Week 1 - 16th May..

The week started with a 1000m challenge swim at a club session. There was only a 4 second gap between Al and myself, a good indicator that we are swimming pretty much at the same pace and will work well together across the Strait. Now that I have committed to the swim I have been feeling a bit negative, chiefly fearing the distance, the temperature, sharks and, most of all, failure but that is just my initial reaction - having spent the last 20 years showing others how to embrace their challenges and overcome their fears it is time to put all that knowledge into practice on myself! I had a great goal setting session with some Westpac staff on Thursday and told them about my swim - it makes it even more real to have others know too!

Over the course of the week I have swum a total of 16km. Looking back over my old diaries I only averaged 15km a week in my preparation for the Masters World Championships in Italy, so this is good going (although the race then was only 100m!). My body has coped well so far but I know that I am going to have to ensure I am in peak physical shape so I have booked in for regular chiropractic sessions to keep my old back problems at bay.

My distant, and more famous, relative Sir Ernest Shackleton's boat was named Endurance - that's exactly what I'm going to be needing too! It seems like a good sign...

The Challenge

Many of you reading this will already know that I've spent most of my life swimming competitively. Until I came to New Zealand this all took place in a swimming pool - after all, who on earth would want to spend time swimming in the sea off the English coast?? In the last couple of years though I've branched out and moved out of the comfort zone of chlorine and a black line to follow, and into the wide open sea. It took some getting used to - frankly the first few swims were scary! No warm water, no lane ropes, waves and tides, and who knew what might be swimming underneath me somewhere - there's no sharks in pools. No lane discipline here, just hundreds of people all wanting to swim in exactly the same spot that I do! It wasn't swimming as I knew it, more a mixture of surfing and boxing....

Two years on I have grown to love open water swimming, and my distances have increased from 1km weekly races to a 10km swim from St Heliers, Auckland to Rangitoto Island and back. So what is to be next? A swimming buddy, Alastair Hulbert, came up with an idea - how about swimming the Cook Strait, the body of water between the North and South Islands of New Zealand. This would be nearly three times longer than my longest swim to date, at 26km and the water would be cooler than it is around Auckland - also, I would not be allowed to wear a wetsuit! The average time to complete the swim is around 9 hours and you have to ensure that your pilot gets the tides just right. An added incentive is that I will be the oldest person to ever complete the crossing.....

Alastair and I have made the decision that we will attempt the crossing, hopefully in the early months of 2012 - obviously this is tide/weather/pilot etc. dependant, but at this time the sea will be at it's warmest. We have discussed this with Pedro and Jane, our swimming coaches, who are going to come up with a training schedule for us, and this blog will be a diary of our preparation leading up to the swim.