Man vs Ocean - One Man's Journey to Swim The World's Toughest Oceans

by Walker, Adam;

  It became very evident to me that the knee would only ever get me so far. I was as fast as anyone in the county on top of the water, but without a reasonable leg kick for starts and turns I knew I would never be able to reach the highest level necessary for professional competition.

  After the championships, I found that having a girlfriend and going out seemed much better pastimes than swimming. I was still a member of the club but didn’t do much swimming for the next two years.

  I came back to it at the age of nineteen for a brief stint. Swimming was more of a social thing to me by then, and I never put in the training and dedication required to take it to the next level. I knew I could still win my event, the 50-metre backstroke, at local and regional galas, and was happy with that due to my interest in other sports.

  I really enjoyed my two years at college as I had the opportunity to play sport as well as study subjects I was interested in. I also liked the people; as it was further education, some of the students were a little older and more mature, and there was none of the hierarchy battling I had experienced in my school years.

  At eighteen I went to the University of Wolverhampton, which I chose because it offered the subject I wanted, sports studies and leisure recreation management. (Also it wasn’t too far from home to see my girlfriend.) I enjoyed most of university life and learned a lot – notably, thanks to my best friend Chris, how to get an extension in coursework and create more time for yourself.

  2

  SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT PATH

  In 1999 I left university and decided to travel to Australia to see my brother Kevin, who had emigrated over there. I had promised him I would visit after I finished my degree. It was in Australia that I met my wife. She came back to live in England with me and we moved in with my parents. I was twenty-one and still didn’t have any idea of the career path I would take.

  I came very close to becoming a PE teacher, but it would have meant another year at university and more debt. I wanted to earn some money and have my own independence.

  I started looking at sales jobs. It was the natural thing for me to do as my dad and three brothers, Gary, Kevin and Mark, were all in this line of work. My dad had worked for Mars, the confectionary company, for twenty-seven years and I felt familiar with the sales environment.

  It took around four months of searching to get a job. I knew it would be difficult with no previous sales experience, but my dad had emphasised the importance of getting a good first job with a respected company, as it would set me up for a successful career path. I had an interview with Coca-Cola, landed the job and I was assigned a local patch to work. I was so happy and excited, and the job even came with a bright-red Coca-Cola van, so I had my own wheels. It also meant we could move out of my parents’ place and buy our own house.

  I moved to Nestle and then Butchers Pet Care, which were both steps up in my sales career. I had been at Butchers for two and a half years when my friend Mike mentioned that there was a position available where he worked, a small domestic-appliance manufacturer now known as Russell Hobbs. I thought this would give me useful experience in the non-food industry so I went for an interview and was offered the job.

  I was twenty-six years old and had made yet another positive move in my sales career, but I knew there was still something missing from my life. I was bouncing from job to job, convincing myself that each move was a step towards my ultimate goal of becoming a sales director by the time I was thirty-five. But I wondered deep down whether this was what I really wanted or whether it was just a challenge I’d set myself for the wrong reasons.

  Sport was still my true passion and I even applied a few times to work for sportswear and sporting-goods companies, just to get close to it.

  The reality was that there was no chance now of achieving my dream of a sports career – it was too late and my body had too many injuries. No matter how much I wanted to be an athlete, it could never happen.

  I hated to think of myself as a person who would tell his grandchildren, ‘I could have been a professional cricketer or swimmer if things had worked out differently …’, dwelling on my run of injuries and my failed attempt at a sporting career. And yet I often felt I didn’t really belong in the world of business either. It was sport that dominated my mind; it had never left me since my school days. For a long time I endeavoured to channel this passion into my sales roles, and I worked really hard at achieving my targets with the same drive and tenacity that I knew from the sporting arena.

  3

  MY LIFE CHANGED IN AN INSTANT

  In March 2006, I had been working for Russell Hobbs for over a year when I was again heading out to Australia for a holiday. During the flight, I had already watched two or three movies to fill the time and I was running out of entertainment options. I looked under the sport category and found a film called On a Clear Day. I hadn’t a clue what the movie was about and the title certainly didn’t give it away. It didn’t sound particularly interesting until I read the description and discovered the film was about a man determined to salvage his self-esteem and tackle his demons by attempting the ultimate test of endurance: to swim the English Channel.

  My situation wasn’t exactly the same and yet I felt there were certain similarities between me and this character, Frank. For instance, I felt a little lost in my work life; I had recently given up cricket, a sport I had played all my life; I no longer swam competitively; and it seemed I had nothing much to strive for and look forward to. Watching Frank going through turmoil, lost and looking for something to break the cycle and give him focus, I was engrossed.

  There is a part in the movie where Frank is on a ferry to France with his friends and he looks out to sea from the deck and says, ‘How mad would you have to be to swim this?’ His friends respond, ‘Totally!’ I got a huge shiver down my spine and knew in that moment that this was something I had to do. It was a fictional story about a fictional character, but it inspired me and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  In life there are many ideas and thoughts that pass through our minds every day which are very quickly dismissed as unachievable. We convince ourselves that we are too old, too slow, not clever enough, not good enough, or that we don’t have enough money or time. We are all guilty of it, finding many reasons why an idea or dream couldn’t and shouldn’t happen. Sometimes we seriously consider a new possibility only to be faced with others trying to knock it down, or with people who are so negative that we end up talking ourselves out of it.

  When I made up my mind to swim the English Channel, I told very few people – not even my mum, who I thought would try to change my mind.

  I had left the swim club eight years earlier, and even then I had swum mostly backstroke with the occasional one-length relay. I could only recall one occasion when I’d done front crawl non-stop for an hour, and that was when I was twelve years old. The closest I came to swimming now was to tread water in goal for my local water polo team, Southwell.

  I didn’t know anything about what it took to swim the English Channel. What training would be involved, the fitness required, and whether I was capable of swimming in very cold temperatures for hours on end. But for once in my life, I didn’t care about these things. I became excited about the idea of it and didn’t allow my brain to compute the negatives and evaluate my prospects. If I had analysed it in any depth, I’m sure I would quickly have convinced myself that the odds were stacked against me and it was simply not possible. I didn’t allow that to happen. It was as if a light bulb had come on in my brain – I was convinced that this is what I was supposed to do.

  My decision to give up cricket had been a difficult one, but it just wasn’t worth keeping it up in the end – I was having two physio sessions a week on my knees just to play on a Saturday. This left a gap in my life which I needed to fill; maybe swimming the Channel was my calling, and the focus that I, like Frank, needed to give me direction and a purpose I felt I badly needed.

  Very quickly after arriving in Aust
ralia, I started to research how to go about swimming the English Channel. I found out that approximately 1,000 people had swum it since 1875, when Captain Matthew Webb was the first man to do so. It is 21 miles at its narrowest point, between Dover and Cap Gris Nez. There are certain rules you have to adhere to for the swim to be official, which are based on how Captain Webb completed it. For instance, you can only wear a simple latex or silicon swim hat – not neoprene, as it is classed as too warm. No wetsuits are allowed, just standard swimwear, so trunks or shorts (which have to be above the knee) for the guys and a classic-shaped swimming costume for the ladies. You are not allowed to touch the support boat. You can drink and eat, but this has to be passed or thrown to you in a drinks bottle tied to a piece of string.

  The cost for me would be £2,150. This would include admin fees and an observer on the support boat to officiate my swim and make sure I abided by the rules above – notably the one about not touching the boat at all during the crossing.

  As well as solo attempts across the Channel, there are also relays in which each team member swims for one hour and then is replaced by another. Teams can vary in size from two people upwards. Crossing the Channel is seen as the Everest of swimming, although three times as many people have climbed Everest than have swum the English Channel. Those who want to conquer it do so for a number of reasons: some to raise money for a charity, some because it’s a lifetime dream, and some, like me, who just want to see how capable they are.

  I learned that swimmers have a choice of boat pilots who are officially approved for Channel attempts and that there are two federations, the Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation and the Channel Swimming Association. I also read that the currents are very strong and the conditions unpredictable, meaning that you don’t know what you will face on the day or how long it will take you. Hypothermia is a very real possibility, as are encounters with jellyfish.

  After reading all of this, it would have been understandable if I’d ended the idea right then and there. This was no longer a movie script – it was all very real. But the more I read, the more I became excited about taking on this challenge. The training would start as soon as I got home.

  4

  WHERE ON EARTH DO I START?

  Upon returning home, I got straight into my training. I wasn’t a member of a club and I didn’t have a coach, so I decided I’d start with a swim before work. I arrived when the pool opened at 7 a.m. and thought the best test of my abilities would be to see if I could swim for forty-five minutes non-stop, like I had when I was twelve. I hated long-distance swimming as a kid and anything over two lengths was too far for me. I think part of the reason why I was so keen to challenge myself with this sport was because it was something I didn’t like and wasn’t very good at.

  I changed into my trunks, excited by the thought that this was the start of an exciting new adventure. I pushed off from the side with great expectation and started to swim front crawl. It seemed strange, swimming up and down with no real purpose other than to complete each length and tick it off. I enjoyed the discipline and challenge of seeing if I could keep going for forty-five minutes.

  My stroke was not great. I swam twenty lengths, followed by another thirty, under the illusion that my fitness would still be there from my childhood days, which was definitely not the case. I also found that I was holding my breath until the last minute, breathing only when I was just about ready to pass out. There was no rhythm to my stroke. But I tried not to focus on the things I was doing wrong; the goal was to finish the time I had set myself. After all, this was just the start.

  I managed to complete the forty-five minutes and achieve my first goal on this journey, even though I was shattered by the end of it and had to face the stiff reality that I was a world away from swimming 21 miles on the open seas. I also had some discomfort in my shoulder, which had been caused by a save I had made in water polo some months before. At the time I’d heard a very loud cracking noise and it hadn’t been right since. I tried not to think about it as injuries had prevented me from playing so many sports I loved in the past. I just put it to the back of my mind.

  I was happy that I had put my line in the sand, making a commitment to this goal, and I was motivated to press on. I went back to the pool the next day and did the same again. I soon progressed from four sessions a week to five, and also increased the duration of the swims to one hour. When I could swim that comfortably without stopping, I challenged myself to hit the same 100-metre split times for the whole hour. My next goal was to reduce the split time and then vary the sessions to include 200-metre sets as well as 100 metres. I then tried to reduce my rest time from twenty seconds to fifteen and then ten. I stuck to similar sessions to gain a clear indication that I was getting faster, which was a good motivational boost.

  As I grew fitter over the coming months, I would include a longer session at the weekend, a non-stop swim covering 5–6 kilometres, just to see how my body reacted to it. (I realised later on that this was more of a confidence booster than something that increased my fitness.)

  After five or six months’ training, I had progressed better than expected. I was regimented with my training, going four or five times a week, and my speed had improved by fifteen seconds per 100 metres. I was also only resting for five or ten seconds between 100-metre sets, so I would only allow my heart rate to recover slightly before I pushed off again.

  One Saturday I decided that I would test how long I could keep swimming for. My intention was to swim for three hours, which would be the longest I had ever completed in the pool. My previous best was two hours, which I had sectioned into lots of 100–200-metre swims with a set turnaround time – this kept my mind engaged with short-term targets. I found that, if I didn’t do this and instead saw it as a straight two hours, my mind would drift and I would easily lose focus, which in turn would affect my speed and my will to complete the session.

  On the day of my three-hour attempt, I only took a small drinks bottle with me and no food. I didn’t like stopping for drinks as I was pushing against the clock.

  I started around 7 a.m., to make the most of the pool’s allocated lane-swimming time.

  The lifeguards had seen me coming most mornings and were now used to me doing one or two hours, so I didn’t mention that I was planning to swim for longer. At 9 a.m. the pool went from lane-swimming to public, and so I swam close to the side to stay out of everyone’s way.

  Once I reached three hours, I thought about stopping, but convinced myself to do another thirty minutes. Once I had done that I said to myself, ‘I may as well do four hours.’ This went on every half an hour until I reached five hours and called it a day.

  I was thrilled that I had swum for that long and I now really believed I had a chance of swimming the English Channel. I knew I still had a long way to go: for one thing, this was a pool heated to 29 degrees centigrade while the English Channel would be 15–16 degrees at best, and I also had no idea how I would fare in open water. I sensed it would be a big challenge to get used to the cold.

  The five-hour swim gave me a lot of confidence so I thought it was time to commit fully to the swim and pay the £1,000 deposit to reserve my boat. I looked online and decided to book the pilot who at that time had the most experience in taking Channel swimmers across, Mike Oram. I was so excited to book my slot – it was now official, which made me feel so much better. At times during my early training I had felt a bit of a fraud as I hadn’t actually booked anything; I would ask myself, ‘Are you really going to do it?’

  I don’t think I ever really doubted I would eventually book the swim, but I’d wanted to get to a point in my training when I felt confident enough in my own ability. It was still a very bold move as I hadn’t even been in cold water yet. But I now believed I would do whatever it took to acclimatise to it. I’d wanted a new focus in my life and now I had it. This swim meant everything to me. It was also a great opportunity to raise money for two worthwhile causes: the Make a Wish Foundation,
which grants magical wishes to young people with life-threatening conditions, and the cat rehoming centre from where I got my two cats.

  My Channel crossing was booked for 10 July 2008 so I had seventeen months to prepare. (I had tried for 9 July, my thirtieth birthday, but there wasn’t a slot available then.) This was the second slot Mike had available on that tide as someone else had booked the first one. Some pilots can book up to four people on a week’s tide – if one drops out the next person will get first choice of their slot and so on. Things can get moved around depending on the weather and the pilot will normally do his best to accommodate you if there’s a delay, depending on how busy he is.

  I was now desperate to test my capability in cold water. Up to this point I hadn’t had any advice; it was just self-discipline that had got me this far. I was advised to phone the oracle of Channel swimming, Freda Streeter, about my training outside. The ‘Channel General’, as she is known, has supported many open-water Channel-swimming aspirants over a thirty-year period and is more often than not found on the beach at Dover Harbour from May to September, shouting orders, military-style, to keep swimmers disciplined.