Well done Ingrid Chow, the 4th Hongkonger to swim the English Channel. It was a pleasure for me and Claire to support you and helped you through your tough times. Ingrid started her English Channel swim from Shakespeare Beach at 18:41, 16 August 2024, and landed Le Cran d’Escalles at 11:50 BST the next day after 17 hours and 9 minutes of overnight swimming. She has become the 4th Hongkonger to swim the English Channel, after Chun Kong Mak (2020),…
On 27 and 28 July, I raced in the England Nationals the first time after getting qualified for the Age Group Championships through the regional qualifier. I raced in the 7.5 km Age Group, 5 km Masters and 3 km Masters over the weekend. Location and travel The races were held in Rother Valley Country Park, South Yorkshire. It is not an easy place to get to, with the best public transport option being the express bus 30 from Sheffield…
More photos to be added later. On 13 January, I did my craziest thing in my life: flying from the UK to Austria to swim a 250 m race and back in the UK within 24 hours. Motivation I want to get started in ice swimming, but unfortunately the UK doesn’t have enough opportunities for me to do that. There was only 1 race under IISA in the whole winter in December, the national championships, which was sold out in…
I did the race Cold Half the third time as a solo this year on 4 February. I completed the race in 5:14:26 in 2020 and 4:53:47 in 2021. However, I skipped the 2023 edition because pandemic-related travel restrictions were still in place in Hong Kong, and I had emigrated to the UK already. My intention was to go back to Hong Kong and race every year. Training Unfortunately, I didn’t have much training before this race. I now have…
I visited the Netherlands between 2023-12-14 and 2023-12-17, which was my first overseas trip from the UK without flying. I personally don’t like flying on airlines compared to other forms of public transport, mainly because it is a hassle to go to airports which are usually far away from the city centre, the strict airline security, the limited ability to carry luggage, and the need to book early as there is a strict limit on how many people a plane…
It has been a month since I swam across the English Channel from England to France. It was a magical feeling when I walked onto the shore at Le Petit Blanc Nez after entering the sea at Shakespeare Beach 18 hours and 21 minutes before, but the journey was incredibly tough, and it was nowhere near perfection. I made many irrecoverable mistakes during my preparation resulting in 2 years of time and opportunity cost lost, which would be valued at…
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…