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

by Walker, Adam;

  I contacted Freda in February and she told me to stay out of the open water and stick to the pool until May, when it would be warmer. In the UK, February is one of the worst months to test your capability outside as it is a cold winter period and the water temperature is in single figures. You would have to be a very experienced cold-water swimmer to go in then – or completely crazy.

  5

  TIME TO TEST THE WATER

  I knew what Freda said made sense but I just wanted to try it. I phoned up the National Watersports Centre in Nottingham and asked if I could book four swims. The gentleman who was responsible for watersports said, ‘We don’t have anyone swimming in the lake – especially this time of year.’ I explained it would all be OK, I was training to swim the English Channel, and I would have someone to watch out for me. I managed somehow to convince him and he allowed me to go ahead.

  When I arrived for the first of my four swims, it was a cold morning with frost on the ground. I changed into my trunks and sleeveless wetsuit. I hadn’t done any research into buying a wetsuit – I just went out and bought the thinnest and cheapest one I could find. Not really appropriate for winter swimming!

  One of the employees at the clubhouse decided to test the temperature before I jumped in: it was 9.7 degrees, which didn’t sound that cold to me. I knew that the English Channel would be 5–6 degrees warmer, so I thought, ‘Great – if I can handle this then the English Channel will be a piece of cake.’ I was excited to test my capability.

  I slipped into the water and immediately began to gasp for air. My chest felt like it was being crushed by a ten-ton weight. I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe. I put my hand on my chest to help me focus on getting oxygen in, but it was no help at all. This was like nothing I had ever felt before – the shock to my system was a real wake-up call about the effect cold water can have on the body.

  In those first moments I was in the water, my wife saw I was struggling and suggested, ‘Maybe you should get out?’ I didn’t want my first experience of cold water to be a one-minute wonder or to get in the habit of quitting. So I brushed it off and said, ‘Oh, no, I’ll be OK. I just needed a minute to get my breath back.’ This was a complete lie. All that was running through my mind was how I wasn’t going to last long in this temperature, how terrible the experience was, and how badly-prepared and naive I had been. I hadn’t even planned how long I would be in the water for. I genuinely thought I would just keep going until I couldn’t take any more, like I did in the pool.

  As a minimum my objective was to swim the length of the lake and back, which was 4 kilometres. Once I had composed myself, my breathing started to settle down, and after a minute or so I began to swim. I did so with my head up, as I struggled to put my face in the water. I attempted a couple of times in the first few minutes to immerse my face, but it was like solid ice. Imagine having the worst ice-cream headache in the world and you’re close to the pain. It was 500 metres before I gradually became used to it and could actually swim front crawl with my head in the water. Once I managed to immerse my face it felt more manageable, and surprisingly I felt like I could tolerate it after all. I had a strange numb glowing feeling in my face and I realised I couldn’t actually feel my feet.

  It was extremely hard to focus on anything else apart from how cold I was. After 750 metres I heard a boat come alongside me. I can only think that the guys at the sports centre were thinking, ‘Why have we let this madman in the water?’

  When I saw the guy on the boat my first reaction was to joke with him. I said, ‘It’s lovely and warm in here – you should come in!’ Joking seems to be a tactic I instinctively use to stem nerves or distract myself from anything negative. The guy in the boat didn’t respond; he just followed alongside me. As I reached 1,000 metres I surprised myself at how well I was doing, even though I felt like I was swimming pretty much frozen stiff.

  I was trying my best to embrace the challenge of getting across the 2,000-metre lake. The lake was marked so I could tick off the distance in my mind. Once I reached 1,500 metres there was something clearly wrong: I started to lose feeling in my arms – they felt like lead weights – and I struggled to move through the water as it felt like I was pulling myself through treacle. My fingers looked like claws (this is one of the early signs of hypothermia), I felt disorientated and strangely paranoid. My pace slowed right down and it was now a battle to finish the final 500 metres. I kept throwing one arm in front of the other with no real power, just trying to drag my way through the water as best I could. It seemed to take for ever. I finally reached 2,000 metres and stood up. Immediately I thought, ‘I have to swim back.’ And then: ‘If I can only swim two thousand metres at this temperature, how on earth will I be able to swim twenty-one miles?’

  I was anxious and asked my wife to throw me the drinks bottle that was filled with warm carbohydrate drink. I didn’t hear a response back so I asked her again. It dawned on me that my mouth wasn’t functioning very well – it felt frozen stiff and the words I was trying to form didn’t make any sense. Even I couldn’t make out what I was saying! I said, ‘Forget it – I’ll swim back.’

  I was serious when I said it, but I stood still for a minute, contemplating my next move. My body didn’t want to do what my brain was telling it to. The will to continue was there, even though it was very apparent I was in no state to do so. Fortunately my brain reminded me how much trouble I was in and I asked the guy in the boat if he could take me back. I’m not sure he could understand a word I was saying, but he soon realised what I wanted when I started scrambling back into the boat. Trying to talk to him on the way back I sounded drunk; I knew what I wanted to say but the sounds coming out of my mouth were nonsense. He must have radioed ahead to the club as there was a lady waiting for me with a towel as I stepped onto dry land. I was shaking uncontrollably and stumbling all over the place. I sensed the embarrassment of the situation and when I was taken inside I was told to sit down. The room was spinning and I remember again trying to joke the situation off. I was given a warm cup of tea, although I was shaking so much I couldn’t hold it without spilling it. I kept throwing it over myself – which was quite nice, actually, as it was a bit of heat.

  The lady said, ‘You have hypothermia – but don’t worry, it’s not that bad.’

  I sensed it probably was quite bad but tried to put it out of my mind. She guided me to a shower and I saw myself in the mirror – I looked like a walking corpse! My face was a yellow and grey colour, as if all the blood had been sucked out of me. There was another chap I hadn’t seen before by the shower, and it was all a bit confusing until I realised he was trying to switch on the heating for the shower and he couldn’t make it work. It seemed to be taking for ever to switch it on. In reality it was probably only thirty seconds, but I was desperate to get warm and it felt like a lifetime.

  Once it was fixed, I stepped under the shower. A paramedic appeared and started asking me questions, such as my name and where I lived. I could remember my name, but I was struggling with my actual address. I knew my town but I really had to concentrate on the street and house number. I also kept asking for the shower temperature to be turned up, as it felt barely lukewarm. The paramedic wouldn’t let me, due to the dangers of heating up too quickly and the pressure that would put on my heart.

  After forty-five minutes in the shower he took my temperature: 34.9 degrees. Anything under 35 degrees and you are classed as hypothermic. As I started to warm up I could see blood patches across my chest as heat began to move back to my extremities. The paramedic said that if I had stayed in the cold water just another couple of minutes I would probably have gone under and that would have been it.

  After around an hour, my core temperature had recovered to a normal 37 degrees and I was allowed to go home. I was told not to drive, though, so I cancelled a customer meeting the next day – an odd conversation in which I had to tell him I couldn’t make it as I had hypothermia and had nearly died.

  That evening I w
ent to bed wearing a T-shirt and three thick fleeces to stay warm. I was concerned about going to sleep, for fear of not waking up.

  I did fortunately wake up the next morning, to a huge reality check. I had been very lucky – I realised how serious my condition had been and how confused I had felt. I had underestimated the enormous effect extreme cold water can have on an inexperienced body that has not been acclimatised to it. The consequences could have been devastating.

  At this point I would have been forgiven for giving up this crazy idea of swimming the English Channel. But my experience in the lake actually had the opposite effect: it made me more determined than ever. I thought, ‘If I’m stupid enough to nearly kill myself over my lack of knowledge and experience of open water, I’d better put it right by doing it properly!’

  After a couple of days out of the water, I went back in the pool. I had learned a dangerously harsh lesson – one I knew I would never forget. I didn’t tell many people about what had happened, and in particular didn’t share it with my parents as my mum didn’t really understand what I was doing. (She is a worrier at the best of times – what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her!) I was determined that this experience would make me stronger. I now knew what it felt like to have severe hypothermia.

  6

  IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED …

  It wasn’t until July 2007 that I went back into open water.

  I contacted Freda Streeter again to let her know I would be coming down to Dover, judiciously leaving out the details of my incident in February.

  When I arrived, there was another first-timer there and Alison Streeter (Freda’s daughter, who has swum the English Channel many times) was about to take her into the sea. She said I could go with them and I knew I couldn’t be in better hands. That said, we hadn’t discussed how long I was to swim with them for – I think the plan was to swim to the harbour wall and back, so thirty minutes at the most, I guessed.

  I was a little nervous entering the water, as the vivid memories of my February swim came creeping into my mind. I ventured out with them anyway and swam right to the harbour wall. As I turned back I realised I had managed to lose them both, so I just carried on swimming back and forth to each harbour wall for the next few hours. I thought Alison would probably be looking for me or trying to get my attention, but when I looked back I couldn’t see anyone.

  At this point I didn’t know what the protocol was – whether to keep swimming or come in. We’d only planned to do a short dip, but the competitive side of me took over. I just kept swimming, wanting to test how long I could swim this comfortably. I went for one hour, then two. At three hours I started to think someone might be worried about me, and at three and a half I was getting quite hungry. I didn’t know whether it would be good for me to continue without food or drink and I didn’t want them sending the water police after me. As I walked back onto the beach I heard someone shout, ‘We wondered when you were going to come in!’ This was Barry, one of the volunteers at Dover; he returns every year to help out with food and drink, or appears with plastic gloves to rub Vaseline under your arms and neck. Like a lot of supporters on the beach, he gives his time unconditionally and this support really does make all the difference to the swimmers.

  This swim had put me back on track and it was still only my second time in open water. It gave me the boost I needed, helping me to rebuild my confidence and put the demons from the last swim to bed.

  Driving the long journey home I felt euphoric and was already thinking about how I might improve for my next swim the following weekend. At this point I was swimming in the pool five or six times a week, before and after work, whenever I could fit it in.

  I was going home with a real sense of self-belief. Although I still hadn’t swum the qualifier of six hours (which as part of the rules needs to be completed in order for you to be allowed to swim the Channel), I felt that my training was all heading in the right direction. It was strange to think that, since taking up this challenge, and at every stage, I had always believed I had a chance of succeeding. I would tell myself, ‘It’s just one arm in front of the other – keep it simple.’ I wished I had thought that way in cricket, instead of allowing the fear of failure to hold me back. By focusing on negative scenarios like losing my wicket, I lost the ability to play to my natural game. At practice in the nets I would hit the ball fluently and not even think about it, but out in the middle of the pitch I’d find that my feet wouldn’t move the same way and I would be tight and stiff, playing consciously rather than subconsciously. In other words I was overthinking it. The trouble was, the more I overthought it, the more my batting performance would suffer; even when I did do well I would criticise myself, thinking I could still have done better. And this way of thinking meant that I never relaxed, mentally or physically – it became a habit to think of myself in that way.

  In open-water swimming I couldn’t afford to think like this and worry. So much of my success rested on mental strength. I wish I had known then what I know now about the power of positive thought and the importance of not overthinking a performance.

  I drove back to work bright and early the next day. Even before I started the swim training, it had always been a drag making the 190-mile round trip to work most days. This time felt particularly tiring, after my three-and-a-half-hour swim and seven-hour round trip to Dover. I was expected to be in the office every Monday and had no choice if I wanted to get paid, so I just had to get used to it.

  As the week went on, I was looking forward to the next swim and wondered what I should try for. Maybe four hours, four and a half … That would be a natural next step. I had heard from the other swimmers that you are informed by Freda how long you are going to do and you don’t get a say in it. No negotiation: you just do it. There is a reason for this military approach and it is not because she is trying to be mean. When the day of your crossing comes and you have to get on with it, you don’t get to negotiate with the sea about how long you can swim that day or what sort of weather conditions you would like. You can only do your best to prepare for what may get thrown at you, and being afraid of Freda’s wrath is a great incentive to stay in the water and do as you are told.

  The weekend arrived and I made the long journey to Dover on the Saturday, leaving just after 5 a.m. I put my things on the beach along with all the other swimmers and gave my name so I could be registered.

  Freda asked me when my Channel swim was booked for. I told her next July and she asked how long I had swum for the previous week. When I told her three and a half hours, she instantly replied, ‘Try six hours.’ Strangely that’s what I wanted; I wanted to see if I was capable of ticking this landmark off. It was only my third proper open-water swim, but I knew the confidence it would give me to complete it.

  I wandered into the water pumped up and focused for the job in hand. I didn’t have time to overthink it, which was a good thing. There are a lot of things that can unsettle your mind; for instance, not only are you swimming in the cold sea, non-stop, for six hours … but you are doing so wearing just your swim trunks, goggles and swim cap. You cannot get out of the water and you try not to stand up or rest, as this would only be cheating yourself and would disqualify your swim on the real thing. After two hours you get a drink thrown to you, and again every sixty minutes after that. The feed should take a few seconds and then you just keep swimming.

  The water felt more comfortable somehow. It was a similar temperature as the previous week, but I didn’t have the same feeling of trepidation and I wasn’t analysing it as I had last time. What I realised is that it’s important to respect the sea, but give it too much respect and it will dominate you, making you question your capability and whether you’re worthy to take it on.

  I focused on how well I had done the week before and used that to give me the confidence I needed. I now knew I could swim for three and a half hours and I also knew I had enough energy left in the tank, so there was no excuse not to do the same again – and more.<
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  The first couple of hours were a little boring. It was a relief this time knowing that I would be able to get a drink along with the rest of the swimmers who were scheduled to do long sessions. The majority of open-water swimmers use a carbohydrate powdered drink that provides slow-release energy. At the beach they also provided a warmed cordial with no extra sugar, which is added for taste. I received mine on the second hour, in a plastic cup. I didn’t like the taste but I could feel the liquid warming my insides, and although I didn’t really want it, I could feel the benefit.

  I drank it fast, as I wanted to get into the habit of practicing as if it were my actual swim. I carried on in the same direction as the majority of the swimmers, which is to go directly left towards the harbour wall and then, once you get close to the far end, you turn back and swim the full length in the opposite direction. It is around 1,400 metres from one harbour wall to the other. It took me about fifteen minutes from the drinks station to the left wall, and a further twenty or twenty-five minutes to the far right wall. I had decided to wear a watch so I knew how long I had been in for; I noticed that some of the others wore them and that those who didn’t relied upon the big clock at the end of the harbour wall. The reason people do not wear them is to resist the temptation to keep looking and feel that time isn’t passing very quickly. (On the actual Channel day, all swimmers are advised not to wear a watch.)

  I realised, as I continued, that I was swimming faster in one direction than the other; at the time I convinced myself this was due to my speed, when in reality it was the wind and current.

  Getting to the three-hour mark seemed tougher than before, and I wondered whether it was because I had swum three and a half hours the previous week and now had no incentive, or because I knew I was only halfway to six hours. It was probably a bit of both. I decided to focus on another short-term goal – swimming four hours – and thought, ‘How great will I feel when I achieve it and pass my previous best?’