“So what’s the problem with cold water?”...

  ‘I am now entering the last stages of panic.. tee hee’. I need regular immersion in colder water and will be moving my efforts more towards Dover and Brighton for the remaining time before my crossing. The sea temperature in the Channel at present, if you click on the link on the right side of my blog, is 11.9C. I bet that you are not monitoring it as much as me! A famous ‘Channel guru’, Freda Steeter who holds swim clinics every weekend, is ‘asking’ swimmers to do two swims of 3 and 1.5-2 hours at present. This is for acclimatisation. So what is the big deal? I thought that you may like the following article kindly forwarded by ‘H2Open’ magazine, which does a great job of explaining more. H2O Cold...

O’Dark O’Clock Swim

So another weekend down. I had planned to do several events in the French open water calendar this weekend to get a total of 30km in within 3 days. However, the water at 14C, a ‘positively balmy and almost chaud’…. were cancelled. This left me with a gaping hole in the training program. To fill this I managed to persuade  my trusted ‘lifeguard’ to accompany me for a 4 hour stint in my lake, which was 14C.   I struggled up at 0400 to fuel myself, awoke Madeleine (Monkey No1) at 0500 and was in the water by 0600. Monkey No1 is a fabulous lifeguard and very creative. Having split her time between dutifully watching ,feeding and encouraging me… building sandcastles using the nutrition bucket.. making movies, ‘Spielberg eat your heart out’, taking pictures with my phone and cuddling up to the ‘club cat’, called…… “Le chat”, I felt that she deserved her usual fee.   I had made her a scrumy breakfast of Weetabix with warm milk, chocolate chaud and thought that the usual unspoken deal of a lolly pop after the swim would do it… “Uhmmmmmm…. Non”   What I hadn’t factored in were the spiralling costs of inflation these days. Knee boarding is obviously a new form of payment!   Oh, bye the way.. I swam 15 times around the lake (14km), saw the sun officially rise (beautiful) and got harassed by the ‘Moorhens’ in one corner. Job done. Feeding, yummmmm..     Monkey No1       Law breaker !     At last..   Payment !     Smell of success !     “In to the future and beyond !”          ...