4 years as an open water swimmer

Early swim awards. 3km and 5km age 9, 8.8km age 15

Synchro squad 1990

(Click on the photos to enlarge them)
I did my first open water swim on 18^th August 2016, at Astbury Mere in Cheshire. That’s not to say I hadn’t thought about it before – I have always been a bit of a waterbaby, first synchronised swimming ages 9 to 12, then lifesaving. In 1994 aged 14 I went to lifesaving classes every week and almost went to an open water swim in Poole harbour but it never came off. I also looked at swimming in local gravel pits but that never happened either. So, now 36, I was standing in a borrowed wetsuit on the shore of the mere as a guest of the local tri club NTC who I later joined. On entry I was encouraged to take a few moments to get water down my wetsuit to acclimatise, then I was off, with some companions to guide me round. The lap was marked out by buoys and was 400m, and I was surprised by how hard it was. Until then I’ve never found it a struggle to swim, I get bored way before I get tired (and I once swam 5.5 miles in 4.5 hours as a child for a sponsored pool swim), but here I was constricted by a the too-small wetsuit and my goggles steamed up. I managed three individual laps then I was knackered, but at the same time I really relished the experience of swimming without touching anything but water, with no walls to turnaround at.

Astbury Mere with Newcastle Tri Club

Due to other commitments I only went once that summer, and just twice the next year as I still didn’t have my own wetsuit and didn’t get on with the loan suits, but that year at least I got to go to the beginner sessions where I benefited from the entry and familiarisation techniques taught by the tri club.

In early 2018 I bought my own wetsuit and made one session at the mere with the tri club where it all finally started to click (see separate article here: https://newcastletriclub.co.uk/?p=4732), but shortly after, I fairly unexpectedly moved across the country for work and started again in Pembrokeshire. I joined a new tri club but they didn’t do regular open water sessions, so it was just down to individual inspiration to arrange get-togethers. Keen to make the most of the sea being on my doorstep, one day I met up with one of the club members at Broadhaven West. We swam out into the bay then turned parallel to the shore to swim to a rock at the far side. It was quite the experience. There was a sizeable swell with accompanying surf, which I wasn’t used to at all. I was too alarmed to swim crawl and breathe facing the shore, as then I wouldn’t be able to see the waves coming towards me, so I swam breaststroke to start, in order to be aware of the surf before it hit me. The trouble with breaststroke though is that you don’t go up and down with the swell like you do with crawl, and every wave hit me in the face, making it pretty hard to breathe. I eventually talked myself into swimming crawl, facing away from the waves and going with the swell and trying not to panic that I would get engulged by an early-breaking wave, and we swam about 1 mile, but it was quite the eye-opener, and a useful baseline to refer back to later. It was also the first time I had seen a tow float, although I didn’t get my own for a few more months.

Abereiddy Blue Lagoon

That summer I came across a group called the Bluetits who swim all year round in skins (swimsuit only, no wetsuit), and in Sept 2018 I did my first skins swim in the beautiful Blue Lagoon at Abereiddy, an old quarry pool connected to the sea by a slit between two rocks. My summary of the swim was: “First I was like ice then I was on fire!”, the stages of my body and skin reacting to the temperature. I remember one moment just after swimming out, where one of the experienced swimmers swimming nearby asked me if I wanted warming up. I said that would be good, thinking she would come and give me a hug. She moved towards me, smirking gleefully, saying “I’m peeing!!”

Later that month we swam in Solva harbour by the light of the full moon, my first introduction to full moon swimming (an interest I have continued since), and the Bluetits used the emotive Turkisk word Yakamoz (moonlight on water) to title the swims. The cold was a massive obstacle for me that evening, I already felt cold and getting into icy water was a hurdle my brain just wouldn’t surmount in any particularly useful way. The entry to the harbour was down a slipway, and I walked at a constant yet glacially slow snail’s pace into the water, getting gradually deeper over the course of maybe 15 minutes, while the rest of the group swam out and round one of the boats two or three times. If you filmed it as a timelapse and sped it up so I was walking normal speed, the rest of the swimmers would have been flitting around the harbour in jerky high-speed motion. I finally got my shoulders under and swam round the boat, keen to see the bioluminescence that many swimmers mentioned as they passed me on their way back in, but I just couldn’t seem to see it.

The Bluetits host a chill swim challenge over the winter months, to swim in skins for 10 minutes twice a month from November to March, and on 1^st November I was at Tenby beach with them, at night, ready for my first chill swim tick. Stood on the beach I couldn’t visualise getting into the water and swimming, how can you do something if you can’t even picture it? All I could do was walk forward into the unknown and see what happened. It’s a flat, shallow beach, meaning the entry was nearly as slow as at Solva as we waded out, and I screamed at the cold on each part of me. Really screamed. It took me more than 10 minutes to get my shoulders under and by then everybody else was heading back in, I had only just begun swimming. As we left, a boat arrived with a searchlight blaring – drawn by my screams, how embarrassing.

First sea swim of 2019

I didn’t complete the chill swim that year, not even close. In December I moved to Devon, which brought many of its own challenges, and the cold water wasn’t really something I handled well, so open water swimming took a back seat entirely, and I went pool training with a new tri club. The moment the clocks changed though I was there on the beach, 8^th April 2019 at Jacobs Ladder, Sidmouth, with a group called the TEDs (Team East Devon). My new tri club hosted organised weekly sea swims too, which started up their sessions in June. I was still struggling with the cold, and the jellies, and my wetsuit (chafing and coming undone and getting holes in), but I was determined, and I was swimming at least once a week. I was also in the perfect location for it – Pembrokeshire, while peppered with sheltered coves good for swimming, often has a large swell and is even better for surfing. South Devon, on the other hand, is largely calm in its entirety and is an open-water swimmer’s heaven. I was so taken with the challenge of open water swimming that I haven’t swum in a pool since the middle of May 2019.

On the 24^th June with TEDs, encouraged by some of the other swimmers, I did my first skins swim of the year. The screaming was back! It took me 12 full minutes to get my shoulders in even though the water was 15 degrees, and then I swam for 12 minutes. But looking back, this was the proper start of my progression to skins and was probably the making of me. In July, the main Devon Wild Swimming group was hosting a Unicorn challenge to swim for so many hours in skins, and on the 14^th I earnt my 1 hour Unicorn badge, repeating it the week after.

The tri club only ran their open water sessions until September, and there are so many swim and run groups in the South West providing opportunities to partake in the individual disciplines that I gave up the triathlons as I don’t particularly enjoy cycling anyway. I do, however, prefer to swim for distance rather than just for the experience and the feeling of the water, which is why for me I call it “open water swimming”, rather than the currently popular term “wild swimming”, although that’s not to say I don’t value the environment I am swimming in. In Devon there are a mix of swimmers, some who dip for the cold-water immersive benefits, and others who swim for distance. I found two groups of swimmers in my area that do longer swims – the TEDs, and a group of mermaid friends that are an offshoot of the Torbay Shoal group.

Breakwater swim, leaving the boats

Throughout 2019 I swam in a variety of different locations with these groups, and encountered many jellyfish, there seemed to be at least one every time I went in! In July I swam on 13 different days, although I dropped off in August and September as I had a couple of large running events that I had been training for all year, as running is still my main activity. With the swimming I engaged in a niche sub-activity of drawing shapes in the sea – I swam in the shape of a jellyfish, a shark, an octopus, a hedgehog, and wrote various phrases such as “Happy Birthday”. There were events too: in August, just before flying to the states to run a marathon, I swam with the Chestnut Appeal, 3.5km from Plymouth breakwater into Tinside beach. It was quite fantastic - boated out to the centre of the Plymouth sound and jumping into a bit of open water far from land with a bunch of other keen entrants, barely able to see the finish point at that time.

Polar Bear
December solstice swim

Winter brought a new challenge, or at least a second bash at a familiar one. Mama Bear, the lady that runs the Devon Wild Swimming group, runs a Polar Bear challenge which is similar to the chill swim challenge that the Bluetits ran, but has a massive uptake nationally and beyond. There are different levels, but I ended up entering gold: swim 250m twice a month from November to march, and a total of 5km over that time period, with just a swimming costume and standard swim hat - no wetsuit, no neoprene, no woolly hat, no gloves. I thought it would be really hard due to my persistent inability to get into the water. Well what do you know, it wasn’t! Firstly I was very lucky and we had a mild winter, but the rivers and lidos did go down to about 6-7 degrees at times. Secondly, I still got in gradually, but it wasn’t all that much harder to get in than any other day throughout the summer, and I’d had enough practise at that by now. My lovely mermaid friends and I met regularly at Torbay and occasionally elsewhere and enjoyed the camaraderie of the challenge.

Sometimes got the old fire in my body that I felt that first time back in the Blue Lagoon in Pembrokeshire. I found that for me there were stages of a cold swim – for the first couple of minutes you’re cold and it feels insane to be doing what you’re doing); then you’re in and swimming around and you know that at the very least you can do what you came to do (if the fire is to come, it precedes this stage); then after 10-15 minutes (depending on how cold it really is) you feel warm, honest to god genuine warmth, and it’s lovely - to have defeated that miserable day to be able to experience something incredible, with all the walkers in their woolly hats and duffel coats looking at you from the promenade as if you’re mad. The stage after that is that you get cold again, and that’s when you get out, because nobody wants to find out what the stage is after that! I really did love this challenge, despite it being hard and me questioning my sanity at times. I’ve suffered from winter blues all my life in various intensities, and tried various things to fight it, but most of the time you just feel like you’re doing something that would be much more fun if the weather was sunny. This was different, this was an experience that was solely for the cold days, embracing them rather than fighting them, and I was living it. The shivers afterwards and inability to speak due to a frozen jaw quickly became normal and each time I went I seemed to have a new piece of kit in my after-swim arsenal to be better prepared – woolly hat, snowboarding trousers, flask of hot squash, mesh to stand on, knitted foot wraps to wear until I could get my feet dry.

"BIG5", Leap-day Hares

I even revolved my Christmas plans around partaking in the Lyme Regis New Year's Day dip, that I'd been disapponited to miss the year before. Another great event in the winter months was the Buckfastleigh Ice Gala (BIG), where we got to swim in a frosty, unheated lido, with other swimmers, AND dress up in fancy dress, wonderful. Then the next event was the coronavirus lockdown! Okay this was an event of a totally different type, but it definitely impacted all our swimming, although we had just completed our Polar Bear challenge before being confined to our own neighbourhoods. I don’t live near enough to the sea to visit during the most restrictive part of lockdown, but I managed to get out for a dip in the local river every Sunday to keep my acclimatisation up, swimming in the shallows against the current for just 15 minutes, keeping my head out to avoid risk of Weil’s disease. Towards the end of May I was back at my local swim spot, Torquay steps, for a half hour swim which I kept up at least once a week. Seeing my first jellyfish of the year was a bit of a shock, it takes a while to get used to those again!

As the restrictions eased swimming opportunities started to increase, before I knew it I was accidentally achieving my aims for the year despite the pandemic, so once I realised this I started to focus on them consciously and swam more often. I swam at many different bays that I had not previous visited – Meadfoot, the salmon leaps on the Teign, the Exe in the city, the Dart at Totnes and Dartmoor, at Budleigh, the London Bridge arch near Torquay, and other places beyond. I also swam over a school of dogfish which count as sharks and wasn’t freaked out by those either – mostly because I didn’t realise what they are until afterwards! I made my peace with crystal jellyfish and compasses, after an initially freak-out when I saw my first of the former and didn’t know what it was. I touched my first ever jellyfish in July (accidentally of course), followed by 2 more in the dark on a full moon swim, which actually helped loads and they’re surprisingly firm and I stopped thinking of them as the slugs of the sea. I still haven’t been stung though, at least not knowingly, but my hands are so numb when I swim and my skin so prickly I’m not sure I’d ever notice. For some time I was feeling the cold, and only lasting 35 minutes before my hands went numb, but on a swoosh (one way with the current) down the Dart at Totnes, I went past 35 minutes, then 45, then pushed on to pass the hour mark, equalling last year’s best effort.

Compass jellyfish

Something started to niggle me though, and that was my speed of entry. My usual approach was to creep in, allowing each sensitive body part to warm up before introducing the next - feet, groin, boobs, armpits, shoulders. It was usually 3-5 minutes to complete this process before I could lift my feet up to swim, which was starting to hinder me on group swims. People had proffered all sorts of tips - blowing bubbles, splashing the back of the neck - but nothing helped, it was a mental block from the sensory overload of the cold. I had only managed an immediate entry 5 times - once in large waves breaking on a beach shelf where you couldn’t hang about or you’d get tumbled, twice in the lido training for the ice gala, and twice for the gala itself, but without these rare motivators it was the usual slow creep. However, one day it dawned on me that I was no better at getting in water of 16 degrees than I had been of 6 degrees, when all round me there were non-acclimatised holiday makers splashing around like it was a heated pool. And what’s more I had once been one of those holidaymakers. So I started to work on some visualisation - a powerful tool employed in coaching for various sports, and I had a hunch it would be helpful as even when imagining it in my mind I could never get in the water fast. I also identified that as my brain couldn’t visualise me getting in the water, the expectation of the future stopped at that point and my brain therefore no longer knew that I actually enjoy being in the water when I am in, so I fed it that information consciously, to bypass the block. On 28th July, standing 

Synchro memories in Torbay

at Torquay steps for the second time that day after having failed to get in at all that morning, I stood with my toes clear of the water, psyching myself up. Having the toes out was important, as I had to break the chain reaction cycle of needing to pause for each part to warm up, and that meant no parts getting cold on their own. Then bang I went for it - one step, two steps, and launch off up to my shoulders before the cold sensors sent the information back to the brain. I was in! And I was happy! Amazingly it wasn’t 5 times as challenging due to 5 sensitive body parts hitting the cold in one go, it was only the same as one. What a feeling, to be in the water and afloat, without all that faff. You may think that I was a changed woman after that, but there’s a reason it took me over a year of skims swimming to get to that point, and that’s because I find the initial cold shock supremely hard to handle. I could, however, see that it was a better way of getting in, and once I had done it once I knew I could do it again, so it has been my method of entry ever since. I even stopped screaming so much. Lately I have even managed to get my legs in first and pause before the rest of me goes in, without allowing my brain a matching pause, which would be fateful.

With this new entry method, and surpassing an hour in the water, I felt much happier planning distance swims with mermaid friends as they no longer need to wait for me at the start, and I have, with relish, completed some of my other objectives for this year - a swim round Burgh island, a 4km linear coastline swim, and swimming for over an hour in skins.

Endurance badges with mermaid friends

The journey is far from over, I have way more I want to achieve. Running is still my main activity but open water swimming is a very close second.  Now it’s nearly polar bear season again, and this year I have my sights set on Jedi, where you actively have to seek out water down to 5 degrees in addition to the other requirements. Will I manage it? I don’t mind if I don’t, because my target is not the achievement I get at the end, but the learning I experience along the way. I do this because it’s hard and it challenges me, not because it’s easy. Open-water swimming, to me, is way more than just swimming.