Goggles at Dawn

On Monday 13 December, two weeks and two days after a  six-hour swim at Freyberg Beach – which I’d anticipated being the start of another two months’ training – I found myself covered in grease and sliding off the side of an IRB into the water near Makara  to try the whole procedure of swimming to the South Island again (if you want to refresh your memory about events earlier this year, here is the recap of March’s adventure). Overcast sky, misty rain, and alarmingly large waves rendered my outlook somewhat pessimistic, but at least the damp weather meant that I could attribute my shivering to the rain on my skin rather than acute fear.   There’ll be a complete lack of sensation and drama in this report, but when searching for a pithy title, I remembered that before a pool swim on Saturday 11 December, John had been talking about the new cinematic extravaganza of West Side Story , which I think was opening that very day. The WSS connection reminded me of Leonard Berns...

To avoid March’s fuelling failure, for my December swim I embarked on a regime of intensive research (lasting approximately 100 minutes) to ensure that I would have enough food that was calorie-packed, and easy and enjoyable to eat. All my drinks would be warm. I practised this feeding plan – more or less – during the six-hour swim on 27 November (not knowing, of course, that I'd be swimming the Strait in less than a fortnight) but because it was a very hot day the idea of drinking anything warm was repellent and I stuck with cold drinks. I'd also neglected to get some fruit juice to mask the taste of the 'Naked' Tailwind, so added a tiny bit of Pure to the Tailwind bottle to improve the flavour experience. I also read through some of the extremely long feeding threads on the Marathon Swimming Federation discussion board. As in the past, these left me none the wiser: some dogmatic people said ‘LIQUIDS ONLY! Anything else is a waste of time!’ while others advocated var...