The tenth of November, 2018 sees the launch of the new North Channel Swimming Association, with a public announcement by Channel Swimmer and inaugural Chairperson Antonio Argules in San Francisco (and here on Loneswimmer). Since before Tom Blower’s first successful North Channel solo in 1947 (previously covered on Loneswimmer here), North Channel swim attempts have been…
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.…
I joined the boarding queue, just as a vaguely familiar chap joined the queue just in front of me. My suspicion from earlier that I knew him was correct. We chatted, he’d been there on urgent family business. He’d guessed I’d been on early holiday in the popular location, but during the conversation I responded (or as…
I had intended this article to cover further the articles shared by Nick Adams from the turn of the last century, but I realised that I would have to digress from those accounts and go back to the classical origins that inspired the sport and thence to those whom the origins inspired. Hence, I’ve altered the…
Kathy Watkin’s book The Crossing, (reviewed here), is the only currently available biography of Captain Matthew Webb. It is required reading for any English Channel Aspirant and certainly for anyone interested in the history of the sport of swimming as a whole, not just Channel swimming. Yet those of us who are familiar with detailed accounts of solo swims,…
It seems all the cool web kids are doing Infographics these days. Being neither cool, (more usually cold), nor a kid, I’ve created a few (I started just to see if I could create any at all) on disparate swimming subjects including revisiting some of this site’s most popular articles. Regular readers will by now probably realise that I…
Back in the spring, when the water was at its lowest point for the year and therefore not conducive to test swims with the purposes of reviewing equipment, well-known and reputable UK open water swim organiser (including I’ve heard the London Olympics 2012 10k swim) Colin Hill contacted me to ask me to test out…
August the 24th is the day in 1875 that Captain Matthew Webb successfully swam the English Channel, landing at Calais on his second attempt in under 22 hours. It’s the date that the sport of Channel and Marathon Swimming unofficially claims as its birth day, (disregarding previous unsuccessful attempts by Webb and others). So following a suggestion by…
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’s sometimes said amongst distance and marathon swimmers that everyone suffers (at least) one nightmare swim. The kind of swim where everything seems to conspire against you. Nature, circumstances, events, planning, details. Nightmare swims are sometimes ascribed to over-confidence by the more self-aware kind of swimmer. Rather than blaming everyone except yourself the self-aware marathon swimmer…
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