I have an irregular Brazilian open water email correspondent who is a lake swimmer, and is too far from the sea to have ever been able to swim in the ocean. He writes about the wildlife he loves on the banks, the calm warm (high 20’s!) water and the serenity of lake swimming and can’t really get…
I had a plan for a swim last week, but I was let down again by my kayaking friend. What to do, what to do? Friday’s forecast was pretty good. Very light onshores. I wanted something new. So I decided it was the apposite day. I had a pretty decent breakfast and was ready to…
Practice everything. Do nothing new on the day. These are the two corollaries of the long distance swimmer’s maxim about preparation. Experienced swimmers learn it early. Plan. So for planning for something like a 24 hour pool swim, experienced swimmers like Lisa & Danny first think about what they will need, and will go back to previous…
Food: Not Maxim. We know that won’t work for 24 hours in a pool. 🙂 Fruit. (Especially berries, bananas) Soup Hot or cold Pasta (ugh) Sandwiches Smoothies Chocolate, biscuits, mint cake, jelly babies. The usual. Fruit Cake/flapjacks I’ll have a tub of Maxim for the times we need a boost. Coffee for the night. Lots…
I thought I’d revisit this subject, with the benefit of some few longs swims done in the past few months. On the first six hour lake swim, I crashed (ran out of energy) on the last mile. On the first six hour SandyCove swim this year I crashed at about four & a half hours,…
Last week was Sandycove Cork Distance camp. Organised and run by Ned Dennison, it’s a 10 day series of swims designed for long distance swimmers wanting to get some really serious training done. It started as the Champion Of Champions swim in 2008, based on the UK Dover race of the same format; a 5…
Well, a milestone passed. 6 hour Channel qualification swim: Open Water: In under 16 Celsius: Done! Whether coach will sign off on it is another matter as 5 of the magnificent seven are currently in the bad books, apparently. It’s not like we won’t be doing it again anyway. 6 hours + in Inishcarragh Lake,…
(WordPress somehow chewed the original of this post, which had followed the Socrates quote, so below is a quick and lazy rewrite). Last Friday we (2010 Channel aspirants) met for a 10 hour pool swim. I had only approximately 4 hours sleep the previous night and was feeling tired but expecting the worst after the…
I love Saturday mornings. Rest day and after 6 1/2 hours session yesterday, it’s even better. Put on some music, have a fruit smoothie, grind and brew the coffee beans, throw on some pancakes. Not training food but pretty nice for a change. Like being a normal human. The Magnificent Seven, and Eddie, assembled at…
So three plus hour swims are a weekly (or more) feature of training right now (end of January ’10). “Normal” day’s training is hovering around two to two & an half. I did a four hour about a week and half ago, just to see how I feeling. I had been planning to do a…
Happy to have finished. Having contracted yet another lung infection really quickly after the flu earlier this week, I had recovered enough to do a quick hard hour yesterday to test whether my lungs would hold without an asthma attack. One hour isn’t much of test so I did some speed-work to stress the breathing…
LoneSwimmer 