Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Some messages to Trent involved an ongoing in-joke with Trent’s crew which I can’t repeat, but I can tell you they involved direct messages from a deity. Trent was hammering, burning. His kick was fully switched on, his stroke was up and still increasing and he’d probably briefly seen…
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. During the fifth hour, Trent and Damián had discussed when Damián would come in as support swimmer. Trent requested Damián for the last hour. Around this time Mike also told Trent to take a double-concentration feed for his next feed, “for a boost” but Trent didn’t want…
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. All this time, we’d been in a race, Trent, the crew, Gallivant. Though there were other Solos out that day, including Chloë McCardel‘s second three-way record attempt, (she made it to about two hours into the third leg) Trent’s race was with a ghost, or shall I say, ghostly…
Part 1. Part 2. Leaving Shakespeare Beach, Trent swam straight for the previously discussed port side of Gallivant. Is this time to talk about port and starboard? These are not useless terms, useful only to professional sailors. Port and starboard are highly useful and accurate terms intended to avoid confusion at sea. Confusion in dangerous…
Part 1 To step back a moment, the first post didn’t exactly explain why Owen and I were on the boat. I can only surmise that when Trent asked me to crew early on in the week, I think it was partly because we’d already been touch by email and Twitter, and partly because of…
As some of you know, I was fortunate enough to be crewing aboard Mike Oram’s Gallivant for FINA Grand Prix 2012 Winner Trent Grimsey‘s English Channel Record. And I know you want the details. How did that happen and what did I (we, Owen O’Keefe, Ireland’s youngest English Channel Soloist, aka the Fermoy Fish was…
Part 1. We arose in Varne Ridge early on Sunday morning, but much better than the more usual middle of the night for a typical Channel swim. Sylvain’s favourite breakfast is brioche, and he didn’t start the morning with a typical Channel swimmer’s huge breakfast, instead restraining himself and just having brioche and coffee, while…
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 No precept is more sacred to marathon swimmers than the forbidding of a deliberate touch between swimmer and anything else; boats, people or equipment other than feed supplies. That is the way we disqualify ourselves or how we signify that a swim is over. Until you have been there, until it…
Parts 1, 2, 3. I’m really sorry that this is taking so long, I have better things to do myself! I’ve found it difficult to distil this subject down to essentials. I’ve written long series before, and there’s no way I’m giving Diana Nyad more blog parts than more important subjects like Understanding Cold Adaptation in…
Part 1. Introduction Part 2. Start Timing & boat availability In Part Two, I raised a question, a question that over-shadows much of the discussion of the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim and so needs to remain to the front. What is the significant entry fee ($2150) per swimmer actually for, if not for a boat…
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…
Last year on New Year’s day I wrote about my thoughts of the coming year. I’m haven’t done a retrospective, if you follow the blog, you have a good idea of what happened. I originally just thought I might just round-up some of my favourite photos that I took during the year which then led…
A couple of weeks after his record-breaking English Channel swim, I put some questions to Trent, from myself and some of you on Twitter, and quite a lot from fellow Aussie English Channel and Sandycove swimmer Craig Morrison. Most the questions are a swimmer’s point of view. I’ve been asked how much long I could…
Narrative imperative required that I leave out some details from after Trent finished his swim. When Trent swam back to the boat with Damián, he was of course tired, like all Channel swimmers, but not unusually so. He is a professional athlete after all. He also wasn’t however particularly bloated. Swimmer’s bloat, Third Spacing of…
As mentioned in the first part, this irregular series resulted from the great documentation that former CS&PF President and multiple English Channel swimmer Nick Adams generously shared with me from his copy of the relevant Fry’s Outdoor Magazine. The series quickly grew into an overview of the early years of marathon swimming. Part One and…
Time means nothing. Yet marathon swimmers, as a group of endurance athletes who more than most should know this, also consistently ignore the lesson and ask “how fast were you?” or “what was your time?“? We allow ourselves to be deluded into ascribing more importance to time, in its incarnation of speed than it deserves.…
If Channel Swimming was Star Wars… Captain Webb would be Yoda, the ultimate Jedi swimmer. King of the Channel Kevin Murphy would be Luke Skywalker, while Queen of the Channel Alison Streeter would be Princess Leia. Gertrude Ederle might get a spot as Rey but maybe not, because Star Wars was lacking female characters. CS&PF President Nick Adams would be dashing…
There are better cold water swimmers than I. There are faster cold water swimmers than I. There are hardier cold water swimmers than I. There are more scientific cold water swimmers than I. There are more experienced cold water swimmers than I. There are people who love colder water more than I. There are even…
As is known by its millions of practitioners worldwide, swimming is a sport that many can and do pursue for an entire lifetime. It is accommodating of a wide range of skills and personal motivations. Swimmers report a range of physical benefits from better flexibility and balance to cardio-respiratory health and improved immune systems.…
As a linkbait title, you have to admit it’s pretty intriguing. One of the toughest things for me about writing this site is article titles. I try to make them interesting when the best thing to do is make them effective for search engines, which is a very different thing. The best titles are a combination of…
The Hype Cycle is a new type of swimming stroke in development for triathletes that is likely to soon be adopted into the wider world of marathon swimming after FINA adopt it as the official sixth stroke. As developed by the University of Portsmouth’s famous open water safety research department, instead of standard arm-stroke the research…
It is an oft-repeated observation of many swimmers that the sport itself is meditative, with many experienced lap and open water swimmers reporting they regularly “zone out“. Some years ago, I wrote a brief article considering the positive or enhanced state of Alpha wave production in the brain during certain physical activities such as surfing and open water swimming,…
Apart from some of the How To articles this index includes many of the site’s most popular articles, particularly the long swim reports covering my friends Trent Grimsey, Sylvain Estadieu, Stephen Redmond and Finbarr Hedderman. Thanks once again to those people for allowing me to provide such fascinating first-hand accounts of the largely hidden world of marathon swimming. There are…
This post arises from the blog’s fifth anniversary in January. Such milestones tend to make one consider various things. One that I have been ruminating on without any conclusions is the history and evolution of the blog and its place in open water swimming. I have recently come to (hesitatingly) accept that LoneSwimmer.com is probably the world’s most…
It is known that people are usually more influenced by the other people they know, friends and families, than by experts. It’s from my swimming friends that I have learned most, not distant (both in geographic terms and ability) world champions or experts. I eke out my improvements incrementally, often going backward. I listen to friends, to them…
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