It’s with great excitement that I make the announcement today of a big change in the world of online swimming∗. ∗(Definition of Online Swimming: Reading online nonsense about swimming because you don’t have time for actual swimming in real life. Aka, writing online nonsense about swimming because you don’t have time for actual swimming in real life). As…
Instead of a beach, shadows loomed over me and the water went from gold to black in sudden deep shade. A wall of dressed stone met my fingertips and loomed two metres over me. It was a pier, stone mooring bollards along the edge. There was another pier twenty or thirty metres away to my…
I’d swum a double handful of strokes on one breath, and seen so little and yet so much. Only water, rocks, kelp, light? You don’t understand. Time to breath and navigate, I lifted my head. Golden sunlight dazzled me, washed over me. I know it had been months, the previous autumn since I’d last swum…
Winter reduces my range. I swim at the Guillamenes, along the cliffs and shore of Tramore Bay. Maybe, just maybe, I might get down to Sandycove for a lap. Days pass when I see no-one, arriving, swimming and leaving without a soul. Spring comes with almost imperceptibly warming water and air and increase in the number…
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,…
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…
A lot of Irish places names have been appearing in my Project Copper posts and I said I’d do a brief overview. Disclaimer: I’m not a native Irish speaker, but I have a few words like many people. If you are from overseas, we don’t call it Gaelic, by the way, but there’s a commonality…
This is Tipperary town (about six kilometers out) and environ’s on yesterday’s hazy May afternoon, the town I’m from originally (yes, just like the song). The panorama was taken at a place called Bull Rock (Rock an Tarbh, 52°23’50.63″N, 8° 9’33.85″W) in the Galtee Mountains foothills, facing north-north-west toward Tipperary Town. Tipperary is Ireland’s largest…
So only two days ago I mentioned how I was out of ideas for upcoming posts and how I went for a sea swim. Not very explicitly with the idea of addressing this, yet that was the end result. I came back with a list of ten items, which, for once, I wrote down. I’m…
I’ve obviously been too busy to write much for the last few day, so I thought I’d let you know that Steve Munatones interviewed me a few weeks ago for Open Water Wednesday spot on the Daily News of Open Water Swimming which is available to his subscribers, principally on my favourite subject…cold water. I rambled on,…
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
Extracted from a discussion. “would you mind expanding on which non-sport-specific books have you found useful in your sports, […]? This was during a discussion between myself and another endurance athlete, an ultra- runner. It’s a question I often ask since I read a lot and I often hope I’ll find something pertinent. This time…
Fellow Fishpeople! Today is Solstice. So I asked myself how to concatenate that with some of my interests in one seasonal post? (Open water swimming, H.P. Lovecraft fan, baby-eating atheist and existentialist.) I’m a fan of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s Scary Solstice “carols”. In fact when I hear the “real” version on the radio,…
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