While my running has been in abeyance, and even as it has started to slowly become easier if little faster again (see Shuffling back to running), I have spent the spring and summer both training and taking out my frustrations by swimming at Sale Water Park in addition to the usual pool speed sessions. It has to be said that, here, the word ‘speed’ is being used in the loosest possible manner. At some point, several months since, I had become aware of the Adur Swim, and being both relatively cheap and enough time away for me to worry about the logistics of getting there at some future point, I had entered it.
To my surprise I was able to get a week off even though it was in the middle of the school holidays, and we decided to head due south to Swanage for a few days and then on to Cornwall after the swim to meet up with an old friend of my partner’s. This was a good plan as far as it went since though our dog doesn’t seem particularly stressed by travel – in that he is fine within moments of getting out of the car, he spends the whole time in it panting – and this meant he could stay at Swanage with Di rather than having to keep travelling while I drove over to Shoreham to do the swim. What it failed to take account of was that the distance between the two towns was over a hundred miles and I would be driving it on a busy saturday afternoon, with multiple clogged up bypasses adding an hour to my estimated time. I arrived in a bit of a lather a scant fifteen minutes before registration was due to close, very hurriedly downed an energy drink that had me wishing I hadn’t as it kept repeating, and was on the coach to the start.
The start was pretty unimpressive, being just a muddy section of bank near enough 5km up the river and where the coaches could briefly pull over. A bit of lying about on a grassy bank while the tide finished filling the river this far up (so we could start swimming as it began to ebb) and the organisers started getting people into the water. As this was obviously going to be a long process I hung back as I know I get cold easily these days and finally slipped in when I couldn’t really delay any longer. I thought this would also mean I was towards the rear of the pack, but those before had drifted downstream and by the time they had been recalled to the starting line I was in amongst it all.
There is not that much to say about the swim. It was salty and murky, and unlike the only two long distance swims I have done previously outside of triathlons had more of a race feel to it than that of the swimming equivalent of a cyclosportive. In part, I think this was because it had been advertised as the chance to do a fast 5km as the current assisted us back down towards the sea. Whatever the reason, I soon found myself having to deeply focussed on staying ahead of the backmarkers with little time to look around. Not that it seemed a Bantham swoosh for scenery anyway.
The only bit of local knowledge I had was that there were two bridges towards the finish. The first of these we were to pass through on the left to avoid sandbanks, the second we needed to be over to the right as the landing place was shortly afterwards. The old adage of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing was shown again as the organisers hadn’t mentioned that there were two other bridges fairly close together a little way before the finish ones. Excited, I of course gave it as good a finish as I could on the first two, then had to swim on with weary arms through the washing machine effect created by the tide taking the water, and us, through the arches of the last two. A sloping ramp with a couple of helpers to help unsteady legs move up it and I was done; not last but not that far from it.
The drive home was far easier than that to arrive at the event and as the ferry drifted across the water from Poole to Studland I finally had time to reflect. It felt good to have done the event since I had set it as a target so long ago and trained pretty hard in the interim, but not the relatively leisurely effort I had been expecting. Not one I would go out of my way at my age and fitness level to do again, but pleased to have been able to just about step up to what needed to be done.