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…
The car park, being a winter mid-day, was empty. I was later to arrive than the “two-minute-dip polar bears”, who’d been and gone. I’ve often thought and written about these days, the empty days of open water swimming, no souls but mine and the ocean’s, grey days when getting in the water takes all my…
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,…
For five years I’ve posted swim advice for the casual swimmers who may take to the water on Christmas Day or over the holiday period. I’m always aware that of the 10,000 people who will take to the water on Christmas Day in Ireland alone, only one or two thousand at best of those will see the post. Most of…
Cork swimmer Diarmuid Herlihy’s Lough Allua Swim has been growing in reputation for the last couple of years, and as one of the swims I’d not previously done, and since also I’d missed this year’s Garnish swim in the same geographical region, I decided to take the long drive south-west to investigate and see and…
LoneSwimmer 