The latest in our series of guest blogs is from Stuart Handley. Stuart has a back catalogue of achieving incredible things and the reasons for this success became really clear when he joined us for both weeks of the ramp up camps. What we put on in these weeks was significant - 22 hours of swimming! So to do both weeks, back to back, was a significant achievement in its own right. He didn’t miss a beat. Outside of the actual swimming, his mental attitude was both collegiate and rock solid.

Stuart continued to attend our weekend training and never wavered. I had zero doubt of his ability to make this swim.

At 1 am as the boat turned out of Dover Marina and accelerated towards Samphire Hoe, I was trying hard not to think about the scale of what I was about to attempt. I was trying equally hard to ignore the copious Vaseline being applied to sensitive parts of my anatomy by the burly, and not particularly gentle member of my crew, while the others laughed and posted compromising photos of us both to the internet. 

Suddenly we realised there were other channel boats all around us, all racing to the start. We cheered and waved at the other boats – for a few moments, any concern was gone and spirits lifted, the challenge in front of me didn’t seem so singular.

I’d spent the winter swimming in lakes and rivers down at four degrees centigrade, I’d covered 800,000 meters in training since the start of the year and completed back to back 7/6 and 8/5 swims. 

But I still had no idea if I could get across. Getting out after an 8 hour training swim and thinking ‘I could do another three hours, definitely’ doesn’t help you if you know it’s probably going to take 18. I’d come to the dawning realisation the only way you can know If you’ve done enough to swim the channel is actually to swim the channel.

I learned a lot, on the swim itself.

First, swimming in the dark is not an issue. The boats are lit up like football stadiums so providing you can cope with the swim from the beach to the boat, you’ll be in clear blue water even in the depth of the night. I leapt in, didn’t get the cold shock I was expecting, but did have to fight some significant breaking waves both in to shore and, after standing clear of the water with my hands up, out. I was blown away to have 13 friends and family cheering me off from the beach, so if you also swam last week and had a big group of loons roaring you in, I apologise – they belonged to me! Soon I was back in the protective blaze of light from my boat, and settled in to loping along 2m away from the hull. If anything the sheer brightness causes its own issues as for me, despite knowing deep down that my crew were smiling encouragement and waving, all I could make out was the sinister monk like silhouettes of their raised dryrobe hoods. If it’s warm enough, ask your crew to wear bobble hats rather than creeping you out for the night time hours.

Later on, paranoid concern reared up as my crew seemed to be scowling at me – were they angry because I was so slow? Was the swim about to be binned? It turns out that because I’d asked them not to eat in front of me, every time my face went down in the water they were shoving food in, then as I rotated to breathe they were holding their breath and trying to look innocent before furiously chewing the mouthful the next time I couldn’t see them. It was hilarious when I worked out what was going on, but it’s a silly example of why you need to trust your team, as my thoughts could have gone very much darker.

They need to trust you too – for example, It’s really important to stick to what you’ve trained on. If I swam for three hours without a feed I’d be eyeing up seagulls wondering how they taste, but I’d trained on the DCT feed schedule and would get out after an 8 hour swim feeling strong so this was clearly making a difference. Despite this I had a lot of people encouraging me to move onto thirty minute feeds and after six hours I agreed, but negotiated that we start with a 45 minute feed. I knew as I came in that I still had a full belly from the last feed, and we quickly reverted to hourly feeds. Even when we got back to Dover I had to force myself to eat half a bag of jelly babies (thanks Donna) and hours later a small sausage roll, but didn’t want anything else until the next morning. From that I’m assuming that the fuelling must have been working well.

If you like doing maths, this is your event. As I started swimming, I made my way from the stern of the boat to the bow; the boat blipped its throttle and moved past me and I repeated this process. Estimating the boat as being about 10m long, I was able to quickly calculate I needed to ‘overtake’ it 3,300 times. I then timed myself doing a single overtake (One Kangaroo, Two Kangaroos… you know, no watch allowed) and worked out it was going to take me 30 hours to cross. I didn’t like that answer so spent some time working out all the reasons why it might be wrong. Later, much more tired and only capable of simpler stuff, I started playing a game Peter Green introduced me to. It’s called ‘Left Arm, Right Arm’ – you might have heard of it. Basically, you say ‘Left Arm’ with every left arm stroke and…. I’ll let you work the rest out for yourself. I do have a lazy right arm, and as stupid as it sounds this helped me focus my technique for each stroke and increased the quality and frequency of the stroke. I think I probably wound up ‘playing’ for about three hours. 

It’s such a long way to cover that the small wins are huge. I got a massive lift when the sun came up four hours into my swim and I realised I was in the middle of the English shipping channel. The moment when you can see the darkest orange glow imaginable on the horizon is incredible, and it only gets better as it slowly brightens and you discover you are surrounded by massive ships. Three hours later, the separation zone was another victory, then when I hit the French shipping channel I stopped for the only time outside of feeds to shout excitedly at my team and point to the cargo vessel I’d spotted. With hindsight I suspect they’d been watching it for a while. A wise channel swimmer told me just to swim to the next feed, which helped, but knowing you’re making progress really helps. If no one’s told you this already, the white cliffs of Dover are evil snotbags. You can see them from France so do not look back without bracing yourself first, as I can guarantee they’ll still be there, and I wouldn’t want it to come as a shock.

DCT had talked a lot about the body switching from burning glucose to fat at their seminar at the start of the year. I’d been hoping to experience it in training, and never had, but it was really clear when it happened on the day. About nine hours in I was feeling grumpy and tired and feeling like I was struggling to lift my arms out of the water, wondering how I was going to last another hour. Twenty minutes later, I felt as strong as I had three hours in, my mood cleared and I stayed that way until my swim ended at 15 hours.

While I was swimming we saw dolphins, seals, hundreds of massive ships, sailing yachts coming perilously close to running me over. Well, I say we – I saw none of this, as everything I saw on the swim can be summarised as the boat, two bits of seaweed, more boat, three bits of litter, and a lot more boat. I didn’t see a single fish, jelly or scaled, and the water was clear and blue the whole way across. But mostly I saw the boat.

I slid onto my last tide turn a couple of k from the French shore, and for the next four hours was swept up the coast only able to maintain my distance. Eventually, fast approaching the Calais forbidden zone the boat crew called the swim on safety grounds. I was disappointed, but also proud of what I’d achieved. Getting to the start of the swim would have been impossible without support from so many areas – my family, my friends and crew, my local swimming partners, DCT and all the amazing channel swimmers (and swimmers to be) I’ve met – I love them all. But nothing could have prepared me for the torrent of love and support that had been pouring in while I swam. Literally thousands of people had been willing me on every single minute I’d been in the water.

There’s no doubt, this has been the most amazing… journey, day, achievement… of my entire life. Ok, I have a son, but I didn’t have to do the work the day he turned up. This was a truly unrepeatable thing for us to choose to do. 

Now I just need to decide if I need to repeat the unrepeatable thing, to be able to eventually stuff pebbles down my trunks.