Every winter now for the last 5 years my mind starts to drift off while swimming, biking and running wondering if I could swim the English channel or at least give it a go. Thought about it when I was a teenager too. I watched a show on some guy swimming the English channel on Discovery channel ( I think) a few months ago. Said that more people have climbed Everest then swam the English channel. What kind of training do you think would be involved in doing such a feat? What kind of support team would be need’ed? Anyone here ever done it? During the show I remember the guy that was swimming it put on about 20 extra pounds to have the energy to swim the channel and went through that and more. Wow! My family thinks I am a little nuts even talking about it but the thought continues to haunt me. Think this may be the first steps toward actually training for it.
Penny Lee Dean’s book, Open Water Swimming gives a pretty good rundown of what is necessary to train for marathon swims.
I suppose basically you could say that it is similar in time commitment to ironman but it is all swimming. Weekdays are an hour to 2.5 hours and on weekends your long day builds out to 8 or more hours total. 5 to 6 hour weekend swims become the norm.
One big difference is the temperature and seasickness conditioning which require open water.
As for your crew, check out the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation, they are the most active Channel Swimming federation and their website has a rundown of how it works. Most people book their pilot and boat two years out, there are only a set number of pilots certified to do Channel swims.
There are long distance swims all over the US that you can use for prep.
Tampa Bay Marathon is 24 miles and I found to be the most accessible of all the races, I did it a few years back. There is the long island sound swim, manhattan island marathon swim, and the channel swim in LA that I have lost the name of for some reason.
But if you haven’t done anything similar you’d probably want to start with a 10k swim in your local area. They usually don’t require a crew.
Steve Fossett did it. I grew up minutes from Dover, so I have often looked across those shores and dreamt. Only now living in California and doing all this training is it actually feasible. The shortest distance is 21 or 22 miles (if you swim perfectly straight)… so you have to have a support crew along with you… which just kind of makes it much less of an individual feat as far as I’m concerned. Still a super impressive accomplishment, but different than say a self-guided Lake Tahoe crossing.
I have a friend who did it last year. She had the fastest time of the season they did some sick cold swims. 6 hour swims didn’t sound too appealing to me
There are companies that specialized in it.
Here is an example of a company with 76 % success rate.
http://www.channelswimming.com/
If you are truly interested, I am sure one of these style places could give you some info.