This article focuses solely on my journey to my second attempt of the English Channel. I will publish an article later for an overview of my whole journey from the point I started thinking about doing this in 2018. As mentioned before, after failing my Channel swim attempt in 2021, I had no intention to retry the swim in the near future. However, I made my second attempt on 2023-09-07 and got a provisional success in 18 hours, 21 minutes….
Today I raced again in a regional open water championships under Swim England rules, my second year to do so. Now I have joined South London Swimming Club so I raced for a London club in the London regional competition for a national qualifying place. The top 3 in each age group in the national distance (5 km for 19+) are qualified into the nationals. I wanted to do this race because I would like to see if I could…
The open water race season has started and my first event is BLDSA Champion of Champions. This event is 3 races, 5 miles, 3 miles and 1 mile, held successively on the same day, with the ranking determined by the total time. The race course was a triangular loop of 800 m length, i.e. 10 laps, 6 laps and 2 laps for the 3 races respectively. 5 miles The water temperature was reported as 15.3°C by the organiser. It was…
Update 2022-11-22: Unfortunately our swim ended up as a DQ due to the a failed changeover at 04:52. According to the observer log, Ingrid missed the deadline and entered the water at 04:55, making my 1st shift overrun by 3 minutes. As a result the swim was declared invalid by the CS&PF committee. We hope to try again in 2023. All times in this article are in British Summer Time (UTC+1). Photo credit to my crew Paul Cribb unless otherwise…
Today, I attempted to do my second marathon swim race this year but unfortunately I didn’t end up well. I pulled myself out just 3.5 km from the finish due to extreme leg pain. This blog article is only about the race itself. My marvellous train journeys will be described in another article coming later. Motivation The race of swimming the whole length of Windermere, at 16.5 km, is one of the longer distance marathon swimming races in the UK,…
I completed my longest swim to date – 21.5 km! My longest swim distance has now exceeded my longest run distance (half marathon). I participated in the 11th edition of Vidösternsimmet, held on 2022-08-13. I completed the full distance race, 21.5 km from Osudden to Sundet, in 10:07:22. This was my 5th long distance swim (at least 10 km, or a Scandinavian mile) I have done in my life since 2019. Preface I signed up for this race early February…
I did my first ASA open water swimming championship on 10/7 in Norwich. It was the starting point for me to become a competitive open water swimmer. The race was the East Region Open Water Swimming Championships. However, it was also the London Region Open Water Swimming Championships and an open age-group competition. The distances on order were, in race order, 3 km, 1 km, 2 km and 5 km, and it was possible to do both 3 and 5,…
I participated in the BLDSA Champion of Champions (Dover) on 18 June. This was my first swim race in the year but it didn’t went well. The race format was 3 races on the day, 5, 3 then 1 miles, with each mile consisting of 2 x a 800 m triangular loop, i.e. 10 laps for 5 miles, 6 laps for 3 miles, and 2 laps for 1 mile. The full result is available on the BLDSA website. 5 miles…
It’s one week since my disaster and I still can’t make my mind out of it. Everything was very wrong. It was the worst moment in my life. I really shouldn’t have tried it at all before I am completely ready. I totally underestimated the difficulty of Channel swimming, thinking it’s not much different to swim 14-16 km along the coast. Let me start with my motivation. The primary reasons I signed up to do the Channel were: as a…
All photos courtesy of my crew Deborah Vine unless specified. It has already been a few months since I made my final training update on my Channel swim, and I have now made the attempt. Here’s is the report of it. My booked tide was 12-17 September 2021. As I am a slow swimmer, the pilot had agreed that he wouldn’t take me out on a spring tide. Although the weather was good on 12 September, it was still spring…