Sharing what I was doing didn’t really mean much to me, there are always people swimming faster and more distance than I am.
Most importantly, the key let-down for me was that I did nothing as a consequence of being on Fitocracy that I would not have done anyway. If I compare Fitocracy with Blipfoto, which a friend convinced me to join to improve my photography, I’ve found myself tramping across fields and rocks, through mud to places I’d otherwise have avoided to photograph things I’d otherwise have ignored, and I’ve tried things I may not have and continue to learn. Since I’m not interested in other fitness exercises, this was limiting for me. The same limitation won’t apply to others.

Fitocracy is very much dependent on your experience level and desire for more social media interaction about your swimming. It can become an easy habit as it did for me and if you don’t log your workouts already that may be of use to you, though without paying for membership that’s limited. It may be better if your sport is other than swimming.

Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 3 – Psychological Factors

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The previous two posts dealt with the physiological and environmental limiting factors of marathon swimming. As noted in Part One, non-swimmers and those unfamiliar with the sport tend to see the physiological factors as the greatest hurdles for swimming further distance, often imagining that marathon swimmer’s have some physical capability beyond the average person whereas the Environmental Factors in Part Two are possibly more likely to be a governing factor.

Assuming a swimmer has done the training, for unsuccessful swims the environmental factors are more likely to cause a swim to either not start at all or to be abandoned, and of those weather will always be the swimmer’s greatest challenge.

Experienced swimmers however will generally mostly agree that marathons swims are “more mental than physical”. And because of the complexity of individual psychology, these factors are not as easily codified or itemized, and what I may consider the greater challenges may be not such an important item for someone else, but some can be identified.

Waiting

Alan Clack at Varne, waiting for the word and the weather

Of all the aspects of marathon swimming that I feel are most misunderstood, this aspect may be the least appreciated. It is very difficult to explain the psychological pressure endured by a swimmer who is waiting for a weather window to open. The swimmer may have invested two years of their life and a not-insignificant amount of money, only to find they don’t even know if they will swim. Depending on the person this can lead to stress and lost sleep. While this occurs prior to the swim, assuming there is a wait period, it’s impossible though to know if or how many swims may have been unsuccessful because of the pre-swim stress affecting the actual swim.

Other swimmers, having waited a lifetime for an English Channel solo in particular, can make poor last-minute decisions or changes regarding crew or feeding. Others feel that having waited those years, they must take chances. Probably the most likely impact of waiting is the decision to swim in a marginal weather opportunity that they would otherwise not have swum in. It is very easy to say this from the outside, much much less so from inside the bubble of the waiting swimmer in a marginal situation, when the pilot isn’t giving a clear indication and the decision rests with the swimmer.

Uncertain duration

Almost all swimmers step into the water with some target time or duration in mind, even if it never articulated to anyone else. Some of us learn this error the hard way and spend the rest of our swimming lives repeating it. All that counts is standing up in France is my own oft-repeated variation. A number of swimmers have found that their swim due to be two or six hours longer than expected, they have no desire to continue. (You might recall this was the subject of a question I asked Harley Connolly, Trent Grimsey’s coach, prior to his English Channel record attempt, whether he would continue if he wasn’t on record target). Imagine this extra time extrapolated to a two-way Channel swim or a Cuba to Florida swim, when the estimated time is subject to even greater deviation. Imagine you are expecting to be swimming for 40 hours (40 hours!) and then you are told “no, it’ll be 54 hours“, longer than anyone else has ever swim? That would bring a unique psychological weight. But all additional swim time brings the possibility of being too much for a particular swimmer.

Unprepared for or unexpected events

Many marathon swimmers will go through personal form of visualisation to help ensure a successful swim. Maybe imagining picking up a rock on Vista Point or Cap Griz Nez or returning home successful. Visualisation is a powerful and well-known tool for athletes (and others). For swimmers this visualisation can include the various things than go awry during a swim, such as worsening weather or digestion or elimination issues. But what happens when reality sidesteps your visualised possibilities? Swimmers expecting a usual night-time start who instead find they have a mid-morning start and therefore will be swimming into the night instead of into the day? It is a more difficult thing to have night after ten hours of swimming than to have dawn after six hours. One is a prolonged boost, the other can act as a mental hurdle or even cliff.

Steve Munatones regularly repeats that the most important rule of open water swimming is to expect the unexpected. But while that’s correct and reasonable, it’s also easier said than done when the nature of unexpected events is to blind-side us. Some can be dealt with and the better the training and the more the experience the more likely the swimmer is to have to run into various scenarios. The epitome of this type of preparation surely has to Lisa Cummins whose training included every possible variation she could manage, from deep cold to night swims, to various feeding methods to the Torture swim, this type of training common to Sandycove Island Swim Club Channel Aspirants. All are intended to give the swimmer the broadest possible well of experience from which to draw. But there is always something unexpected out there for every swimmer. How can you prepare for solid fog? How can you prepare for getting trapped under the pilot-boat?

Reasons

It can be said that the question the endurance athlete dislikes the most is Why do you do it? We all have our own particular reasons for swimming, every swimmer’s motivation is a unique recipe which includes some obvious ingredients such as proving something to themselves, looking for limits, fighting the inevitable onslaught of age, or simply loving open water swimming. To these will be others particular to the individual, such as seeking approval, validation, remembrance of someone, or overcoming some physical hindrance or others.

Whatever the unique blend of the swimmer’s psyche they may find that in the heat of battle, those reasons evaporate or are not sufficient or may have been misdirected. This isn’t a criticism, it doesn’t mean those swimmers are missing something. Instead for some swimmers it is in the swim that they discover something about themselves or their motivation which means that finishing a swim is no longer necessary to meet those internal expectations or reasons or that the training or the swim itself regardless of outcome was the real reward. Whichever is the case only the swimmer themselves knows the internal landscape and the rewards and losses and costs of the effort, successful or otherwise.

Self doubt

Made of Water

Or should it be self-belief? How I title this section is surely more a reflection of my own mental landscape than any definite assertion. If you read about any adventures sports or know or follow any adventure or top class sports people like Adventurer Dan Martin, Ocean’s Seven swimmer Stephen Redmond, International elite swimmer Chris Bryan or adventurer Lewis Pugh or many others on Twitter, something you’ll notice amongst many (but not all) of them is that they post inspirational quotations. Some come from themselves, some are quotations that come from others that they have found useful or that they appreciate and wish to use to inspire others. In a way these quotations act like a shorthand for the internal mental effort required.

Part of the nature of the human condition is self-doubt and it is one of the most limiting factors of all. After all without wishing to start repeating a lot of those inspirational quotations, the person who believes they can, and the person who believes they can’t are both right. If I quote that, it doesn’t mean that I absolutely follow it. Personally the problem I have with inspirational quotations is that they make me feel inadequate, with all their exhortation of overcoming and victory. Life seems to me at best a series of compromises.

Nonetheless a certain amount of self-belief is required for big swims, or anything else. You need the belief that you can keep turning the arms over for the next ten minutes, feed interval, hour, tide, night or day. Some of that comes from training or experience, some of it comes from knowing yourself. Some of it we learn along the way. But we can also run out of it and run up against limits. Almost all of us have some limit to it.

Despite that, I have my own favourites. This Socrates quotation from a long time ago remains a favourite. During Channel training my training log said “Today is the Channel” so I would remind myself of the journey every day. Another is simply; “I do not stop when I am tired. I stop when I am done“. Even if I don’t always believe it, or myself…

This is another of the private internal battles the swimmer must undergo. The biggest difference between the same person who stepped off the beach in England, and who swam ashore in France, is the increase in self-belief, what we usually term confidence.

An extract from Channel Swimmer David Walliams' Channel mental training preparation

An extract from Channel Swimmer David Walliams’ mental training preparation

There are of course the other more mundane psychological aspects of a marathon swimmer’s life: Boredom, worrying about imminent physical problems, regretting missed training, anxiety about water depth or creatures, or ever embarrassment about bodily elimination, these are the ongoing easier understood issues of a marathon swim. But no less important for being more mundane or easier to convey.

Channels swimmers often say it is 10% physical and 90% mental. I prefer to think that it is 90% physical. And 90% mental.

Unlike most of the items in Parts One and Two, these aspects are neither visible, nor particular to marathons swimmers. And yet they can be bigger hurdles for being invisible and private and general.

But the biggest hurdle isn’t necessarily one or the other, but the one that either stops you or took the most to overcome.

Next time you look at any endurance athlete or event and in particular marathon swimmers, I hope I’ve given you some idea of the Limiting Factors with which each and every one must necessarily deal.

Limiting factors in marathon swimming – Part 1 – Physical Factors (loneswimmer.com)
Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 2 – Environmental Factors (loneswimmer.com)
Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Third Spacing (aka bloating) (loneswimmer.com)
Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Salt Mouth (loneswimmer.com)

Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 2 – Environmental Factors

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In Part One I covered the physiological limiting factors in marathon swimming.

The various environmental aspects of a swim are not insignificant. They are especially important in that they all lay outside the swimmer’s control and often even outside the control of the support crew.

Water Temperature

Thermometer

This is generally a known factor prior to a swim. Swims are either cool or cold water like the English and North Channels or warm water swims like Maui, Rottnest, Manhattan or Chloe Maccardels’ upcoming Cuba to Florida attempt. A few fall into an intermediate category defined more by the swimmer’s experience, such as the Catalina and Gibraltar Channels. Sudden changes in temperature are rare in marathon swimming and where they are possible they are also understood; such as South Africa’s west coast which is prone to sudden wide water temperature changes, and the California coast where the sudden transition from very deep water to a shallower continental shelf very close to the mainland can cause cold water upwelling at the end of a marathon swim. Air temperature is obviously much more variable and a condition of the weather but extremes of air temperature are not usual during a swim. A five degree Celsius differential can be significant for a swimmer if such a drop is also accompanied with a breeze or wind which can sap the swimmer of body heat.

Jellyfish

Lion’s Mane jellyfish

The recent and future attempts at a distance and time records by necessity are held in warmer waters such as Cuba to Florida. These water are home to jellyfish with debilitating stings such as Box Jellyfish. While the cold waters of the North and English Channels are home to Lion’s Mane and Portuguese Man O’War’s endurance records are less likely and jellyfish stings in the English Channel are rarely more than intermittent, though the North Channel (the Mouth of Hell) can have miles of Lion’s Mane blooms, part of what makes it the ultimate channel swim. Attempts to swim in these waters divide swimmers in two ways: whether attempts should be made in locations not considered possible without additional protection or exceptions to the usual rules, and if so are jellyfish protection suits acceptable or the thin edge of a wedge that will inevitably lead to more overt (or hidden) performance enhancing suits? (See Evan’s analysis of his survey of marathon swimmers for an excellent overview of the contradictions of divisions and unity in the community).

Sharks

The Man In The Grey Suit is a subject of great concern (and discussion) for distance swimmers. Not of any real concern here in the north-eastern Atlantic, they are a greater hazard in the warmer waters elsewhere, particularly California, the Caribbean, Hawaii, South Africa and Australia. The Cook Strait Channel swim in New Zealand is unique in having a shark evacuation rule. Shark cages have been used for marathon swims in the Caribbean and South Africa at least. Shark cages are however considered swim assistance as they increase the swimmer’s speed through eddy current drag. Other possible control methods include electronic shark repellents (whose effectiveness is not entirely assured or quantified), armed boat crew or armed or otherwise scuba diver outriders.

Tides

These are amongst the most variable of environmental factors and therefore potentially also the most limiting. Because swimmers move slowly relative to even a sailing boat, we are vulnerable to slight deviations, miscalculations or just insufficient data, the most likely cause. Even in such a well-travelled and mapped location as the English Channel, especially for swimming, pilots will occasionally speak of tides arriving early or late or with a difference force than expected. Tidal currents are understood at a larger scale, hundred of years of navigation have mapped the seas for craft, not for swimmers. Tides act in a similar chaotic way to a weather system, which means that small deviations will always creep in. The only way to improve accuracy of prediction is to improve the data, and this is not practically possible or even desired for small tidal variations. As swims occur in less well-known or new locations, the likelihood of discovering unknown local variations outside marine charts increases. Half a knot current, barely detectable to a boat, is enough to deviate a swim over hours from a projected or necessary course.

Global tides

Crew and boat

Any English Channel pilot will confirm that one of the most likely causes of unsuccessful Channel swims is poor selection of support crew. The most likely cause is mal-du-mer, seasickness. For some people seasickness is a completely debilitating ailment that can sap all willpower and strength and there is no way to know whom it will strike. The solution of course is to have experienced crew. Even this can fail because people experienced on powered craft will be at the mercy of the choppy water amplified on an almost stationary craft. Other crew issues can also arise, whether accidents or other illness. Anyone who hasn’t been on a rocking boat looking down on a swimmer is unlikely to understand! And not unknown are mechanical problems on the pilot-boat. Most pilots are by necessity practical mechanics able to address problems as they arise, but not all problems can be fixed with a wrench and hammer while rocking about on the sea.

Channel boat The Viking Princess out of the water

Weather

Weather changes are the bane of English and North Channel swimmers particularly. Other Channels like Tsugaru and Gibraltar and Cook are also subject to constantly variable and unpredictable weather patterns. If you are used to the predictable weather of the west US coast, with morning offshore and afternoon onshore breezes, knowing your swim will almost certainly take place with a 48 window, the difficulty of allocating two weeks or even long (like the North Channel) and still being completely unsure of getting in the water is shocking. Weather constraints obviously ran the full gamut. In the North, English and Gibraltar channels the main concern is wind (and its effect on the seas). Fog can also be a problem with 2012′s Channel season infamously seeing three solos on one day abandoned within a kilometre of France for the first time in 137 years. I’ve warned previously that fog may be the most dangerous weather condition for swimmers. In warmer humid climes like Round Manhattan, and the Caribbean, lightning storms are a serious cause for worry, a swimmer or boat caught exposed out on the water is in real danger. Having to wait for or even postpone a swim is something many marathon swimmers have undergone and the mental pressure this brings is often not inconsiderable, which I will discuss further in the next and final part.

Coming in part three, Psychological Factors.

Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 1 – Physiological Factors (loneswimmer.com)
Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Salt Mouth (loneswimmer.com)
Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Third Spacing (aka bloating) (loneswimmer.com)
Survey of marathon swimming rules and conditions (freshwaterswimmer.com)

The Boston Marathon attack – an attack on all sportspeople

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I don’t want to be trite about this event, and I’m far away from it in different country, an athlete in a different sport.

But regardless of nationality or sporting event, apart from being an event in America we should all see this as an attack on all athletes and sports-people whether participants or otherwise, around the world.

All athletes regardless of sport rely on three commonalities:

The community of our fellow athletes.
The support of our families and friends.
The organisers and volunteers without whom events would be non-existent.

None is more important, some people pursue individual quests, some do it without family or friends, maybe some believe they do something entirely without organisational support, but no-one is completely individual and unconnected to the world. Kick out any one leg of the three and the whole pursuit, whatever your sport is, falls apart.

There may be for you, as there are for me, many sports in which you have no interest. But that is not the same as having no interest in the people who pursue them. It’s not the same as not recognising that every sports-person cares just as deeply about their sport.

This attack was on the athletes, the supporters, the by-standers, the families and friends, and the organisers. My stomach churns at the thought of the people who have some event planned for next week or next month after this. Some event that for them may the biggest sporting pursuit in their lives, or a personal goal or even simply just part of their lives, some sport that for them is as essential to living as swimming is for me. And trying to convince their family that they can continue, and worrying whether the organisers might not continue.

Because for many of them, one thought that will not arise will be to stop their sport, whether running, football of any kind, swimming.

On that basis, ask yourself, if tomorrow in your swimming you had this hanging over you: Would you swim? And even if you did, as most of us would I think, think about the new burden that would bring to you and those connected with it.

Therefore I say, the Boston Marathon attack is an attack on every person who has ever participated, helped, organised, supported, or even watched, any sport in the world. I sympathise with those affected.

Limiting Factors in Marathon Swimming – Part 1 – Physical Factors

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The northern hemisphere summer swimming season is on the horizon , though it doesn’t feel like it here in Ireland where we’ve been having the coldest spring “since records began” (that phrase we are all familiar with from the past few years). there will be big swims, both attempted and successful.

Before genuine and extravagant claims are made by ill-informed media covering swims about which they know little and understand less, I though it might be worthwhile to round up the limiting factors for ultra-endurance marathon swims that might help people to apply some criteria to help evaluate some of those swims. Limiting factors which constrain or control a process.

Limiting factors on marathons swims can broadly be said to fall into three categories, with further subdivisions in two of those three.

Physical
Environmental
Psychological

In this first part we will consider the physical limitations.

The Physical Constraints to long swims pertain to the individual swimmer and will be influenced by their experience, training, and preparation.

The god bottle

Energy: Often seen by non-swimmers as the defining criteria, Energy relates to the swimmer’s ability to keep swimming. For experienced marathon swimmers however this is not often the as critical as is seen from outside. Evan and I have covered marathon feeding aspects in the past, from mechanics to content and possible supplementation, but the simple fact is that a tested feed plan, appropriate for the conditions and swimmer, will usually provide the pre-requisite energy. Most marathon swimmers use concentrated carbohydrate as the primary feed, with electrolytes to keep the body’s systems operating. Changes to this basic plan vary with the swimmer but as long as the swimmer can keep feeding, they will take in sufficient energy.

Digestion: There is often talk of vomiting amongst marathon swimmers. Many, and I am one, think it is worthwhile to get used to being able to swim if or even while vomiting. While many swimmers put the pre-disposition of marathon swimmers to vomit at the door of feed plans and high carbohydrate loads, I think there can be other possible causes, (though the body regardless of size can only process so much carbohydrate per hour). Additionally there are also the small amounts of salt water that even very experienced swimmers can take in due either to the odd mouthful of choppy water, or salt spray in rough conditions. And which I think is important but unquantified, is the extended time in a prone position which could hinder digestion. Peristalsis, the contraction of internal muscles to move food through the digestive process, has been shown in studies to be independent of gravity for most positions (unsurprisingly, since the intestine leads in all directions). Though peristalsis in the prone head-down position was not shown to be statistically abnormal (i.e. the swimming position) those studies were of short duration. It is possible, but undetermined, if a longer time period could cause a greater likelihood of digestive problems causing vomiting. Vomiting during a swim usually isn’t particularly energy-consuming , and can even be a relief for once-off incidences. But should the vomiting frequency increase greater distress can be caused and lead to a collapse in energy.

Strength: Like energy, strength is often more considered a limiting factor by non-swimmers. Marathon swimmers don’t often operate on strength alone but more usually on continuous repetition obviously and on technique. Hundreds or thousands of kilometres of swim training act as low-repetition strength training and cause swimmers to have very strong (if not very defined) muscles. A typical training load of a thousand kilometres a year (some swim less, some swim much more) prepares distance swimmers physically. Marathon swimmer’s embrace of the Nothing Great is Easy aphorism is simply one of our ways of explaining that physical strength is not the most important attribute.

Typical English Channel swimmer with salt mouth

Salt Mouth: I’ve written on Salt Mouth specifically as being a serious limiting factor for long swims. In brief it is the build-up of salt in the swimmer’s mouth and throat which can in the worst cases lead the swimmer to be unable to feed or even swallow, and can cause the sloughing of the epidermis of the tongue and throat. It can be extremely painful. Only swimmers who have run into this can understand how painful it can be. With all the talk of stinger suits and shark protection, I think ways this problem is far more important for those willing to risk extending the outer limits of distance swimming. When evaluating a long swim it is worth looking at the salinity of the region. Kevin Murphy’s record 53 hours in the English Channel was in a region of higher salinity and is one of the many reasons swimmers who understand this limiting factor hold Kevin in such high esteem. Swims in the Caribbean such as Chloe McCardels or Penny Palfrey’s Cuba to Florida swim attempts are also in a region of high salinity. The US West Coast is lower salinity that the US East Coast and the Mediterranean is higher than any of these.

Global ocean salinity

Sleep: If you’ve ever missed a night sleep and spent the next day in an utter daze, one may find it hard to imagine that sleep deprivation in itself is not as much a limiting factor as one may guess. There are studies showing that the sleep two nights before a big athletic event is of more importance that of the preceding night. And the majority of English Channel swimmers start their swim in the middle of the might and will miss most if not all of sleep of the night before. Once actually swimming, and assuming the swimmer has the requisite physical and mental stamina, lack of sleep for a second night does not seem to be the most critical factor. Obviously scientific study of the whole of marathon swimming in low enough given the small numbers involved, but the numbers of people who have swum over 24 hours (the 24 hour club) is very small with no scientific study to speak of, and only inferences can be made. Key is probably the factor that the athletic endeavour of marathon swimming is well below the swimmer/athlete’s VO2 Max ability, (what the athlete is capable of at their threshold limit).

Stroke training

Technique: Marathon swimmers range in style and technical ability. Some are not at really graceful or obviously and some like Evan or Trent are elegant controlled swimmers. Most of us though fall in the the wider intermediate range. We train technique along with all the other aspects and just are there are different ways to skin a cat there are different techniques in swimming from a bludgeoning powerhouse to a smooth FLOWer. Excellent technique in itself is not a determiner of success in marathon swimming, but equally being a powerhouse swimmer isn’t either. Good technique though is much less likely to lead to an overuse injury during a significantly long swim. Slight stroke imbalances when repeated 30,000 times for an average English channel swim, or even more for more epic swims, accumulate tiny stresses in the body of the swimmer, especially the neck and shoulders, that could lead to injury during a swim.

Coming in Part Two, environmental limiting factors of marathon swimming.

Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Third Spacing (aka bloating) (loneswimmer.com)
The effect of gravity on peristalsis ( Pubmed)

Everyone is a lone swimmer

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LoneSwimmer.com reaches a quarter of a million page views this weekend*, and I wanted to thank all the readers, viewers, commenters, subscribers and occasional visitors. It is very gratifying for an average swimmer in the middle of nowhere.

When I started this blog I honestly never expected it to reach such a figure, I never had such a goal or target. In fact I never had any particular target other than a continuing desire to share whatever I’d learned. It took a year and a half to reach 50,000 views and I remember both being very pleased but wondering how much life was left in the blog at that time, (something I still often wonder). And I was also pleased as you know by now to win the Sports and Recreation Blog of the year for 2012, to my very great surprise. Personally one of the greatest pleasures have been the direct contacts and friendships I’ve made with swimmers around the world resulting from the blog.

Readers come from almost all over the world, though Equatorial Africa and parts of the Middle East seem uninterested. The four regions for most readers are the USA, Ireland, the UK and Australia, with Canada, South Africa, India and the EU countries being the next most common origin. Darker colours in the map represent more readers.

About 700 posts, have been published (some have been removed due to being obsolete…or rubbish). Over 1200 comments have been left, and that’s despite my being sometimes poor at responding, especially in the early days of the blog. There have been over 42,500 SPAM comments! Most SPAMmer are idiots, but not are all and those few can confuse the SPAM filter, and the sheer volume means that occasionally a genuine comment or question will get caught in the SPAM filter & I might not see it for months. My apologies if this has happened to you and if I never responded it probably means I missed it entirely.

The most commented post is Introducing a Precise Open Water Temperature Scale, which is also the site’s third most popular post. “What temperature is too cold to swim in”, and the amended version of the same being the most popular posts, ongoing.

Apart from variations about cold water swimming, the most popular search is for Sea Lice, a continuing problem for open water swimmers around the world, and which seem to increase in volume in spring and late summer of both hemispheres. The incoming searches can be very varied. I see people who have plugged in the entire question from their homework verbatim, or others looking for images of some of my swimmer friends in bikinis or even naked. And those friends don’t have to be women! Someone wanted to know if a dog can swim the English Channel and there are other occasional odd ones. How to get water out of your ear is perennially popular (I still prefer the hop up and down on one leg as my preferred method, for the jovial aspect at least).

Quite a few people visit because of images here, such the English Channel from the International Space Station, European Space Agency’s Grid Waves, (which caused a huge influx of traffic recently after it got shared around on Facebook, many thinking it was a fake). Other very popular images include the depth of the ocean to scale (look very carefully at the bottom of that image) and lot of people click-through on this image! Also images for Jellyfish ID, the Training Zone chart, different types of athlete’s bodies, understanding waves, and how waves can interfere with swimmers, understanding prevailing winds are all popular, often or maybe even usually amongst irregular swimmers. My open water swimmer’s brain cartoon has escaped in the wild also.

The HOW TO series is continually popular, which is why I leave the link up there on top, and those How To posts tend to be the ones I most like writing since they are at the core of what I am trying to do. (I really need to organise an index for them). Interestingly theraband work for shoulder strengthening is the most popular of those, with the annual cold water swim advice for irregular swimmers being the second, and the next three are all on the subject of understanding and addressing hypothermia in swimmers. There have been three different April Fools joke, which have caused varying levels of consternation (2012 & 2013) or even panic (2011) but have always entertained…me!

In comparative terms to loneswimmer.com, marathonswimmers.org, which Evan and I founded early last year, is coming on 600 members and has page views coming up on half a million! Are you a member yet? The power of community is always stronger than one person’s views.

So there we are, a quick overview and Thanks to you all!

Sometimes we are all lone swimmers, and everyday is the Channel.

Thanks,

Donal

{* In fact since quite a few people receive posts by email and aren’t recognised in the overall figures, the number was passed a while ago. In order to so some site housekeeping, email updates will revert to summary only for the moment and you’ll have to make a one-click jump from email back here to read the full article.}

Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Salt Mouth

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Salt Mouth

Unlike Third Spacing of Fluids, salt mouth is one of the most common and least visible or appreciated effects of marathon swimming and can cause the swimmer great distress and discomfort, and yet it’s invisible to everyone else.

Typical English Channel swimmer the day after

Typical English Channel swimmer’s throat

Salt Mouth is the effect of salt build up on the tongue and in the mouth and throat. The extent of the effect is directly proportional to the immersion time obviously, but less obviously to the salinity.

We sometimes speak about the limiting factors of distance swimming being hypothermia or jellyfish or currents, but salt mouth is also one of the most significant limiting factors for very long swims. At its worst salt mouth can inflame the throat, make swallowing nigh on impossible and the swim ends. Some swimmers even report shedding the entire surface of the tongue and throat.

For myself post-swim initial mild discomfort starts after about four or five in salt water. For a swim less than ten hours the discomfort doesn’t last more than 24 hours (e.g. Manhattan) and often only overnight.

However for longer swims the discomfort or even pain can be quite significant. After my English Channel, I had a lot of discomfort for over three days, to the extent that eating was painful. Lisa Cummins was in a lot more pain after her 35 hour two-way crossing, that took even longer to abate.

Alan Clack during a feed

For those unused to swimming in the sea, a marathon sea-swim can be a painful experience with the salt mouth gradually building up from early on during the swim. Other swimmers may just notice a gradual loss of taste during feeds and not detect the extent of the build-up until after the swim.

I’ve said above that salt mouth is less obviously related to local salinity. This is because people often don’t realise the different saline levels around the world and often come from a lower salinity region. The south coast of Ireland is about 4% whereas the English Channel is about 4.5 to 5%. That’s a 15-20% increase. Over 5% isn’t even considered salt water but brine, (though we use the terms interchangeably). The west coast of the US for example is around 3 to 3.5%. Ocean temperature obviously affects salinity but so does ocean size and mixing. The Mediterranean Sea has higher temperatures and a smaller area so the saline solution becomes more concentrated. In the English Channel the water is constantly pushed and pulled up and down the Channel by tides and can’t escape so the salinity increases.

Global ocean salinity

The most usual method of combating salt mouth is for the swimmer to take a dilute mouthwash solution regularly during the swim. Undiluted mouthwash during a swim can the swimmer’s mouth to feel burned. Dilution rate is a personal choice, but usually 25%, 33% or 50%. I use 33% as I find 50% is still too strong. Frequency is also personal; Alan Clack asked for an increase of mouth wash during his Channel Solo, as he could feel his throat getting sore and he was getting a mouthwash about every 90 minutes and it seemed to work for him. Of course this needs to be always balanced against the time taken for the mouthwash.

The other key method of combating salt-mouth is to change your breathing pattern such that you are exhaling through your nose in salt water. Most experienced swimmers will exhale through both nose and mouth, especially in the pool. This is partially related to the effort expended. But for a marathon swim the swimmer is maintaining a lower rate of exertion and it is possible with practice to exhale through the nose only, reducing the exposure of the mouth to salt water.

A method that hasn’t really been explored yet but which was mooted by a dentist friend is to line the inside of the throat with a protective barrier. Should this happen, it will doubtless be a future area of rules contention.

Karen Throsby says the black jelly babies are best

Apart from these two methods swimmers choose various food items which seem effective at temporarily combating or relieving salt mouth. Tinned peaches and jelly babies are amongst the most popular. Ice-cream after swims is also popular for this reason. I found Kendal Mint Cake useful during training swims. For those unaware of Kendal Mint Cake, it isn’t a cake but compressed glucose with a slight hint of mint, famously used in early 20th Century mountain-climbing and polar expeditions and still very popular with climbers for its compact size and high energy content. Later in swims though as the mouth cools it is difficult to melt and swallow.

Overall Salt Mouth should not be dismissed as a mere inconvenience but as another of the potentially serious limiting aspects of swims, which require consideration during training and investigation of preferred methods of alleviation.

EDIT: Have a look at English Channel Soloist and Utah resident Gordon Gridley‘s extreme salt tongue photo in the comments below. Gordo trained and did his English Channel qualifier in the Great Salt Lake, where salinity is far greater than the open ocean.

HOW TO: Open water breathing patterns (loneswimmer.com)
Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Third Spacing (aka bloating) (loneswimmer.com)

Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Third Spacing (aka bloating)

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Third Spacing of Fluids

A long time ago I wrote a post of Third Spacing of fluids and I’ve decided to revisit (and slightly correct) the subject.

The most obvious external indicator that someone has been swimming for an extended time is physical bloating. The person literally becomes swollen. It’s especially obvious in the face which develops a puffy look. This is one aspect of something called Third Spacing of Fluids. The more usual medical condition and cause of Third Spacing is when someone haemorrhages or have been burned. Space is this sense also means location, the medical term of compartment. The first compartment or space is within blood vessels or tissues, the second space combines that with the area between vessels and tissues. Tissues have about 75% of fluid and plasma about 25% normally. Both tissues and plasma are physiologically active.

Swimmer's feed boxes for qualification swiim

Swimmer’s feed boxes for qualification swim

But the Third Space is the “compartment” or area or space where fluid doesn’t normally collect and is physiologically non-functional. In the of Third Spacing of Fluids from swimmers it refers to the space between the skin and the fascia, which is the fibrous connective tissue under the skin. It happens when a human is immersed in water for an extended time. Water is absorbed through the skin into the intracellular spaces.

Third Spacing can’t really be stopped and of itself is does not impede performance. As I said above that third compartment is non-active. It’s possible that it can be slowed by increasing electrolytes, however in cold water swimming, the swimmer is already taking in a high liquid volume partially for electrolytes but more importantly carbohydrates.

Zinc sun-barrier & a slight puffiness on Trent Grimsey’s face after his record EC solo

Third Spacing starts within a couple of hours of immersion, and obviously increases with immersion time. It can be slightly noticeable after six to eight hours. It wasn’t readily visible on Trent for example after his record swim, unless you had seen Trent close-up beforehand.

Also, Third Spacing passes quickly. Channel and marathon swimmers will usually need to continue urinating after a swim and urination and vomiting quickly relieve the body of the excess liquid.

Swimmers may have reverted to normal appearance within a couple of hours, (the trip back to Dover from France) and almost look normal within 24 hours, regardless of immersion/swim time.

Donal after EC solo

Third Spacing means most swimmers will look much different after a Channel swim often causing non-swimmers to be unduly concerned though there is no need for such concern. Third Spacing happens in both fresh and salt water, though it seems to be more pronounced in salt water. This is likely partially because of electrolyte depletion and salt water is closer to body fluid.

The next post will concern salt mouth.

Physiological effects of long and marathon swims – Salt Mouth (loneswimmer.com)
HOWTO: Open water breathing patterns (loneswimmer.com)

The despoiling of the Guillamenes – Part 2 – Slán abhaile

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In the weeks since I published the article of the despoiling of the Guillamene Cove by the addition of shoulder-high stainless cattle-crush, meetings have been held between Newtown & Guillamenes and Tramore Town Council and radio and newspaper interviews have been done. Many people read that article. (A couple of people have told me I was the “public face” of the Guillamenes, though I think they mean my swim box, which far more people know than me).

Gone swimmin’

A Facebook Protest Group has started (regular readers will know I don’t do Facebook). There’s been a physical protest at Tramore Civic Offices. Oh, and I paid my annual Newtown & Guillamene club membership.

It’s not all unanimity on the protest front. Club members have been verbally abused by people protesting the change. People who are never actually at the Guillamene. In one case one of the senior club members was insulted in the street. When he asked the abuser how long since the protester swam at the Guillamene, the answer was 10 years. Looking through the names of protesters, what’s noticeable to myself and many of the actual club members, is just how few of the protesters are known to us from the coves. This is indicative of protest in the age of Facebook. I think people click [Like] to feel they are doing something, making themselves heard, when it fact it’s a fairly meaningless action which certainly doesn’t impress the people who actually get out and do something. Facebook Likes mean less than a five-minute swim at the Guillamenes, and far far less than being a club a paying club member or helping to keep the area clean or reporting behavioural problems, or stopping people engaging in dangerous behaviour.

I’m far more impressed by people who are completely in favour of the cattle-crush, but who actually swim at the Guillamenes. I’m never on the side of bullying and nothing is more likely to lose you your argument than attacking the very people who have put so much time and effort over decades into developing and looking after our swimming coves.

There has also been widespread mention of criminal activity, whether destruction of the crush (which at least hasn’t, yet, happened) or theft of the railing by “scrap metal thieves”, a relatively recent Irish phenomena.

The Stewardship of the Guillamenes is the idea I’m keen to keep front and centre. For all the people, local and visitors, who have benefited and enjoyed the amenities at the Newtown and Guillamenes Coves, it should never be forgotten that it is the club which has stewarded the area for all over the past 80 years since its founding at the beginning of the 1930s. For people who’s only real interaction is that [Facebook Like] button, they should remember that the club members, past and present, are the ones who are there most days of the year, tidying up in winter, power-hosing and painting in summer, collecting for local charities, or organising the Snámh Fada, swim gala and diving competitions.

I’d like to do a quick review of the changes:

The Good (in my opinion)

The increase in the number of changing platforms/benches (2011/2012).
The new slipway in Newtown Cove (2011).
The replaced railings in Newtown Cove.
The new swim ladder and attached platform at the Guillamene. (as the person who swims in roughest water at the Guillamenes you’ll have to trust me that this is a real safety improvement)
The new picnic tables.
The addition of steps down onto the rocks for the fishermen/(people?).

The Bad (in my opinion)

The relaid main concrete steps down the cliff (very poor quality).
The concrete steps down into the water (Smooth, an ideal ground for algae growth, lethally slippery during spring, summer and autumn, kept clear by the club at the cost of significant time and expense. Partial remediation would be possible with the addition of parallel cut grooves).
The installation of the cattle crush on the diving platform.
The replacement stainless steel railings on the cliff top over the previous mild steel railings.
The installation of the extra unnecessary handrail under the cliff, which reduces the available changing area.
The closure of the public toilets for the last two summers.

Tramore Council’s argument about the installation of crush is that it received two complaints about safety in 2012 and therefore it was obliged to act before possible future litigation.

One of the main threads of the counter argument to the installation is that new installation is itself unsafe or likely to lead to further accidents, given its height and scale. It’s been pointed out for example that given that height that children can still easily get underneath it, and could still fall. This seem to me to contradict what has been done with the new steps into the water, where relaying the concrete has led to much dis-improved safety as it now provides a far better bed for algae growth and potentially dangerous slips and falls and nothing has been done to redress this problem.

The problem with this argument is the logical conclusion of it is that the current railing would be removed and a solid head high wall or barrier would be installed so that no possible accident can occur. The riposte is that to climb though the barrier would be to enter into unreasonably dangerous action. Yet the sea edge is naturally dangerous. At what point do you abdicate responsibility for your own actions and blame someone else? Like America, Ireland is a notoriously litigious society. That doesn’t mean everyone is so inclined. But I certainly take responsibility for my own stupidity, as I image most of you do also.

It is beyond me how the installation of a simple warning sign of the dangers of the sea front, as is done in Newtown Cove for the dangerous cliff edge, and all along the Copper Coast, for cliffs, current and mine shafts wouldn’t be sufficient.

But the other main problem with the barriers that I have is the unsightly nature and overwhelmingly ugly aspects of them at a location that has been very beautiful for me and others, a beauty that is partly expressed though the fact that so many people have derived such pleasure from the timeless pursuits of jumping into water and swimming and chatting and pursuing that most essential of Irishness with friend, the craic. They simply don’t fit into the lovely surrounding, surrounding which are partly of course man-made. It is the built environment of the Guillamene that has led to its place in the local and tourist culture. Man-made isn’t bad. What is wrong is a lack of visual or cultural integration of a new safety system into an existing environment. We bemoan the surrendering of Irish culture to the drink and the pub, yet when those of us actually do anything else, the spectre of the Orwellian state raises its head.

A meeting will be held in September to review the changes, with Tramore Council and the “stakeholders“, that perennially popular local government term, which includes the Newtown and Guillamenes swimming club, a representative of the Facebook group, and will definitely include myself.

In the meantime, abuse of club members, and criminal threats or activity do nothing to advance any purpose and lose the respect and agreement of those of us committed to the long-term enhancement of the area.

The famous Guillamene sign, which the tourists love, has a less-seen reverse side, visible to those who think to look up when leaving the Guillamene Cove indicating that the cove was principally for bathers. And underneath, the Irish farewell: Slán abhaile. Which means; “Safe home“. I think more people need to consider the wider aspects of Slán abhaile.

The despoiling of the Guillamene Cove (loneswimmer.com)
Spring at the Guillamene (loneswimmer.com)

What the introduction of PED testing for amateurs will mean for all open water swimmers

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You thought the whole Lance Armstrong saga was infuriating or frustrating, annoying or downright appalling? As have we all. Yet little did we know where it would lead or how quickly it would affect swimmers.

Last week’s news of an agreement between WADA (World anti-doping agency), USADA (United States anti-doping agency) and the European Non-Government Sporting Organisation (ENGSO) under the umbrella of the Anti-Doping Convention of the Council of Europe, slipped out without much coverage but it is surely the precursor to one of the most significant changes in amateur open water swimming in the 238 years since our sport began, (or any other endurance sport for that matter).

Historically, most swimmers adhere to the principle of honour, that we say what rules we are swimming by, then we either succeed or not by those by rules. The fact that we are by and large amateurs in a marginal sport has meant ordinary open water swimmers, even if there are now a lot of us worldwide, have never been either concerned by MDLs (Maximum Daily Limits) or even prohibited substances.

I’ve never personally seen nor heard of a distance swimmer using EPO or stimulant, steroids or masking agents, beta-agonists or any of the endurance PED cheating of professional sports-people though I am not so naive as to believe it doesn’t happen. Captain Webb and many subsequent swimmers used brandy or alcohol to aid their swims and though alcohol was until now almost never used anymore but still legal. Many swimmers use copious off-the-shelf and even prescription levels of painkillers or anti-inflammatories to remediate the extreme stress and pain caused by long distance open water swimming and all the associated training. The use of caffeine is extensive to combat early mornings and late evenings for pool training not to mention using it fuel actual swims, (I like the effective ergogenic (stimulant) properties of caffeine and regularly stop imbibing to maximise the effects for swims).

But this isn’t the point. Those days are now over. We’ll look back on them with fondness for the ease of our previous lives.

As over the beginning of March, all registered distance swimmers with any Association or Federation, in Northern America, the EU and Europe and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) have to register with WADA. Inevitably other global regions will have to follow.
Observers for the various Associations and Federations are currently or planned to be trained to take urine samples immediately post any swim with a registered association. This will obviously start with the big associations, CS&PF, SBSCA, CCSA, MIMS, Gibraltar. The others will follow.
Santa Barbara Channel Swim Association are first off the blocks with their roll-out of the announcement of changes.
Swimmers unwilling to provide immediate post swim samples will NOT have their swim ratified by the Federation. Observer reports will not be forthcoming.
The 2013 WADA Prohibited List of Banned Substances now applies to distance swimmers for registered or booked swims. REGARDLESS of when the swim was booked.
Swimmers MUST register and have Doctor’s Therapeutic Use Exceptions (T.U.E.) Certificates where applicable for substances which are being used therapeutically and which are on the Prohibited List, (such as my asthma inhaler Salbutamol).
Some no-longer much used substances (such as alcohol) will now have maximum limits such as the alcohol doping violation threshold (haematological values) of 0.10 g/L. This means a fundamental change to the “As Captain Webb did it” over-aching guiding principle of marathon swimming.
Though not yet ratified, it’s likely that caffeine will have its threshold set as concentrations in the urine to exceed 15 μg/ mL for a swimmer-athlete to test positive for this substance. (This equates to a consumption of about 500mg per day, i.e. a maximum of 2 average cups of coffee at 300mg per cup).

What you must do now:

Educate yourself.
Download the list of Prohibited Substances above.
Check yourself that you are not breaking any rules.
Arrange a meeting with your General Practitioner to discuss AND certify.
If you are taking any prescribed medication, you will need a Certificate to so state for EACH substance for EVERY instance. (Backdating is not allowed, that’s one of the ways Armstrong cheated).
The “I didn’t know” defence has long been the refuge of PED cheats. That day is also over.

What you could also do now (not mandatory)

Register as a drug-free athlete with your national swim association. You are expected to be PED-free and If you are drug-free then this isn’t an issue but it’s a statement of intent. Of course should you register and later be caught, you face a mandatory lifetime ban from swimming at any level.

EDIT April 2nd: P.S. Don’t you realise yet the Internet is the perfect vehicle for April’s Fools jokes?

Learning the sea at Doolin Bay & Crab Island

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The Cliffs of Moher, (aka The Cliffs of Insanity in the Princess Bride movie)

I want to take you on a trip out west. Not south-west to the island that you could expect, Sandycove Island. This time, it’s west to County Clare we go and a different but also special bay and island, another island that like Sanycove, many have seen but few have known and fewer have appreciated, a few of those whose hearts are given to the sea each in their own way; surfers, divers, and this one swimmer. Before the Copper Coast and Sandycove Island and the English Channel it’s the place where I learned the most about the sea, even though I was not often aware what I was learning.

First sight of Crab Island & Doolin Bay with a big swell

Crab Island is on the west coast of Ireland, about 500 metres off Doolin Pier, in County Clare to be precise. The island itself is the remnant of the mainland, If you know how to approach Doolin in the best way, taking the tiny back hill road from Lahinch over the hill, you will crawl along, carefully avoiding the occasional local inhabitant and/or surfer who knows this road. You climb up out of Lahinch, up the hills at the land side of the Cliffs of Moher, and half a mile before you cross the coast road, you will crest the hill. The spectacle of the Aran Islands, the Clare coast, outer Galway Bay, Doolin Bay and Point and Crab Island suddenly present themselves, no slow unveiling but a dramatic entrance.

Beyond Doonagore Castle the Crab Beast roars. Inissheer Island is on the horizon.

If the sea is in your heart and blood, and if a westerly Atlantic ground-swell is running, I cannot describe the sensation of excitement mixed with awe and fear, that the sight of the swell roaring off Crab and into Doolin Bay can bring, and that fear can only come from personal experience.

Crab Island (just Crab as it’s known) is legendary amongst Irish and a few of the world’s surfers. Big Crab describes when a westerly groundswell, originating in the western Atlantic or Caribbean hit the west coast, with an easterly off-shore wind, is a notoriously heavy wave with a technically difficult right-handed wave (which means it breaks from left to right as you ride it).

Breaking Crab, lethal at high tide

Crab can hold very big waves and regularly breaks boards and bodies. A heavy wave is a surfer’s description for a wave that has volume, front-to-back depth, and speed. The rest would call it a serious or scary wave. Heavy waves can be moderately sized but generally these are the waves that grace the covers of surf magazines and that the surf companies use for their ads.

The notorious wave breaks on the outside of the tiny island onto a series of flat reefs, the only hint of mercy, though a hard rock is still a hard rock, and is impossible at high tide. A deeper channel separates the island and is the most usual access and exit, but when the swell is big enough, the wave outside the island can break the whole way across the channel.

The most obvious breaking wave, the one that grabs the attention of anyone land-side because of its closeness and immediacy is Doolin Peak, which breaks right in front on the limestone terraces. Standing in front of this wave is like standing in front of the ocean’s maw, where the ground can shake and even the landlubbers realise how insignificant we can be compared to the sea.

Doolin Point breaking big. Spring 1999

And then, south and left of the peak is Doolin beach and bay, more forgiving than Crab but which nonetheless can hold a big wave.

Holding a wave means that a particular location will allow waves to break cleanly as the swell size grows. Most locations can’t hold a big wave, most beaches can’t hold a big swell as the bathymetry, (the shape of the sea bottom) transition is too gradual from deep to shallow. Reefs like Crab allow a sudden transition from deep to shallow, which increases power, speed and predictability.

Doolin beach. Bigger than you think.

In recent years the discovery of one of Ireland’s two globally known tow-in wave spots, Aileens (discovered by Waterford surfer and Clare resident John McCarthy, the other being Mullaghmore in Sligo), only a few miles away under the Cliffs of Moher, has eclipsed Crab but only because for the media and the average viewer, big is the only measurement that counts.

But you should visit Crab Island if you can as soon as possible. Because as we all know, anything good in Ireland will be touched if not ruined by uncaring planning decisions, and there is a current proposal to extend the Aran Islands ferry pier to such an extent that it will threaten the existence of these famous waves and location by forcing backwash of the wall back into the breaks. Efforts to contest or change the proposal continue.

Cliffs of Moher from Doolin Point_MG_2404-resized

Cliffs of Moher seen from Doolin Point, their immense height not easily apparent

What did I learn at Crab and Doolin over my years visiting?

I learned about ground-swell. Transatlantic, two thousand miles swell. Swell that reaches to the horizon.
I learned about waves so big and powerful and close that the dry land you are standing on quakes when they break.
I learned about a sound that I can never describe; a sound that is difficult to record, the sound that only comes with big swell. A sound that combines the wind, the muted roar of breakers, the scrape of rocks on the sea bottom. A sound that is almost below sound, that you feel as much as you hear, but if you aren’t attuned to it, passes you by.
I learned the effect that minute shifts of wind have on the sea state. Crab is notorious for requiring just the precise amount of wind, from just the right direction. Too strong and you can’t launch off the lip, any hint of south or north in the wind and Crab becomes impossible or blown-out.
I learned about being offshore. Paddling out on a board to get to somewhere dangerous at sea with no possibility of assistance. Sometimes even on a surf-board the paddle out could take twenty-five minutes due the heavy wash into the channel. From the main-land the island looks so close, from the break on the far side, the mainland looks so far away.
I learned limits. Crab was sometimes at the limits of my ability, often beyond and which it was on any given day I only found out when I was out there. I once surfed there for three hours, on my biggest board, on the biggest day I’d ever seen there, and only caught one wave. And that one wave still sometimes looms in my dreams.
I learned the terror of being at the top of a two storey high wave looking down, with rocks in front of you and a nuclear mushroom cloud of white water to your left and behind you. And you not sure your board is big enough or you can paddle fast enough or have the skill to go right, down the line and into the safety of the Channel. But it’s too late, and you have to commit, you have to commit 100% or you will be crushed.
I learned about being prepared for the sea, having once been slammed head first into the outside reef of the island by a big set wave as I was clambering across, and then dragged across the rocks, destroying the board, and surviving inly because I never surfed Crab without a helmet, that simple precaution saving my life.
I learned another time what it is like to be sure the sea is about to kill you and what it is like to be about to die, which all happened in a few seconds as I rode a big one into the Channel and then had a multiple wave hold-down..
I learned what it is like to then not die, to be spit out by the sea and to know you can never explain what those few seconds were like. Seconds that were valuable years later, seconds that came back when I was in the Channel, when people asked me what went through my mind when I was trapped under the pilot-boat. When all I can say is how bright the bottom of the boat and the sea was turquoise with sunlight gleaming in rays past the keel. When in truth I was also thinking about that green deep under the water at Crab that I knew would be the last thing I saw.
More than anywhere else, I learned to never step into the sea without respect for it in my heart, and even when it might not be conscious respect, Crab crashed it into my bones until it became part of me.

Swimming with a bottlenose dolpin at Doolin Pier

Swimming with a Bottlenose dolphin off Doolin Pier, yours truly in the orange cap, the scuba divers were a bit… surprised that I was in without a wetsuit. The water temp was 6.8C.

Guest Article: Sylvain Estadieu – Butterfly in the Public Lane

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As an irish people I dislike the association of Guinness with being Irish. Sylvain is French so he's allowed!

As an Irish person I dislike the association of Guinness with being Irish. Sylvain is French so he’s allowed!

Sylvain Estadieu, aka The Flying Frenchman, came to Ireland in 2008, where he became a Sandycove Island swimmer. He Soloed the English Channel in 2009. So despite his origin and travels around the world, and currently living in Sweden, Ireland and Sandycove will always have a claim on him.

During Channel training Sylle became notorious for his Individual Medley of Sandycove Island, four laps of the island, about 1700 metres per lap, each lap using each of the four I.M. strokes, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and front crawl. I seem to recall he said breaststroke was the worst lap.

After keeping it quiet for some time, Sylvain finally went public late last year with his intention of attempting another English Channel Solo, this time though he intends to attempt it as a Butterfly world-record attempt. Sylvain and I crewed for Gábor Molnar‘s English Channel swim, where I extracted the promise that we (Gábor and I) could crew for him. So this September, I’ll be back in Dover for another World Record attempt.

In Varne Ridge.
From left: Gabor, David, Donal, Evelyn, Sylvain,

In 2010 and 2012 Sylvain and his girlfriend Great Greta travelled around the antipodes, where he left his mark by starting a tradition of non-wetsuit swimming in Lake Wanaka.

Sylvain at Lake Wanaka

I get asked quite often if my sessions are 100% butterfly. The answer is no. I just had a look at the figures and for 2013 it turns out I’ve swam 48% of butterfly, 47% of front crawl, 4% of backstroke and just under 0.5% of breaststroke.

The other question that I get asked fairly often is if it’s easy to swim butterfly in a public lane. It can prove difficult to train front crawl if there are undisciplined bathers (Disclaimer: don’t swim in the same lane as me … I’m not a easy-friendly lane-mate) … so doing butterfly in a crowded lane sounds like it should be almost impossible, right? Well, you’ll be glad to learn that it’s possible!

The first rule of BIAPL is you don’t talk about BIAPL (you saw this one coming). One does not encourage others to do it. Especially if said others frequent the same swimming pool. We wouldn’t want a lane full with butterfliers, now that would be mayhem.

The second rule of BIAPL, which is probably more important than the first one is you’ve got to look around. This one is actually applicable to other strokes, other sports and situations like crossing the street, walking on the sidewalk, moving dishes from the dishwasher to the shelves, etc. As soon as there’s one person to share the lane with, you’ve got to start looking around yourself. Doing a complete length of butterfly with your head down is forbidden, so is taking the first stroke(s) with your head down. You look ahead as often as you can and learn to anticipate. Will I be able to take one full stroke or two short ones? Maybe I’ll have to overglide a bit so the oncoming swimmer will have time to end up behind me?

In all likelihood I will need to whack my right hand against the lane line a couple times per length so as to give enough space to the others (sorry to disappoint you Donal, but my wingspan is a mere 1m82 … but I still take more space doing fly than if I were to (somehow) swim sideways with my head-to-feet axis perpendicular to the lane). Occasionally my left hand will be high up in the air trying to pick apples while my left “wing” will resemble that of a little duckling. Not pretty, but at least there’ll be no blood in the water.

It’s an easy rule to summarize, but it’s really powerful. Just know your surroundings, know what’s going on around you, and most of the time you’ll be alright.

The third rule of BIAPL is that you won’t be able to take every single stroke in the mighty butterfly style, so get over it already. There will necessarily be times when you have to switch to freestyle for a few strokes. But that’s not a biggie, especially because it gives you the chance to … count … something … else! Yipee! You’re already keeping track of the distance you swam, the remaining one, your average pace for each set and the number of times people have pushed off right in front of you, now let me introduce the fly/fc ratio.

What is the fly/fc ratio?

Quite simply, the fly/fc ration describes the amount of butterflying in your butterfly sets. 100% means that you didn’t need to use the one-arm stroke even once while 50% indicates that it must have been a bloody battlefield out there and that maybe you’d have been better off doing something else, like kicking perhaps?

Calculating the ratio is very easy: imagine your average stroke count is 20 strokes per 25m in front crawl. You start a casual 1000m butterfly and end up using a total of 90 strokes of f/c in order to pass people of avoid accidentally punching them in the head (or worse, if you have paddles on, something reminiscent of the French Revolution … the Swedes have hidden their royal family since I moved to Sweden). You will have swum approximately 112.5m of f/c and 887.5m of fly, hence a ratio of 89%. Not bad!

You can also use this ratio to calculate you actual “butterfly speed” over such a set, but I’ll let you do the math.

The fourth rule of BIAPL is embrace the moment. Have fun, you’re flying after all. You’re bringing magic to this world, you’re inspiring people, at the very least a young Arnie, for two strokes or more.

And remember the (poor) haiku:

Both arms over head
Then glide deep under water
Archimedes will help.

Otherwise, training is going well, getting faster, stronger and better looking by the day.

Fly Sweden!

Review: SwimSmooth.com One Day Swim Clinic

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In late Channel season 2011 I was in Varne Ridge to crew a solo. Present for that tide were a bunch of Channel Aspirants from Western Australia, advised by seven-times world open water champion Shelley Taylor-Smith. They had had a long wait with bad weather. One of the swimmers was UK-born but WA resident Paul Newsome, the coach behind the popular swimming website SwimSmooth.com and we got to chat the day after his Solo, which had been in very challenging Force 5 conditions, (making him, like me, a member of the unofficial Force 5 Channel club).

SwimSmooth takes the rational approach that there isn’t a single style, that in fact there are different ways of swimming, especially for new and intermediate swimmers, and that there are appropriate progression paths for those styles. It doesn’t try to squeeze everyone into the same (useless) mould. SwimSmooth sets out six initial styles but the coaches aren’t tied into insisting that everyone is one of the styles, as people can demonstrate aspects of different styles. SwimSmooth also specialises in open water swimming, realising that there are many other aspects of open water swimming outside just the stroke that affect swimmers. A well-known aspect of SwimSmooth is their use of technology, (driven mostly by Paul’s SwimSmooth partner, Channel crew and swimming coach, Adam Young). These include their famous Mr. Smooth animation (at which I’m sure thousands have stared for long periods), the integration of Paul’s Feel For the Water Blog, and the thorough use of video comparison technology for stroke analysis, that previously would only have been available to elite swimmers. Video analysis is probably the most powerful technique tool of all apart from having your own elite coach. SwimSmooth doesn’t engage in Trademarking of well-known swim drills as some others have done. Instead a small selection of appropriate drills are used to address each swimmer’s deficiencies, something many new swimmer’s have no idea how to approach.

Mr. Smooth

Unlike Total Immersion, of which I’ve already written some (but not all) of my criticisms, Paul has walked or more precisely, swam the talk. He took on the Channel in Force 5 winds and prevailed, still achieving a fantastic time, better than most on a good day.

Last week I saw on Paul’s Twitter feed that he was heading for the UK’s swimming centre for excellence in Loughborough (pronounced Luff-burr-o). Last week he tweeted that he was also coming to Ireland for Coach and swim clinics and needed some guinea pigs for video analysis. I saw the Tweet too late and responded but I’d missed the opportunity. I also told Paul I’d hoped to add his autograph to the book. But it all worked out because two days later Paul offered me a cancellation place on the March 17th St. Patrick’s Day swim clinic.

The University of Limerick Pool is one of Ireland’s only three 50 metres pools, and one of the two High Performance Centres, where Irish International Marathon Swimmer Chris Bryan trains, along with some of Ireland’s Olympic swimmers and hopefuls. Paul made the point that the Perth centre alone where SwimSmooth is based has three 50 metre pools, and over twenty 50 metre pools to serve its population of 1.2 million. The almost total abandonment of our sport is of course something most Irish swimmers feel keenly. For example Waterford Institute of Technology, (the nearest college to me), has been building a large Sports Campus. A Sports Campus … with no pool. But instead of a pool there’s a (now abandoned) business conference centre.

UL Pool SwimSmooth clinic IMG_20130317_112030

UL HPC 50m pool.

The twelve swimmers on the course arrived at the pool at the 10 a.m. opening (St. Patrick’s Day, national holiday) and met Paul and his SwimSmooth partner Adam Young, UK Swim Smooth coach Emma Bunting, and another twelve coaches who were on a three-day SwimSmooth Coaching course, which included English Channel relay swimmer and Solo Aspirant? Jill Bunyan. The swimmers were from around Ireland but the coaches were more geographically diverse, including Jill from the Isle of Man, coaches from Ireland, UK, Scotland, and as far as Hong Kong.

We spent about an hour on introductions, everyone speaking about their experience and their own stroke problems.

As I’d said to Paul earlier in the week, I have no local club to swim with, and no coach. Since swimming is really a two-person sport, the swimmer constantly requiring the intervention of a coach, I knew my stroke would have problems. Though I didn’t say it, in my own mind, every single aspect of my stroke was likely to have issues. All the training I do only reinforces any poor technique where I am not aware of it. And most swimmers are not aware of their technique problems. We were also quickly introduced to personal swim coaches from those on their coach’s course, my coach was Cassie.

There followed a quick discussion of stroke, deliberately short so Paul would not be putting clutter into people’s minds just before swimming. We also saw some fantastic video that Adam and Paul had taken of Becky Adlington’s and Shelly Taylor-Smith’s strokes.

I warmed up, enjoying the luxury of the 50m length, since I’d be one of the last recorded, while Paul videoed each swimmer using a remote camera on a boom, recording front, side, over- and underwater angles.

Example of the video stroke analysis during the clinic. Neither of these swimmers is me!

After a working lunch, (there was no wasted time in the entire day) Paul started stroke analysis of each swimmer’s video. The last time I have video analysis of my stroke I felt terrible embarrassment when I saw myself. But I prefer to improve more than I care about embarrassement. I hoped there had been improvement since then, and there was in some areas, but other areas had deteriorated. My cruising open water or long pool distance bilateral stroke was okay (later in the pool Paul said it looked smooth and like I could go for ever, which is what I train for and which was a relief) but the video of my single-sided “speed” stroke showed ( I asked him to do both) appalling and multiple stroke errors.

Paul made some suggestions. I could already see, based on all the EVF work I’ve been doing for the last year, how in fact I’d caused the other problems, and some problems were utterly invisible to me (such as a slight left arm crossover when breathing right) . On Paul’s YouTube Channel there’s a good example of his analysis and tools in a long video.

I don’t have Paul’s coaching experience obviously, but I have enough swim experience and coaching knowledge to analyse someone else’s stroke. This is the irony of swimming, that what we see in others we can’t see in ourselves. For an experienced swimmer, seeing their own stroke says more than any words.

Donal, underwater

Paul also spent some time on open water skills and advice, addressing such issues as turning, rough water, and anxiety.

Cassie & Donal (& Trish, elite pool swimmer in the foreground)

Next we moved back to the pool and did a range of drills, none of which were new to me, but some of which I hadn’t done in a long time and which were good to revisit. These drills were chosen by Paul to address the issues of the range of swim abilities present on the course. That range of abilities never became an problem, spread as we were across three 50 metre lanes, and we all had a chance to work more with our individual coaches. The drills included using Finis Freestyle and Agility paddles and pull-buoys. Already being a paddle addict I was hugely impressed by the Agility paddle, (which I’d planned to try anyway after Evan recommended them). I’ve since bought a pair.

One of the swimmers on the course, Trish, is an elite swimmer, in time and stroke, and I certainly have plenty of open water experience, even if my swimming speed is average. Yet neither of us felt that anything we did was a waste of time, or in any way dumbed-down, and the time didn’t drag. To satisfy relative beginners through intermediate level, to advanced and elite levels, all in one course, is no mean feat and usually only comes in a squad with time. Swim ability questionnaires filled out by the other swimmers beforehand certainly facilitated this and assisted the excellent organisation on the day.

Due to the public holiday UL were keen to shut the pool early so there wasn’t a lot of time to chat.

We each came away with a stroke analysis from our coaches, an individual DVD that Adam had generated for each swimmer which included not only the video of our own swimming, but also all the comparison videos, the computer notes and audio from the analysis, and specific drill and swimming advice for each swimmer dependant on Paul’s and the individual coaches assessments. Oh, and a SwimSmooth open water swim cap. (Find the cap).

Conclusion

I’ve recently seen someone pay for video swim analysis in which they were only recorded from the side and front from above the water, and the remaining time was spent by the “coach” and swimmer talking on the side of the pool.

The SwimSmooth one day swim clinic is so far beyond that as to be almost like comparing two different sports.

The clinic offered time-efficient, personalized and top-class stroke analysis, expert coaches, specific open water and drill advice, and stroke remediation, for all levels of ability and experience. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Alternatively, if you are not in a location where you can participate in one of these clinics in the foreseeable future (but remember I’m in the middle-of-nowhere, so you never know), the SwimSmooth blog, has some excellent free technique and drill resources for all levels, and there’s the SwimSmooth DVDs and books, also highly recommended.

Paul & Donal. Not only is he faster, he’s younger and better looking. And now finally added to my marathon swimmer’s autograph book.

I expect a Top Five and very possibly a Top Three place for Paul in this year’s MIMS when the large Irish and Aussie contingent will account for over a third of the entire field.

There’s no such thing as a freak wave – coastal safety is your own responsibility

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I was reading a letter to Tramore Town Council, about the new Guillamenes cattle-crush, from someone who’d been involved in International Water Safety for many years. In the letter the person pointed out how someone had been “swept off the diving platform by a freak wave”. I said the Club Secretary Aidan Farrally that his points were valid but subsequent to that assertion, his arguments became suspect.

Now despite my deliberately somewhat provocative title, yes there are such things as freak waves. However while they are long reported, they are an only recently confirmed open ocean phenomenon, and more commonly known as rogue waves, (twice the height of the significant wave height around them).

But here we are discussing so-called freak waves at the coast, the interface of land and sea.

Every year we read or hear stories of coastal drownings caused by freak waves, where people at the coast are caught by a wave seemingly out of scale or size to the preceding waves, and swept off rocks, out to sea or suffering a fatal concussion from rocks. These are tragedies, but I have long had a problem with this reporting because it perpetuates a myth about the sea, and somewhat shifts the responsibility of care away from the person into a force-majeure situation, an “act of god“.

If there are freak waves, how can an average person realistically protect themselves except to stay away from the coast? If there aren’t freak waves, then the responsibility shifts to people themselves to be more vigilant.

The phrase freak wave implies that what has happened is unusual and unforeseen, neither of which are the case. Ask any surfer. So we need once again to talk about waves and safety at the coast.

Most waves are caused by wind. Wind blows over the water surface and the friction pushes the water. The distance of water over which the wind blows is called the fetch, and the longer the fetch, and the longer the time and stronger the wind that blows, the bigger the initial waves. If the wind continues to blow, as the waves grow, they present even more surface for the wind to push. The waves continue to grow.

Waves are an energy pulse that travels through the water and will continue to travel unless something stops them. That something from our point of view, is land.

I said initial waves above, and that’s really important. Wind that blows in a Western Atlantic storm cause waves, which if unimpeded by other contrary weather, may blow those winds toward Ireland and Europe, across 2000 miles of open water.

We need to think about the fundamentals of a wave.

Imagine the wind blowing and causing waves.

The height of a wave is called the amplitude.
The greater the amplitude the more energy in the wave.
The number of waves in a particular time is called the frequency.

Waves of different amplitudes usually have different frequencies. The higher the amplitude or height, the lower the frequency.

The bigger the wave, the longer the time between them and the less frequently they appear.

Waves travel at different speeds. Wind that cause waves nearby can have lots and lots of chop, small waves really close to each other.

Now the critical things about waves of any kind, not just water, is if they are even fractionally different heights they will travel at different speeds. What happens if two things, in case waves, are travelling the same direction at different speeds? The faster one will pass the slower one.

The further away the initial wind, the further the waves will travel. If a faster waves catches a slower one, the basic physics means that they will be added together. The amplitude, the height of the waves, will become the two combined heights.

A one and half metre wave catching a one metre wave, will become a two and half metre wave.

This wave, in surfer’s parlance, is called a Set Wave. Surfers don’t see them as freaks, but as normal aspects of the ocean’s behaviour.

Long groundswell waves at Tramore pier

This doesn’t happen quickly but when you have hundred or thousands of miles or kilometres in which it can happen, it doesn’t have to be quick.

Waves reaching Hawaii from the Aleutian Islands

The result is that you have a wave that is now a third higher than the higher of the two previous waves. And that may be higher than all the surrounding waves. And the bigger it is the faster it’s travelling but the longer time between them, so there can up to many minutes between large waves like this. Any experienced surfer can tell you that the period between the largest set waves could be up to 15 minutes.

Now we’ve explored the formation and irregularity of waves, we’ve seen that these are not freak waves, but normal ocean behaviour.

The important thing becomes that the responsibility for understanding this lies with the person on the shore, just as it lies with a pedestrian crossing a road, except the ocean can’t see or react to you like a motorist can even when you are in the wrong.

Therefore the most important action to watch the water. Always.

This is NOT expect the unexpected. This is how the ocean works.

It should be noted, unlike beaches facing directly into the swell, at reefs and rocks, especially those that are not directly facing the oncoming swell, set waves can be difficult to see. if the water around a reef or rocky shore is deep, the first indication you may have is the wave actually breaking onto where you are standing

One wave seems to appear out of a flat surrounding sea at Tramore. easy to see on a beach, not easy to see elsewhere.

A wave seems to appear out of the flat surrounding sea at Tramore. Easy to see on a beach, not so easy to see elsewhere.

Watch the water for twice as long as the waves are high (in imperial measurement).

If the waves look to be two feet high, watch the water for four minutes before venturing close to the shore.

If the waves are two metres high on initial appraisal, you should (approximately) convert that to feet, and watch the water for six to seven minutes before getting close. Do this regularly and you will start to gain a better appreciation for the sea and its rhythms. And more importantly, you and the people around you will be safer.

Coastal safety is your responsibility!

The relevance of shivering in open water swimming

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- Apologies to those email subscribers who saw this earlier in the week and are seeing it now again.

For this post, let’s take all the usual pre-swim and first three minutes stuff for granted.

You’re in the water. The water is cold. And you are cold. We start there.

The water is about 10° degrees and you’ve been in for say 30 minutes (without a wetsuit). I’m picking 10° Celsius for a very specific reason, that most people will agree it’s either cool or cold, but many people will still start to stretch out their swimming times at that temperature. So 10°C and 30 minutes is a compromise. It may require colder water and longer times for some, and shorter times and warmer water for others.

The day is overcast and a little breezy. Therefore you are receiving no external heat input from the sun or the ambient temperature.

Donal’s Claw

You have The Claw and can no longer touch your little finger to your index finger. You still have 500 metres to get back to your exit point and you feel you need to warm up. So you swim harder. You metabolise more ATP, some of which provides the energy to propel your arms and legs faster, and some goes to produce excess heat, which helps warms you slightly. But your limbs are really cold and it can’t warm you enough.

Brown Fat distribution

Luckily , you’ve been swimming in cold water regularly and you have built-up some brown fat (Brown Adipose Tissue, aka BAT) on your shoulders and lower back. BAT doesn’t develop all over like ordinary fat but in those specific parts of the body. You don’t realise it, but the brown fat has also been burning calories specifically to provide heat for you, as unlike ordinary white fat, BAT is metabolically active. Ordinary white fat provides energy by being an ATP store and of course it also insulates. But BAT along with some insulation, burns ATP to produce heat, the blood flows through the BAT and warms up. This is known as NST, Non-shivering Thermogenesis. NST is not sudden, it starts when you are exposed to cold and the BAT is insulating and protecting you immediately, and also providing heat.

Maybe you’ve forgotten your watch, or made a distance mis-calculation or the tide is stronger than you realised, and result is the exit is still 1000 metres away. And while the BAT is useful it also consumes your energy reserves more quickly.

A kilometre is a long way when you are really cold. Now you can no longer touch your little finger to your index finger. Your fingers are fully spread. You can’t swim at the same rate you were and start to slow down. And then you get a little shudder. And then another. And then you are shivering in the water.

Shivering is the body’s last attempt to warm itself. Like with any exercise, like with all your swimming, not just at speed, your body is burning more ATP again in a desperate attempt to warm you up. Like all your metabolic processes this is an ancient evolutionary step, from the eons before we had mastered clothes and heat, even before we’d shed our fur, cold nights on the African plains. And here are, us stupid swimming apes, voluntarily shedding our learned advantages and protections and stepping into a lethal environment where we no longer have a natural protection. And all we have left to protect us from death by hypothermia is a desperate last little biological process. A biological process that evolved … FOR LAND. Not for water where direct conduction of heat away from the body is 30 times the convection heat-loss rate of air. This isn’t the normal shivering we experience during Afterdrop, because then it is helpful for rewarming.

In water, shivering is dangerous and accelerates remaining energy and heat loss.

Shivering will not heat you in water. It will not protect you. Every experienced open water swimmer will tell you, that once shivering in the water develops you are in real danger. (And that’s excluding the fact that you were already in danger merely by being in the cold water to begin). This on our scale, where cold water itself is low down.

If shivering starts, get out of the water.

If you have started shivering you should have already been out of the water. If it happens when you are in the water, you need to get out immediately. If you are crew and your swimmer starts shivering forget about stroke counts or cognitive tests or anything else, and pull them out immediately.

Cold water swimming ability comes from experience. It’s not a talent. It is a skill. Skills can be learned. Part of the skill is developing the knowledge and experience to avoid swimming until you start shivering while still in the water. The learning process for some people (like myself) is facilitated by knowledge.

The loneswimmer autograph book

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In 2011 I spent a week in Dover at the end of the season with Lisa Cummins and Kevin Williams, waiting to crew for Kevin William’s Solo. Unfortunately the weather was rubbish, Kevin got weathered out, and we spent a significant portion of the week in The White Horse, the pub where successful Channel swimmers sign their names on the ceiling and walls.

The White Horse

Unlike a lot of swimmers, especially the local Dover swimmers, I actually like The White Horse. There are almost always other swimmers there, and the conversation tends to be almost exclusively swimming naturally, and just you never know whom you’ll meet. The White Horse is Base Camp for the world’s marathon and Channel swimmers. You sit there looking around at the signatures of all the people you know and admire, grumbling that one-way relays take up so much space while soloists scramble for a few square inches, or see a signature that prompts a story you heard… I am after all, a fanboy of Channel and marathon swimmers, as many people will attest who’ve met me, I get exited meeting swimmers and tend to gabble on, which is entirely at odds with my normal persona, (leading many swimmers including good friends to believe I’m some kind of hyperactive extrovert).

After returning from that Dover trip while I was swimming one day I thought to myself that it would be cool to try to replicate, in some small personal form, the walls of The White Horse.

The Irish Channel party was held about six weeks later and I showed up with a virtually blank Moleskine A4-sized book under my arm (I was thinking ahead, and knew I wanted a book that would last years, hopefully), with the intention of collecting the autographs of the Irish Channel swimmers present. Some people laughed and the idea was politely ridiculed, but everyone went along with it. Most of us after all, will go our entire lives without being asked for our autograph.

But for the last 18 months, I’ve dragged that book with me everywhere there was a swimming occasion. I’ve taken it to MIMS, to Distance Camp, to Dover a few times and elsewhere. Quite a few swimmers from around the world have seen it by now. And the collection of names is quite impressive and always growing. No-one is laughing much at the idea any more!

World Record holders! I have World Record English Channel Holder Trent Grimsey (fastest) on the opposite page to World Record English Channel Holder Jackie Cobell (slowest). World Record holder for first to complete the Ocean’s Seven, Stephen Redmond of course, who’ve I had sign it few times just after he’s gotten off the ‘plane at the airport. He’s already taken a full page, I have the page beside it reserved for his future adventures. I even got him to sign the seventh Tsugaru Channel swim in gold-coloured ink (which I promptly smudged). And Roger Allsopp, World Record Holder as oldest male swimmer.

Stephen signing the book after Tsugaru. Remember then I said I'd explain some day?

Stephen signing the book after Tsugaru. Remember then I said I’d explain it some day?

And of course I have the King of the Channel, Kevin Murphy and his personal message to me is deeply appreciated.

I have English Channel swimmers from around the world of course, but it’s obvious I can only get a sample so I hunt down real life and online friends.

Triple Crown swimmers in the book include Double Triple Crown swimmer Tina Neill (winner of the inaugural 2012 marathonswimmers.org Female Swimmer of the Year award), Eddie Irwin, Gabor Molnar, Mo Siegel, Ned Denison, Nick Adams, Dave Barra, Barbara Held, Andrew Malick. Of course most of The Magnificent Seven, (Jen had emigrated by the time I started the book and Danny Walsh should be entering it later this year).

Autographs of Jackie Cobell, Trent Grimsey and Diarmuid O’Brian, the first Sandycove Channel swimmer

Other well-known swimmers include Forrest Nelson, Chloe MacCardel, Darren Miller, Anne-Marie Ward, Jen Schumacher, Susie Dods (who has said she’s going to start a North American version!), Tom Healy, (2012 Irish English Channel record holder and Most Meritorious English Channel Swim of the Year) and Roz Hardiman, whom I’ve often mentioned in my writing as inspirational (English Channel Soloist, without the use of her legs using no aids). The Godfather of Irish Channel swimming, Kieran Fitzgerald. FINA 2012 Runner Up Damian Blaum, three-time winner of the longest open water race in the world, (Parana in Argentina), and Irish International swimmer Chris Bryan (I was apparently the first person to ask for his autograph). Also Carol Sing, oldest US female Channel swimmer. My English Channel “brother” Ian Down, CS&PF committee member.

And I have our departed friend Páraic Casey.

Of course there are others I’ve met when I hadn’t started the book including seven times world champion Shelley Taylor-Smith and Sue Oldham, oldest female English channel swimmer, and a few others.

All the Sandycove Channel and marathon swimmers. Many Distance Camp Channel Swimmers. Other Channel swimmers I’ve met in Dover and elsewhere. Most of the Irish Channel swimmers. Double two-way English Channel swimmer Stuart Johnson. And even a (very) few non-marathon swimmers: David and Evelyn in Varne Ridge, Coach Eilís, Freda Streeter, (the Channel General), Barrie Wakeham (the Dover Shingle-Stomper) and EC Pilot Paul Foreman.

(And couple of signatures of people who decided they’d write in it knowing they weren’t swimmers and weren’t asked, what can you do). And couple of more that I can’t figure out who they are!

I’ve closed it on the hands of couple of people who weren’t solo swimmers and I’ve told a couple of people they’d have to do more before they can get in there. Politely of course.

I doubt it’s more than a third full, and it has become a prized possession. I look forward to getting many more of your world-wide autographs in the coming years: My online partner and record-holder Evan Morrison. Ali Streeter, Queen of the Channel, (but the prospects look difficult at the moment). My Channel sister Jen Hurley. Maybe I’ll get Swimsmooth.com‘s Channel Swimmer Paul Newsome next week (like a lot of swimmer’s someone I met previously, before I started the book). I dream of getting Ted and Jon Erikson, Lynne Cox and Phil Rush and others, maybe someday, somewhere. I used to think about posting the book to people to ask, but I’m unwillingly to risk its loss now.

If I haven’t mentioned your name here as someone I have collected, you can be assured that I don’t value it any less, all of the entries I value highly. My friends from Sandycove were the first ones I collected and the idea was based on them

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