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Training For a Swim Event in the Summer (Part 4...nearly there)
The countdown is on!
*22 days until Windermere… where has the time gone?
*22 days until we swim all 16.5 km of the UK’s longest lake.
*22 days until we spend 6 hours or more in freezing water.
The past two months have flown by. Between Mark working, Alfie gaining his level 3 Personal Training qualification and Lizzie completing second year of university, there has been little time to train. Despite this, every spare moment we’ve had has been spent chasing black lines in the swimming pool or sighting buoys in the lake.
For our final month of preparation, we’re keeping the training load high to overload our bodies and get them to adapt to swimming for so long. A few muscle niggles have come to light recently but nothing some rolling, stretching and deep heat hasn't been able to fix.
We started our Just Giving page for The Emily Ash Trust and have already raised almost double our initial goal! This is spurring on our training and will keep us motivated for all 16.5 km of Windermere. Thank you to all those who have donated so far!!
We’ve been practicing feeding in the lake using our Swim Secure Tow Donuts and aim to ‘feed’ every 20 mins/1 km in order to keep our energy stores high. The Tow Donuts are great - they fit so much in them! Alfie and Mark store energy balls in theirs and I put raw jelly cubes in mine. (It’s weird I know, but a great source of energy and an old favourite of mine when I used to race!)
For the real swim, we hope to stick to a similar feeding schedule however, we plan to be fed off the boat instead. To maintain hydration and a high core temperature in the cold water, we will alternate between drinking Lucozade and hot sugary drinks throughout the swim. We’ve spent a lot of time practicing our food/drink/timing combinations to ensure they are effective at fuelling us and don’t cause stomach upset!
On Monday we swam our first ever 10km at our local lake! This was the final test of all our kit, food, drink and bodies before the big day. The swim went very smoothly and we were very happy!!
With *22 days remaining, Mark, Alfie and I are getting super excited (and a little nervous!) We have time to smooth out any bumps and we will begin to decrease the mileage so we are rested for the real swim! We are driving up to Windermere a week before the swim so hopefully we can acclimatise to the ice cold water temperature and do our final kit checks.
Are we crazy having trained to swim 16.5 km of England's longest lake during a pandemic? Maybe. Are we going to smash this swim? Definitely.
I look forward to writing our next blog post after the swim - wish us luck!!
Alfie and Lizzie
*Written on 19.6.2021