Well, the summer months are drawing to a close and I’ll be out of the country for about six weeks supporting Sarah Outen so this seems like a good point to round up how Laura and I have got on swimming the Thames so far.
We have covered about 19 miles of swimming. I still haven’t worked out how far it is from Cricklade – where it gets deep enough to swim – to Richmond – roughly where we’ll stop before tides and permissions get complicated. I’m pretty sure it’s over 100 miles though so that leaves us with a long way to go.
The main reasons for the slow start have been:
- Finding the time to get out west – it’s a couple of hours drive each way from London so a day trip only really allows one swim and a busy summer has seen very few available weekends
- A combination of me getting cold after an hour or so in the water (Laura never gets cold) and my dodgy shoulders making me hesitant to swim hard
- Beaking my wrist and spending two and a half months out of water
But this all sounds like post-hoc justification and excuses. Boring!
Really, we just need to find a bit more time and I need to get stronger and more tolerant of cold water so we can start pushing ourselves.
I’m sure we’ll try some swims over the winter though I don’t know how far I’ll get before delirium kicks in. Failing that, we’ll be back again come spring time and, I hope, with a vengeance.
There is a long way left to swim and, besides, we’ve still got to cycle the M25…
(P.S. I’d originally planned to write a blog post about every swim but I was boring even myself so I stopped)
