WE SHALL ENDURE
What does it take to swim 183km? Rowan Clarke gets into the endurance swimming mindset
Have you ever been casually dipping and watched a marathon swimmer pass by on their umpteenth lap? Do you find yourself wondering why they do it?
There’s a big gap between outdoor swimming and endurance swimming. It’s a different mindset, an ambition, a compulsion. It’s time-consuming and expensive. It pushes limits, comfort zones and boundaries. And it can be life-changing. So, what makes some swimmers cross that gap?
STRONG BACK
Back in 1975, a man called Ted Keenan became the second person to complete the original Triple Crown of open water swimming – the English, Bristol and North Channels. When asked what it takes to cross a channel, he said a “weak mind and strong back”.
Of his three crossings, the North Channel is the one that really tests Ted’s formula. A 21-mile stretch of rough sea between Ireland and Scotland, it’s notorious for its currents, cold temperatures and swarms of jellyfish.
Twenty-five years after Ted, Steve Price became the third person to swim the original Triple Crown. Describing the bumper size jar of Vaseline he bought from Costco, and “swimming up the arse of a jellyfish and coming out wearing it”, Steve paints a colourful picture of the sheer physicality of attempting to swim the North Channel.
It was this physicality that not only led Steve to take it on, but also brought him back to succeed on his fourth attempt. “I was always the fat kid at school,” he says. “I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of the physical challenge.”
So, what makes someone physically capable of enduring the brutality of the North Channel? In 2017, the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance published a review to find out. It showed that open water endurance swimmers could swim at a high percentage of VO2 max (aerobic capacity: the optimum rate at which the heart, lungs and muscles can effectively use oxygen during exercise) for hours on end. They were more efficient at propelling themselves using little energy, and their quantity and distribution of body fat helped buoyancy, streamlining and cold tolerance. Maybe being the ‘fat kid’ is an advantage after all.
What’s certain is that open water endurance swimming doesn’t have ‘a look’. More than that, it embraces physical differences giving a space for seemingly ordinary people to achieve incredible feats. Accompanying hundreds of swimmers across the English Channel, this is something safety boat pilots like Stewart Gleeson find remarkable.
“I always say, go into a pub and try to pick out a Channel swimmer. You could probably pick an athletic runner, but endurance swimmers come in all shapes and sizes,” he says. “We’ve taken Blesma relays, a deaf swimmer, the first paralympic team. Those crossings really stick in your mind.”
WEAK MIND
Living with a disability or chronic illness can be a big motivator for endurance swimming. This is partly because being in water can minimise disabilities and dull pain. But it’s also about mindset. Coping with life’s challenges seems to lend itself a strength of mind, resilience and determination that’s even more important in the water than a set of physical traits.
Take Beth French for example. Having been floored by ME, she set out to test her physical ability to not just swim across a channel, but to swim a channel, recover and then go and swim across a different channel.
“I think the difference between someone who goes to just enjoy the water to becoming someone who feels compelled to do endurance is a compulsion to test something,” says Beth, who attempted to complete the Oceans Seven challenge in a year. “For me, it was to test whether or not I was over ME. It was a test because I didn’t trust my body.”
This feels like mental strength and not Ted Keenan’s ‘weak mind’. But perhaps Keenan was alluding to an ability to let go, a kind of mental elasticity as opposed to a weakness.
“When I was doing the swims, it became meditative without having to try because you have to step outside of yourself,” says Beth. “Your mind is really calm. You just notice the ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings. The trick for me was to become the observer rather than the feeler because you do get tired, you do get cold, you do get scared, you do doubt yourself – it’s just finding something within you that will take one more stroke.”
When you watch Beth’s film Against the Tides, the hours upon hours of swimming are condensed and interspersed with other shots and commentary. It’s very hard to get your head around how that time passes, how it feels to be face down in water, deprived of external stimulation for hours on end.
“Sometimes the 30 minutes between feeds seems like an eternity. Sometimes hours pass in what seems like the blink of an eye. My favourite part is when I enter a ‘flow state’ and the swim becomes a moving meditation, just moving and breathing through space and time,” says the formidable endurance swimmer, Jaimie Monahan. “My mind goes anywhere and everywhere. I watch my hands go in and out of the water, focus on my breathing, count my strokes, sing songs to myself. I especially love long swims when I can see the cycle of a whole day from the water.”
THE REAL CHALLENGE
Speaking to Beth, Jaimie and Steve, it becomes clear that the swim itself is rarely the most challenging part. Shaping and following a training plan, organising the practicalities of feeding and timing, assembling the right support team, stumping up thousands of pounds and then dealing with uncontrollable elements like the weather and marine life requires real resilience.
It’s hard to comprehend just how much mental flexibility is needed in endurance swimming. After days hanging around waiting for her North Channel window,
Beth had to give up and move on to her next swim. Steve started but failed to finish his crossing three times due to an array of issues including serious jellyfish stings. But, after looking at the list of great endurance swimmers who’d also failed this swim, he drew the strength to try again.
“My mind goes anywhere and everywhere. – I watch my hands go in and out of the water, focus on my breathing, count my strokes, sing songs to myself”
“I got so close, I knew I could do it – even when I was being hoiked into an ambulance after that third attempt,” he says. “I analysed the swim to make incremental changes and then I tried again. In this sport, you’re not a quitter and you’ll never be a quitter.”
That flexible mindset is make or break for many endurance swimmers, and the longer or more complicated the swim, the more flexibility is needed. In 2018, Jaimie Monahan completed six marathon swims on six continents in 16 days.
“Strangely enough, the swims were often the easiest part of this challenge. I tried to anticipate potential issues and have a plan A, B and C for every possible contingency, but when that wasn’t possible, mental flexibility was the most important thing,” says Jaimie. “Swims had to be rescheduled or relocated on short notice. A boat broke down. I received painful jellyfish stings. We were even questioned by guards armed with machine guns coming out of the water on one swim.”
This is where having the right support team is essential. It’s their job to guide, feed and look after the swimmer’s safety. But they must also facilitate that all-important mindset – everything from the support team’s body language and energy to the words they say influences the endurance swimmer’s mental state.
“On my first channel, the English Channel, I had a boyfriend who came on board as my number one crew and my best friend flew over from Quebec and she ended up having to hide from me for the entire swim because she was an emotional wreck, which would have put me off,” says Beth. “Then the captain had to get my boyfriend to move away because when I started to look broken towards the end, he was really struggling to stay calm and feed me without concern on his face.”
IN THE ZONE
Just as the behaviour, body language and facial expressions of the support team influence the endurance swimmer’s mindset, so does their environment. The many variables of open water make for marked differences between swim locations, swimming on the same route on different days and within a single long endurance swim.
Many of these variables, while unpredictable, aren’t unexpected – such as weather, tides, currents, swimmer illness and marine life. But then there are factors that are harder to navigate, such as boat problems, plastic litter and humanitarian issues.
“Trying to get the tides and weather together, that’s the big challenge, but there’s also the migrant issues going on in the Channel at the moment. It’s always in the back of your mind,” says Stewart, who also volunteers on life boats for the RNLI. “We’ve come very close to some of these vessels crossing and all we can do is just keep watch and keep checking in with the Coast Guard.”
With so many variables and increasingly difficult environmental conditions, it seems even more incredible that swimmers achieve such feats of endurance. Not only that, they also do it with such humility, and learn so much about themselves, their beloved environments and humanity.
Listening to Jaimie Monahan talk about her epic 183km quadruple loop of Manhattan in her home city of New York, you start to understand how that deeply personal, internal experience of swimming for 45 hours on end interrelates with the external environment.
“My quadruple Manhattan with Urban Swim will always hold a special place in my heart,” she says. “Not because it was my longest swim, but because during the darkest and most uncertain parts of pandemic times in New York City, this swim was both an escape and a way to connect deeply with my home island.”
It connects with us too. Not just us as outdoor swimmers, but as humans. We love an epic battle, stories of ordinary people who achieve something superhuman. And maybe that’s what turns outdoor swimmers into endurance athletes. Maybe that possibility is within us all and the switch comes when we ask ourselves the question – could I…?
Could you?