The Winter Ahead

For the last two years I have been travelling almost everywhere by bicycle. Thats a rather long story which is told on my other blog here. I still want to continue travelling by bike over the winter, after I leave my temporary home in Munich towards the end of September, and I'm thinking about routes. It looks like I'll be heading south through Italy and over to Greece before heading back north and then towards the UK and the Channel for next summer. As it turns out, sticking close to the Mediterranean Sea might just be perfect for Channel training, as this temperature chart shows, the sea temperatures should stay at around the right level for preparing for the English Channel (in summer this is about 16 degrees C.) If I get this right, I might be able to train through the winter in the sea without ever having to go near a pool.

Taken from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea#Sea_temperature

Sea temperature (°C)

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Marseille [2]	13	12	11	13	16	18	21	22	21	18	16	14
Barcelona [3]	13	13	12	14	17	20	23	25	23	20	17	15
Valencia [4]	14	13	14	15	17	21	24	26	24	21	18	15
Naples [5]	15	14	14	15	18	22	25	27	25	22	19	16
Venice [6]	11	10	11	13	18	22	25	26	23	20	16	14
Málaga [7]	16	15	15	16	17	20	22	23	22	20	18	16
Gibraltar [8]	16	15	16	16	17	20	22	22	22	20	18	17
Athens [9]	16	15	15	16	18	21	24	24	24	21	19	18
Heraklion [10]	16	15	15	16	19	22	24	25	24	22	20	18
Malta [11]	16	16	15	16	18	21	24	26	25	23	21	18
Larnaca [12]	18	17	17	18	20	24	26	27	27	25	22	19
Limassol [13]	18	17	17	18	20	24	26	27	27	25	22	19
Antalya	17	17	17	18	21	24	27	28	27	25	22	19
Alexandria [14]	18	17	17	18	20	23	25	26	26	25	22	20
Tel Aviv [15]	18	17	17	18	21	24	26	28	27	26	23	20

First swims

In the last couple of weeks I have begun to dip my feet back into the world of open water swimming. Living in Munich is great because it is surrounded by many fairly big lakes which are all generally very clean and currently a good temperature for swimming in. I decided to do all of my swimming this summer in these lakes, rather than the pool, because there is no better training for open water swimming than swimming in open water.

My favourite places to swim have been Feringasee and Heimstettenersee. The latter is almost exactly 200m across form one side to the other, with a buoy at about 100m across, in the middle. This will be a good place to train, time intervals, and try and work on my speed. Feringasee doesn't have such easy measurements, but I have been swimming here more so far, possibly because it is closer to my house, and possibly because it feels slightly warmer. It is where I have done my longest swim so far, a fairly modest one hour.

Swimming in the lake feels great. The water is cool and refreshing and very clean. Everytime I've been so far the sun has been shining brightly, and from a mental perspective, I've been doing well. When I tried to swim the Channel four years ago, I had big problems in training because mentally I didn't like being in the water so long, but so far this hasn't been an issue. However, I did also struggle back then with getting very cold in the water. I evetually overcame this by gaining lots of weight. With that insulating fat long gone, I am once again feeling the effects of the cold, and whilst I can mostly ignore it when I'm swimming, after the hour swim I sat on the shore shivering intensely, and doing the longer swims I want to do this summer feels difficult now because of this.

Nothing Great is Easy

In September 2008 I attempted to swim the English Channel. I had been training for more than a year for the big swim, devoting almost my entire life to the pursuit, training for hours in Dover harbour, acclimitising to the cold, and mentally preparing myself for the challenge.

Unfortunately, after 14 hours and 42 minutes of swimming I was forced to abandon my swim, still 3 miles from France after going sideways for the last two hours with no strength left to fight in through the tide. I was left feeling devastated, but I knew that one day I would be back.

Since then, however, I embarked on a different kind of adventure, travelling the world by bicycle. After 44,000km of cycling I now find myself in Munich, Germany. A family wedding next year will bring me finally back to the UK, and, while I'm there, the lure of the Channel is once again calling to me.

I know this will be a monumental challenge. In the four years since I last tried, I have done little swimming. The bodyfat I gained to fight the cold water has been lost in the miles of bike riding, and all my cold aclimitisation had gone. I will have to start from scratch. Everything I went through in 2008, I will have to go through again. That was the toughest thing I have ever been through, and if I'm going to make it to France this time, I will have to work even tougher. But in the infamous words of the very first man to swim the Channel, Captain Matthew Webb, "Nothing great is easy!"

Follow my journey here!

A graph of my 2008 swim, must learn to swim straight!