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.