Three weeks to Malta and fear

It is now 3 weeks to Malta SwimTrek Long Distance Swim camp where I will be attempting a 6 hour qualifying swim in hopefully 60F water. A fellow blogger, Julie Galloway, is heading to Malta this weekend for her camp and 6 hour swim. I am looking forward to her reports and hints.

The distance training has gone well. Eliz and I did just short of 6 hours (5:50) three weeks ago and a 6 hour swim this past Sunday, both in a way to warm pool at 83F (34C). I am estimating that we covered about 23,000 yards (~13 miles) in the 6 hours with approximately 15 minutes of non-swimming time due to feeding breaks and bio breaks. Even though we held a pretty slow pace, we were able to pick it up the last 1/2 hour. Eliz thoroughly smoked me during this pick up, a hint of what our relative times will be in the longer swims. For an endurance viewpoint, I feel we are ready for a 6 hour open water swim given we have done a 6 hour training swim in a pool. Beyond that enters the fear issue.

There are two main fears eating at my psyche now. The first is expected. How will we do when we hit the colder water in Malta? Our training so far has been in pool temperatures from 81F to 84F. The local lakes in the foothills of Colorado have been bouncing from frozen to 37F (3C) and I am typing this while looking at 6" of snow on the ground. I have been trying cold showers to prepare but there seems to be differences in opinion on the effectiveness of this. The bottom line is that we will just have to do our best once we get to Malta.

The second fear was one that I was not expecting to fight. I have been amazed with how little overuse injuries have occurred as we have ramped up the swims. I would like to believe it was due to intelligent ramp up but it probably has more to do with luck. After the really long swims, there is longer term fatigue (three days to a week) with some stiffness but nothing that hasn't gone away. On Wednesday this week, I hit the water for a short one hour recovery (meaning slow) swim. I had a tightness in my mid-back, nothing unusual after a long weekend swim. After about 15 minutes of warm up, the tightness was still there so I stopped to stretch it. During the stretch, there was a sharp spasm in that location. The pain was reasonably intense and did not go away. I decided to stop the stretch and see if could swim it out. I quickly determined it was not and I could not complete a full stroke. Here I was, three weeks from Malta and could not swim across the pool. Minor panic set in but I squelched it. I decided I had done enough damage and got out of the pool. The next 24 hours was pretty painful but it seems to be calming down now, about 36 hours later. The injury feels more like a muscle related instead of a tendon so I am hoping for quicker recovery. The next week or so will determine if I make the trip to Malta. Sigh...that is the risk on the longer events, be it running, biking, swimming or any sports where you take the body past what they are normally made to do. Why we do what we do is to see how far we can push ourselves and sometimes we find out the hard way. I just hope my lesson does not keep me from completing the swim camp.

Fighting the Demons

We are just 6 weeks away from the Malta SwimTrek swim camp. We have only a couple more of the ludicrously long pool swims left. Today was planned to be somewhere between 5:30 and 5:45. We get to sleep in and start swimming at 6am since there are no aqua aerobics today. As I am putting my suit on, my mind wonders into dark areas. I start questioning why am I doing this. It would so much easier to stick to doing shorter stuff like 10K runs and Olympic distance distance triathlons. I am doing this precisely because it is not easy. I shake myself wondering where these thoughts are coming from. It might be from exhaustion. I chaperoned my son's scout troop's ski trip yesterday. It was an unbelievable day. It was sunny, not too cold with no wind. When we got to the top of the mountain at about 12,000 ft, it was an unbelievably beautiful view. I was so caught up in the day, I pounded down through the trees and moguls until my legs are totally trashed. I then had the long drive home with cramping legs to totally exhaust me. Not the best day before prep for a nearly 6 hours swim.

As I stand by the pool and pull my cap on, it breaks. Not the best omen. After the first hour of swimming, I still had dark thoughts. My mind definitely was not in the right place. I am constantly wrestling demons that are whispering in my ear that "2 hours is good enough" and then as we get past 2 hours it whispers "3 hours is good enough". At 3 hours, I reach for a crutch, the SwimMP3 player. I know it is a crutch but I was hoping it would distract my mind. Alas, something is wrong with the SwimMP3 player and it does not work. It must be a message that I need to fight these demons myself. Eliz has been struggling with her back muscles from a hard workouts in the previous days and takes a quick break for Ibuprofen. At the next food break, I mention that my fighting mental demons is ok to keep fighting but if she is fighting physical problems, we should stop. She wants to continue. It seems as if verbalizing this helps me mentally. At the 4 hour mark, I finally seem to slide into the long distance zone. The demons have been vanquished. At the 5 hour mark, I check with if she wants to go for 5:30 or 5:45. She says she wants to go until noon which would make it a 5:50 swim (we started at 6:10am). Fifteen minutes later, another person arrives and there is no lane available in our little 2 lane pool (Eliz and I are sharing a lane). I ask if he wants to circle swim with us (typically not done in small health club pools non-team hours). He is ok with it so I slide back behind Eliz. Ahhh, the draft is great but I know that we can't do that for the Channel. With 30 minutes to go, we switch positions so that we don't get to comfortable drafting. I start trying to pick up the pace and was surprised I was able to move it from double dog slow to reasonable (still not fast) to finish the workout.

The training to battle the inner demons is just as important as training physically for an event like the Channel. From the reports of previous swimmers, there will be more then once during the swim that the demons will tempt me to get out and grab a warm cup of hot chocolate and huddle under a blanket in the boat. I need to practice doing mental battles with these demons. Experiences like today are precisely the type of training I need. Ones where there is a low but where I am triumphant and actually finish the swim mentally stronger then I start. The knowledge that if you wait it out, things will get better is one of the most powerful weapons in this battle.

Early morning swim

I woke up early this morning my regular 4:30am swim in the overly warm 2 lane health club pool and was shocked to find it nearly full.  Given the large variation in speeds that exist in non-swim club scenarios, circle swimming is awkward at best and usually avoided.  The usual mode is for swimmers to take half a lane so that maximum number of swimmers is only 4 in a two lane pool.  I jumped in to occupy the 4th and last available slot.  Minutes after I started, another swimmer shows up and has to wait.  I am pretty sure I was the only one in the pool that was motivated to swim that early in the morning by the fear of being in shape for an eventual English Channel crossing, why were the rest up that early?  Am I in a town occupied by a bunch of insomniacs?  During my brief hour of swimming , two people had to wait for a lane to open before another swimmer finished their workout.  When I left shortly after 5:30am, the pool was empty. What is the world coming to that the "rush hour" of swimming is between 4:30 to 5:30am in the morning?

Surviving a lonely long pool swim

After the boring history stuff, I will start doing some real time updates with some scattering of background information. Today I had the fun of a 5.5 hour pool swim all by myself. Usually, I have been doing the long swims with my fellow English Channel wanna-be, Eliz. Unfortunately, she had to work this weekend. This left me all by my lonesome to study the line at the bottom of the pool. For those that are open water swimmers, you are aware that it is much easier from a boredom perspective to swim the long swims outside in open water then in a pool. Unfortunately, living in Colorado, all the outside bodies of water are either frozen or just a degree or two above freezing. This makes swimming outside challenging. My normal joke is it is great hypoxic training, you break the ice on one end of the lake and have to swim across and back with no breaths.

Since I am limited to a pool, I have the additional challenge of finding a pool where there is a 5.5 hour window without some activity such as swim teams or aqua aerobics. The only pool in town that I could find is a 24 hour fitness that as you can guess from the name is open 24 hours a day. They have aqua aerobics (which we fondly call the aqua bunnies) at 9:30am. Giving some buffer to finish before they start converting the pool, I aim to hit the water at 3:30am. I set my alarm for 2:30am, grab breakfast and head for the pool. I find it amusing to see our neighbors house unloading from a night of partying as I start my day. When I get to the pool, I am once again surprised with the fact that someone else is already in the water. I don't think I have arrived at the pool early enough to beat everyone in the water. There must be a lot of insomniacs in the city. So at 3:30am on the nose, I turn on my SwimMP3 player (yes, for the purist, I use an MP3 player for the long pool swims) and start my steady strokes.

Eliz and I have fallen into a pattern where our long works are a series of 30 minute swims. We choose this interval to allow for a regular feeding interval of 30 minutes to train ourselves to feed at this rate for the Channel swim. At our long swim pace, this basically makes it a set of 11 x 2K except for the time we take for feeding and bio breaks. Sometimes I count to see how far we go during the 30 minutes but usually I avoid that and let my mind wonder. My estimate is we actually only average about 1900 yards per 30 minutes. As the hours go by, we have a tendency to slow down. With two of us, one usually has the energy to pick the pace back up. Occasionally, one of us will get frisky and pick up the pace on one of the 30 minute segments to a more aggressive pace. Today, I was alone so it was going to be difficult to keep the pace up.

For the first 2 hours, I was able to keep a reasonably good pace. At the two hour mark, I was getting stiffer and I could feel the pace slow down. At the 2.5 hour mark, I had a gel with my Infinit/hot chocolate drink mix. I was pleasantly surprised that about 10-15 minutes later, I felt perky again and picked the pace up. I know most people get that reaction from gels but I rarely do. This perkiness held for a little more then an hour so by the 4 hour mark, I was back to slugging through water. I held off on my second gel until the 4.5 hour mark. This gel did not give me the perky pick me up. I am not sure why the difference. At the 5 hour feeding, I could see the end in sight and decided to try to descend the last 30 minutes. It took what seemed forever to get the muscles to pick up the pace but by the last 10 minutes, I was able to go about 10 seconds per 100 yards quicker then my slugging pace. Even though I was glad it was done, I was surprised to feel reasonably energetic at the end of the swim. I definitely felt I could go another 30 minutes and hit the magical 6 hour mark. The time when I finished was 9am. I climbed out of the water, went home and grabbed a couple hour nap before joining the world for the rest of the days activities.

Rough Training Timeline

Now that I had a date, it was time to work out the details of the training timeline.  I still had to train and finish the Ironman I had signed up for in July of 2008.  My swim training was reasonably anemic (2 times a week for about 3000 yards a workout) to allow my limited training time to focus on biking and running.  As soon as I got back from the Ironman, I started ramping up my training. the goal was to quickly jump to 2.5 to 3 hours a workout and then start slowly building the length of the long swim by about 15 minutes every other week.  The goal was to get to a 6 hour swim by April 2010.  We signed up for SwimTrek's Long Distance Swim Camp in Malta the week of April 11, 2009.  The swim camp has a 6 hour English Channel qualifying swim scheduled during the week.  Our hope was to get the qualifying swim under our belt in the spring of 2009, back off and mentally recover for a few months before we start the more serious ramp up for the English Channel in summer of 2010.  If we have any problems during the qualifying swim, we can make another attempt in the fall of 2009.

Some issues with preparing for an April open water swim.  We live in Colorado where most outside bodies of water are more suitable for ice skating then swimming during the winter months.  The water won't be reaching the 50F (10C) range until April.  All of our training approaching swim will be in nice warm pools.   To complicate things, the local swim teams dominate the public pools so there is not a long multi-hour block that we can swim our long swims.  We solved this problem by joining a fitness club that is open 24 hours a day and typically start our long swims from 3-4am in the morning.  The downside is the fitness club main clientale are non-swimmers that want the pool temperature to be warm, 84F (29C).  This is not the best training for a cold water swim at 60F (15C).  We have discussed solutions to this including some flights to the coasts but that can get expensive.    So far, we have no solid solution but hopefully we will come up with one.

The Decision

I was approached sometime in January 2008 by a friend, Eliz, looking to see if she could find anyone willing to swim the English Channel with her during the summer of 2010 (side note: we can't swim together but hopefully can swim at the same day). My first reaction was not just No but H... No. I do wonder what that says about me that she thought I would be crazy enough to do something like this. Possibly my history of saying "Cool, that sounds like fun" for long painful events. I guess it is also shows how difficult this one was that I did hold off for over two weeks saying No repeatedly instead of immediately saying yes. I consulted a few close friends to check my sanity (general consensus was I was not sane but they thought I should do it) and more importantly, I checked with my wife Merce and son Chris. If I were to undertake this adventure, it would take a considerable amount of time and sacrifice from the family. Their general feedback was "go for it". They thought it would be a fun trip to England where they could enjoy the trip with only me being the one to suffer. I am so blessed to have such a supportive family that enjoys seeing me in pain.

Eliz was excited that she had a fellow sufferer on her journey. It is a long journey with long hours in the water where it helps a lot to have a compatriot in pain/boredom helping you through it. Once the initial decision was made, Eliz quickly caught me up to speed with some of the logistics and terminology. The first decision was the date. Attempts are made in two week tide windows. For the natical types, please forgive me if I miss this up. There are two types of tides; spring tides and neap tides. Spring tides tend to be faster/higher tides in the Channel while the neap tides are slower/lower tides. More recently, the faster times are coming from the spring tides (I am not sure why). There is also the time of year. The crossing attempts are general done from late spring to early fall. The late spring will be gentler but colder while the fall will be rougher and warmer. Eliz was already leaning toward balancing the the two and decided on the July 19th, 2010 neap tide window.

The next logistical item was the reserving a boat and Captain. The demand was high enough that you need to reserve them 18 to 24 months in advance which explains why our date seems so far away from our decision date. Eliz had already reserved Neil Streeter as her captain. I consulted with a friend that had already done the English Channel, Voni, and she recommended Neil sister, Alison Streeter. Alison is current English Channel Queen with the most personal swim crossings by a woman at 43 official crossings (more unofficial). I contacted her and with a little trouble figuring out how to wire her money, I was able to reserve a slot during the July 19th, 2010 neap tide.

A quick tutorial of why we reserve a full tide. A Captain will sign up a certain number of swimmers during a given tide. The swimmers are assigned priority order based on when they signed up. When the tide window opens, the Captain will review the tides, weather, etc and make the decision if it is safe to attempt the crossing that day. If the decision is no, all the swimmers hang out and wait until the weather clears up. If the decision is yes, the Captain goes to the next swimmer in priority order and asks her/him if they want to attempt crossing that day. If they say yes, off they go. If they so no, the next one in priority order is asked. It is not uncommon during bad weather times that swimmers wait their entire tide window never getting an opportunity to attempt the crossing. In this case, you go home and sign up again for another year. That is the just the unfortunate nature of this event where mother nature has the final word. It is our current understanding that both Eliz and I are the number one priority for our Captains/tide combinations since we signed up so far in advance. This should reduce the risk of not getting an opportunity to try.

Catchup on history before I decided to sign up

The purpose of this blog is to document more then just the actual event but the journey as well. As with most big events, the actual event tends not to be the more interesting part.

First, a little history about myself. I am not a hard core swimmer that has been swimming continuously since I was 8 years old. I did swim on a YMCA team starting somewhere around 8 years old but only swam 2-3 days a week. I lost interest in swimming in my early teens and stopped. When I moved to Ohio my junior year of High School, I re-found swimming for slightly more then a year. I never achieved fantastic times to even consider college scholarships. I briefly contemplated walking on when I went to Va Tech but was quickly tempted away with women (mainly my future wive, Merce) and beer. So I spent my college career drinking and working on my degree.

By the time I graduated from college and moved to Colorado, I was beginning to lose my youthful shape (to put it kindly). I started back exercising at the age of about 24. As I started back, swimming was part of my exercise program but running and biking were my main focus. I think it was the high altitude and sunshine that effected my judgment but my events seemed to be getting longer and longer. By the time I was approached to make the decision to attempt the English Channel, I had completed 13 running marathons, 8 10K swims, 2 Ironman triathlons and was training for my 3rd Ironman.

The historical background becomes important primarily in how it eventually shapes my preparation and training. In basic terms, endurance events no longer scared me. I had experienced 12-13 hours hour events with the Ironman and knew a lot about what worked and what did not work for my body. What I had not done is any cold water swimming past about 2 to 3 hours. This combined with the fact I was coming off a great year of doing my first Boston Marathon and Ironman Austria meant I did not have a "typical" English Channel swimmer body. I hit a low of 135 lbs at 5'8", a good 10 lbs lighter then I graduated high school. In general, this is a good thing for a 46 year old but not if they plan on surviving 10-12 hours of swimming in 60F water in the English Channel.