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Here are seven words I never imagined I’d write: I’m training to swim the English Channel.
To be precise, I’m training to swim the English Channel as part of a six-person relay team. That means I will NOT be swimming the entirety of the English Channel myself. The six of us will each swim for an hour at a time on our own, starting from a beach in Dover at about one in the morning and (ideally) ending up on a beach in France probably about 15 hours later.
Trust me, no is more surprised by this turn of events than I am.
A year ago, I wrote about my lifelong love of the sea and the start of my sea swimming journey. That love has only grown more intense over the past year as swimming has kind of come to dominate my life (in a good way!). I dipped in the sea all last winter while also taking Seabirds classes and doing the Pool to Pier program, so I was at the pool at least twice a week and in the sea at least once a month. And somehow, instead of getting tired of it, I found myself enjoying it more and more.
It was partially the joy of getting better at doing somethingâand, in my case, the joy of getting better at a physical activity when I have always, always, always considered myself “not sporty” and “not an athlete.” When I started taking pool lessons in January 2023, I remember that a more advanced class was being held at the same time, and I was in awe of the women who were able to swim back and forth non-stop for half an hour. I could barely do 50 meters before I had to catch my breath. But at some point, I realized I was the person swimming back and forth non-stop. The progress was so gradual that I hadn’t even noticed it.
It was a real milestone for me the first time I swam 1k in the pool. When I knocked out 1.5k pretty quickly for the Cancer Research UK Swimathon this past April, the woman keeping track of my laps said “You should have done 2k!”. She was right, but such a distance had been unthinkable when I’d signed up to the challenge months before. When I started the Pool to Pier classes a year ago, I wrote that I couldn’t imagine ever being able to swim around Brighton Pier, or from one pier to the other (which is “only” about 1k). And this summer, I swam from one pier to other, and I felt like I’d conquered the world. (I still haven’t tried to swim around the pier because I’m too freaked out by the idea of it, but that’s another story.)
I would still say I’m very much not sporty and not an athlete, but I can’t deny that I’m actually a pretty good swimmer. And that’s quite convenient, because I adore being in the water. I love the crystal turquoise of a pool, and I even find the smell of chlorine strangely comforting in a Proustian sort of way. But I also love the sea and how the saline water buoys you up, making swimming feel almost effortless when the wind and tide are in your favor. I’ve insisted over the past two years that I don’t actually love cold-water swimming, I just swim in the cold water here because it’s the only water available to me. But I’m not entirely sure that’s still true anymore. Something seems to have shifted in me this year, and I find myself almost craving the chilly water. I’ve started to enjoy the bracing sting of it as I pick my way carefully down the slippery shingle beach and wade in, shivering and cursing the cold as it creeps up my body. It feels awful until it feels great, but even when it feels awful, the cold seems to sear away all thoughts of the rest of the world, leaving just you and the water that surrounds you. It’s…elemental, I suppose. It’s clarifying.
And that brings me back around to the cold English Channel and my plan to swim across it. Here’s the thing: every time I go to the beach to swim here, I’m swimming in the Channel. There are lots of solo and relay Channel swimmers here in Brighton, and one of them happens to be a Seabirds coach, Christine, who regularly puts together relay teams. This summer, some of the other Seabirds coaches started joking(?) with me about when I was going to join a team. I kept laughing it off because, come on, it’s the English Channel and, as we have established, I am not an athlete. Buuuut…the more often I’ve looked out at that expanse of water on my doorstep, the more I’ve wondered what it would be like to take it on. I know I don’t have it in me to run a marathon, for example, but this year I started thinking that maybe I do have it in me to tackle a challenging swim. And once the thought got into my head that crossing the Channel as part of team was maybe not a totally unrealistic goal, I couldn’t let the idea go again.
So last month, during a lesson in the pool, Christine asked me if I also enjoyed swimming in the sea, and I said yes, and then she asked me if I wanted to join a relay team for August 2025, and I said OMG, OMG, I don’t know, I don’t think I can do it, I don’t know, OMG. And then I said yes.
Now, of course, I’m utterly terrified. I really don’t know if I can do it, but I know I have to believe I can do it or else I really won’t be able to do it. What I absolutely do know is that I would regret it forever if I didn’t at least try, because I would be left always wondering whether it would have been possible after all. I also know that an opportunity has been presented to me, and if I don’t seize it now, it might not come around again. Right now I have the motivation, the means, the time, the ability, and the will. Who knows if the stars will ever align like that again? It makes no sense to put off the challenge “just” because I’m scared, because I will always be scared. Fear is definitely a big obstacle here, but I have to trust that it’s not an insurmountable one. Time will tell.
Time is now also ticking down. The scheduled date for my team’s crossing is August 15, 2025, but the potential swim window is wider than that depending on the weather and other factors. In some ways, August seems like a million years away, but when I think of how much training I need to do between now and then, it doesn’t seem that far away at all. So I’m swimming every chance I get.
I’ve also signed up to a few swim challenges to give me an extra boost of motivation. One of them is the Swim 10k Challenge for Cancer Research UK, which involves swimming 10k over the course of November. This is the second time I’ve participated in a Cancer Research UK event but the first time I’ve ever tried to do any proper fundraising, so I was wasn’t sure how it would go. As it turns out, it’s been going very well, and I’m surprised and very touched by how generous people have been. If anyone would like to donate to my fundraising page, it would be much appreciated.
The support is encouraging me to keep going, and it feels good to be swimming for a good cause. I’m already halfway to 10k after a week and a half of swimming, which is another thing I couldn’t have imagined just a few months ago. Right now I can’t really imagine jumping off a boat in the middle of the English Channel and starting to swim, but I hope that when the time comes around, it will seem like a reasonable and achievable thing to do.
Well, achievable anyway. Reasonable is probably a matter of debate!
I seem to have left pieces of myself scattered around the internet. This is my attempt to pull some of those pieces together.