What’s with the weather at the moment? I feel for all the swimmers (and their pilots) waiting to go on this tide as the forecast has been very changeable. Fingers crossed for you all that things settle down very soon.

We had odd weather on the beach too, and not entirely as forecast. There were definitely days of two halves - rain to start and sun to finish. That made for a good opportunity for people to stop and chat after training. I felt for John on his second 10 hour though - rain and pretty miserable to start and then the sun came out to make it nice but finished off with a chilly breeze for the last hour. Great training though.

There’s a real buzz on the beach now with a mix of the 2021 regulars, new swimmers and returning familiar faces.

Your pod leaders love what we do, it’s hard not to. We get to meet new swimmers, sometimes nervous, sometimes excited, grow and learn. Grow in confidence, banishing demons along the way, until the day that they go off and conquer their dreams and come back somehow a slightly different person.

What we do is all about team work, both with the weekly volunteers, the pod leaders and me. Good communication is the key to that working effectively, safely and us knowing how best to support you and each other.

One of the things that I liked most about this weekend were a few quiet moments when most of the swimmers were finished and there were swimmers relaxed on the beach looking calm and confident. They looked ready to go. It’s a really magical part of the season.

Keep up the great work, you are doing brilliantly.

#lovetheclassof2021

Your pod leaders’ observations

As we approach the middle of the training season, things become, quite rightly, relaxed. Relaxed is good. Keeping the important things in place is also key. Thank you to all of you who already make life easer for us.

Boundaries & key timings

With a group as large as ours, we have to have boundaries in place to enable it to:

• operate safely

• make it manageable for volunteers & pod leaders

I know that many of you have twigged just how much work goes into running this and I have written about the mid week workload before. The weekend is pretty tiring too.

As I said, we are now almost mid way through the training season and this weekend I was running on vapours. Yes, OK, I did a relay on Thursday and that is enough to make you tired, but I was tired before that too and I’ve had years when I’ve held down a corporate role, run DCT and trained for marathon swims. This year is proving to be particularly tiring for all of us. We’ve been pondering why that might be. The world is a little more intense at the moment with Covid amongst us, maybe that’s it.

A couple of years ago I reduced my number of working days because I could no longer work full time and get everything done. This year I stopped my corporate career altogether. DCT, whilst part of my overall business umbrella, only forms about 10% of what the company is actually about, yet the effort going in takes up 90+% of my time right now. Clearly, this is not sustainable and needs to be rebalanced, especially to maintain the current DCT pricing.

The other pod leaders also hold down jobs.

For this reason we have to have clear boundaries as to what is included within what you pay for. We need to make this work for everyone.

In order to have the energy to safely run training, we also rely on volunteers to support things like feeding and we have boundaries as to what we will and will not do. It’s a very, very long day on the beach.

Boundaries - what’s included in what you pay for?

Just as a reminder of what is included in what you pay for. With over 250 people on our books so far this year, you can imagine how chaotic our lives would be if everyone took just 10 minutes more of our time than we had planned for.

Membership:

• As well as the bundle that you get when you pay, you can unlock membership discounts on training.

• Weekly community call

Training via monthly or annual subscription

• Any training sessions during your subscription period

• A cyclical training plan that is adapted to meet your training goal

• Feeds

• Pod leaders available to answer questions after training

• Access to your pod WhatsApp group for conversations during the week

Pay as you go training

• Training sessions paid for

• Feeds

• Ability to ask questions of beach crew after training

If you want more support than is indicated here, that is possible as an optional extra 1:1 session or package. There are separate fees for this. Weekday 1:1 support is not included in any of the standard training options. Of course, feel free to use the Facebook group to connect with others for group support or use the mentoring programme if you prefer.

Training key timings

There are some key timings that are non-negotiable:

• Arrive on-time: arrive early enough to sign-in, attend the mandatory briefing and be in the water for 10am. We reserve the right to refuse entry to anyone arriving after this.

• Soloists feeding (timing): We provide feeding after 2 hours and hourly thereafter. No other times. Feeding is a key safety process where we check in on all swimmers. It is important that you arrive on time and give in the correct number. If you are thirsty, please feel free to ask for another drink, that’s absolutely fine. If it’s busy, you may need to wait until other swimmers feeding have had their feed. This is also the feeding schedule that many use on the day. We are deliberately teaching you a good process.

• Soloists durations: We offer a maximum of 7 hours on a Saturday and 6 hours on a Sunday. We may arrange 10 hour swims from time to time, these will be notified separately.

• Relays swim durations: You’re welcome to swim for up to two hours and you can double (or triple) dip. Time can be a funny thing on a relay. Sometimes the time of the boat disappears rapidly and the time in the water seems longer. Regularly swimming for over an hour in training can make the time on a relay seem about right. This is why we encourage regularly doing 1.5 hour double dips.

Other key points

There are some key points that are crucial to the safe running of training and to making it manageable for the beach crew. We ask you to keep within these boundaries:

• Hat colour: All soloists to wear red hats, all relay swimmers to wear yellow hats.

• Soloists feeding (liquid): We offer 100% Maltodextrin (like CNP); UCAN; squash; black tea; or water. We will also aim to make one of your feeds an electrolyte feed. If you need something different, please provide it to us clearly labelled and we’ll be happy to help.

• Soloists feeding (solids): We may offer a little treat on one of the feeds on longer training swims. We don’t offer solids on all feeds as we are aiming to teach you a process that will work on the day. Solids take time. Take a long time on a feed in the channel and you may undo the hard work that you’ve put in since the last feed. Aim for 20 seconds per feed.

• Relay swims double dips: Please remember to give your number in when you get in and out of the water so we always have an up to date list of who is swimming and when we expect to see you.

• Space at feeding: feeding can be a chaotic time and it is really important that we hear all the numbers given out of those who have fed and those who are getting out. You may see us using radios. Please give the beach crew space at these times so that we can carry out this important process. Conversations should take place away from any radio, we will ask you to move if this is not the case. Questions should wait until feeding is done. Feel free to ask any questions you have outside feeding time, this is positively encouraged!

• Space in front of beach crew: it may look like we’re sat chatting or eating between feeds, we’re always looking. We’re watching people who get out, we’re scanning the water. If we look distant, we’re not, we’re just busy. It’s fine to stand and chat, and we love to chat with you so that we can get to know you better, learning what makes you tick so that we can better help you train. We may just invite you to sit down so that we can still see what’s happening in the water.

Time out

You may see weekends where one or more of the pod leaders are not there. As Stephen Covey says, you need to ‘Sharpen the Saw’. We can’t support you if we are exhausted. So expect weekends when we take time out to recharge. There will always be beach crew present to ensure that you get quality training.

Shout outs

When you are involved in a sport like ours, you surround yourself with people who routinely do amazing things. You’re all pretty darn amazing to be honest. These shout outs aim to highlight some of the breakthrough moments or big training weekends that we notice. There are many more. Please please give yourself a shout out in our Facebook group if you had a personal breakthrough moment or are proud of your achievements. I’d love to hear about it.

• Ady Brown, Tony Ferguson and Kristen Smith for a 7 & 6 weekend

• Katherine, Patrick & Helen for 10 hour swims on Saturday

• John for his final back to back 10 hour swims

• Christopher Trendowicz for blasting out bigger swims that he had originally planned.

• Girls Alive team for double dipping with 2hrs & 1 hour and going back when they’d finished their own swims to support Emma Simpson as she finished her first 1.5 hour Dover swim - great team work!

• Happy birthday to super crew Amy and to Paul Cross the ‘wookie’

Welcome to new swimmers this weekend, we enjoyed meeting you. Well done on your swims.

Any omissions in this section are purely accidental.

Channel swimmer on the beach!

It was lovely to congratulate Philip Brice and Colin France fresh from their channels swims on Friday

During the week we had a few moments of concern when a relay I was due to be in along with other members of the DCT Senior Leadership team (plus friends) looked like it might go on a weekend. That would have made for interesting challenges in managing the beach given that all core beach crew were in the team! Luckily we went on Thursday!

Swims to call out this week:

• Philip Brice: EC solo 2nd July - 15 hrs 55 mins

• Colin France: EC solo 2nd July - 13 hrs 50 mins

• SaLTed Nuts!: EC relay with DCT key players Emma France; Miguel Arbide; Ruth Williamson; Paul James; Liesl Norris (as awesome substitute for Jon Southey who was waiting for his solo window); and Mandi Bodemeaid. 1st July - 15hrs 41 mins

• Cinq au Swim: EC relay with Liesl completing her second ever relay, the day after her first EC relay! Also on board Phoebe Critchlow, daughter of our very own #1 and Emma Carter-Briggs, Justine Ledwith & Sophie Smith. 2nd July - 16hrs 47 mins

Well done to all swims this week, wherever you trained. We enjoyed tracking you. 😊

A few of our end of session celebrations

Weekend Stats

Note: Water temperature taken during the swim session in the harbour. The lowest recorded reading is shown here. Air temperature, wind direction & wind speed taken from the Port of Dover app.

Saturday:

Swimmers:   45
Water temperature:   16.3C
Air temperature: 15.3C
Conditions:   Rain, low cloud, slight chop. F4 SW

Sunday:

Swimmers:   42
Water temperature:   16.3C
Air temperature: 16.3C
Conditions:   Rain, cloudy & breezy to start. Sunny clear skies for most of the rest of the afternoon. Windy at the end of the 10 hour swim. F3 gusting F4 SSW.

Volunteers & beach crew

Thank you to the pod leaders and to our volunteers. Kirill was on the rota for Sunday, Joan was with us both days and and thank you to everyone who just helped out with feeds & swimmers in need on both days. This really is a team sport.

Reminders

Remember to book your sessions online. Bookings close 24 hours before the session, it would be a massive help if you booked by Thursday morning.

The system doesn’t arrange automatic refunds, so please message me if you cancel ahead of these deadlines and I’ll arrange a refund.

You don’t need to sign into the website to book a session - just pop your email address in to the booking system and it will remember you. Remember to click into the discount code box if you are a subscriber and it will auto complete your discount code. If you are a pay as you go swimmer and are also a member, remember to use your discount code to get your membership price.

Pod Ponderings: Creating a peak performance state

That all elusive peak performance state. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create it at will? Well you absolutely can.

If you were to look at someone who is stressed, you could probably tell that they’re stressed without even talking to them. Chances are they’d be focusing in on something small in front of them ‘foveal vision’. Their body language would also give them away.

However, if you were to look at someone who was in a peak performance state, they would be standing a little taller, shoulders back, head up, taking in everything.

Your state can affect your physiology.

Here’s the great news, your physiology can also affect your state.

Simply by switching from foveal vision to peripheral vision can also switch your state from a stressed state to a peak performance state.

Imagine that!

If you want to try it for yourself, find a nice comfortable place to sit, feet planted on the floor, hands on your lap. Relax. Find a spot to look at in front of you. Without moving your eyes, start to become aware of what’s going on to your left and to your right. Really tune into your peripheral vision.

Relax. Relax your shoulders. Relax your jaw. Be aware of any tension and let it go.

Become aware of what is above and below your gaze. Maybe even what is behind you.

Now you have entered a state of relaxation. A state where you can perform at your peak.

Practice getting into this state.

It can be done very quickly, particularly if you use a method called anchoring where you come to associate a state with an action. If you’ve ever read about the pavlov experiments with dogs salivating over steak you will have heard about this.

Get in touch if you want some help with this. I can help with my hypnotherapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming experience as there are a couple of ways that this can be approached.

Photos

A few photos from the weekend….

Spotlight in the shop

Did you know that we have feeding bottles? Well we do, see more below. These are soft & easy to squeeze, perfect for the big day.