Wow, what an amazing training session this morning. I am stoked for the whole day, whatever happens, i'm up, quids in, ahead of the curve, out in front. Ready.
I have to take you through this one, it was an exceptional morning in the Thames!
For those of you not in the UK, it rained here in the south-east of England all day yesterday. Not just pitter-patter, but proper rain. Constant rain. Couple that with the deluge from Wednesday afternoon which was shorter but torrential to the point of grey-out and you've got waterlogged countryside and a high water table.
When Chris, Pete, Nathan and I got to the river this morning, our plan was for a long steady session, 1 hour plus. What we found was that the water level was now some 15cm higher than it was wednesday morning, and remember that's 15cm across a stretch of water maybe 50m-75m wide. That's a lot of water coming through the gates! You could see clearly from the bank that the current would up the ante for us and this was not going to be an easy session.
Normally our paddle to Marlow weir takes us 22 minutes up to a small boat, Sapphire Blue i think it's called, that is the last moored boat before the weir. This morning the boat was not getting any closer, no matter how hard we swam. It's a disheartening game trying to guess distance at water-level, things just take much longer to get to. No matter, Pete and I cranked it up a notch and slowly reeled this flaming little blue and white boat in, slowly and steadily. I reached it first, maybe 20m ahead of Pete, but when i put my hand out to grab the sides, i immediately found myself moving backwards. I had to resume swimming hard again, just to make it back to the boat and keep swimming with one arm as i reached up to grab a conveniently placed rope. Madness. Looking round, i was astonished to find that Pete's still 20m away and he stayed there for about another minute as he dug in to make the boat. While I'm merrily swinging in the current, gripping this wonderfully secure rope, Pete finally reaches up and gets a fingerhold on the stern, enough grip however to manage a gutsy high-five! It was a good effort to reach the boat and we're both a little out of puff to be honest! Instead of 22 minutes, it had taken us 44 minutes this morning.
Looking further downstream, Chris was still gamefully bashing away maybe 30m off, while Nathan was even further back at about 50m, even with his bouyant wettie. It got cold waiting so we decided to use the Thames as our very own infinite lap-pool, slipped out from behind the boat and continued to swim at the same pace as the current flowing in the opposite direction. It was hilarious to be swimming away quite happily yet knowing we weren't getting anywhere! I estimate the water was running at about 90 seconds per 100m, 4km an hour, which is what we expect to average in the Channel.
After a couple of minutes, we checked in on Chris, still a distance off, so we decided to go out and spot him into the boat. Honestly, five strokes and we'd covered the distance to him downstream, where we collected ourselves, made ourselves known and as a trio dialled it back into the boat. For the second time, Pete and I dug in and reached the stern with Chris in tow, more high-fives between us and the realisation that this was exactly what to expect from the Good Lady Channel.
Now, what to do with Nathan? Knowing he's a gritty competitor, Pete didn't think twice about not making him reach the boat and we paddled off to collect and chaperone him through the current. As soon as the three of us broke the waters and gave him a little drafting room, he started to move forward at a steady pace, crossing the main stream from the Buckinghamshire to the Berkshire bank, finally reaching the boat. Good on the man! Awesome finish!
We were now at something like 55 minutes of battling up stream and thinking that our plan to swim all the way back to the normal boat house might take us the rest of the morning! We hastily revised it, knowing we all had work to get to, and made a dash for the landing jetty. Man it felt good to be moving so quickly! We covered the return leg in about 10 minutes, which says something about the pace of the river we'd just fought with.
Mentally, being able to see your progress, however slow, is encouraging. But in the channel, we'll not have any stationary objects against which to guage ourselves. Will any of us want to know that we're not making headway even when we're pulling as hard as we can? At what stage do the team on the boat communicate to the swimmer that as hard as they're working, they need to work harder to push through a tide? We need to work this out between us. It will make a big difference for sure to the mental side of the swim, which takes on more significance than you would think.
Anyway, enough of swimming upstream. I'm going to try to swim downstream for the rest of the day and make my own positive current.
Again in the words of Og Mandino (god, this man's good with words ain't he??? a quote for everything!!!) "I will love the rain for it cleanses my spirit". Well, it certainly did this morning!
Oh, we made the pages of the illustrious Maidenhead Advertiser this week! The journos want to do a follow up after our swim aswell. Somewhat hilariously though, the article states that Captain Webb (the first guy to swim the channel) is taking us across in the boat. They seem to have got their research mixed up with our facts: Andy King will be taking us across.
http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/4542447.Marlow_swimmers_take_on_the_channel/
Happy trails!
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