The Channel isn't that cold late August and September. We can reasonably expect 65 in these months.

He’s also on Marathon Swimmers forum and Reddit,with the same song and dance. “Give me advice that I will not take.”

Have you done the math on your goal pace? 15 hours is roughly 1.5MPH, 17 hours is 1.3MPH. Have you done a 6-8 hour swim at that pace yet? If not, given your timeline, it’s time to work on volume and endurance. You will slowly get faster with more time in the water anyway, but at this point you need to be mentally and physically prepared for a cold 20-24 hour swim. That’s how you should be setting goal benchmarks right now. Use time benchmarks, because conditions are too variable to compared one 20k swim to another.

Best of luck. I’m sure you’ll find a way to ignore further advice. I’m not trying to be mean or discouraging, but it’s getting old, mate.

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

If the Channel is as half wide as it is now, I would have already booked for 2020. I was fit enough last winter to complete 16 km when there were no COVID interruptions affecting my pool training. Moreover, I'm still on the linear portion of the curve in my training as I have never trained to the point that I don't feel good to further increase my training.

I adjusted my nutrition today and I felt much better now. I may need to look into the nutrition and my pacing strategy in my next marathon swim.

You are too hung up on the distance. The hard part of the EC is not the 20+ miles. Which, at your speed, you will get pushed off course and you will swim farther. The waves will pick up through the day and it will slow you down further.

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

This is what I'm most concerned, and the worst case is ending up like Stuart Handley.

I failed the Channel today which proved you are right. The condition was worse than forecast and only about half of the solos today got across.

Forecast was F3 but reality was swells and whitecaps like F5 for the initial 8-10 hours. As a result I didn't make the tide change in time after 14 hours of swimming and got defeated by the tide as I was so far from the Cap (a few km distance) when it changed even it's at the bottom of a neap.

A faster swimmer made it before me and two stronger swimmers made it much closer when the time changed. The other solos returned just a few hours seeing the horrendous conditions.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You had all the information you needed here to assess your chances(which were quite slim) but you charged ahead anyway. So now take the good parts of this whole adventure and go forward with those. Bite off smaller chunks before you try and eat the whole steak, and make the process your primary goal...Good luck and thanks for the update...

Sorry to hear you didn't make it. Since reading this thread earlier in the year I have been curious to know how you got on. 14 hours of swimming in the Channel is a pretty big accomplishment in itself. Are you going to try again?

Well I think if we are all being honest with ourselves, you and we, all knew that you were going to fail.

That's based on what you typed here and on other forums. You still got 14h of swimming in which won't make you less fit. IDK if you can find some shorter OWS races to do to put that fitness gained to use. Or maybe design some of your own challenges to do to take advantage of that fitness. For instance I have a friend who's doing 12h of running the same 5k loop on a trail that's near his house. Maybe something like 2h in the pool for distance or 5k/10k for time.

It might be good, as was pointed out, to do an honest post event analysis, both of the swim attempt itself and the previous 12-18mo of training. If done right this could help you see spots where you blinded yourself, areas where you're strong, weak, made excuses, broke through excuses etc.

Do it as if you were analyzing someone else's training and attempt not your own. Challenge every assumption you make and when you think that went well, reexamine it from another angle to make sure it really did. Same with the failures.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I'll not try again, with a possible exception if I pick up triathlon and eventually want to do A2A (in such case I'll sign up the non wetsuit category making it a legitimate CSPF channel swim)

I really can't. I already know that I was massively underprepared because due to COVID closure I couldn't do any of the technique, speed and endurance work as planned. The only thing I had done was acclimation.