First Channel Swim
musclewhale89
Alberta, CanadaMember
I am new to this forum and have fallen in love with Marathon swimming over the past two years. I live in landlocked Alberta but I am really interested in doing channel swims.
I am curious if anyone can give me any tips on training or signing up to do them?
I would like to know which channels are the best to start with, what a week of training looks like in terms of yardage and time in the pool, and how you go about signing up for them. I know that some of them have year long waiting lists and what not.
Any tips or guidance on how to get to that point would be so greatly appreciated. The logistical aspect of channel swimming seems so daunting to me.
Cheers!
Comments
Welcome @musclewhale89. I had to respond, at the very least because of your interesting username, and because of your geographical challenge of being a landlocked marathon swimmer. I'm from Northern Arizona. You found the right place to look for info! The Marathon Swimmers Federation website and the other threads on this forum. Dive in brother!!
Thanks for the response! The username is actually a nickname I received after winning the swimming portion of a relay race called the Hillbilly Hustle lol. My co-workers (whom I did the race with) didn't believe I was a strong swimmer because I am 5'9 and have a decent amount of muscle mass. After I won the swim, one of them was teasing that I was a whale or dolphin and muscular and the nickname "Muscle Whale" was born haha.
Being land locked means I do a ton of swimming in the pool and only get to swim in the lakes for a short 5 months of the year.
Looking forward to learning lots about marathon swimming and channel swims over the near future.
Hello Musclewhale89! Welcome to MSF. You'll have to excuse my ignorance of the geography of Canada, I had to do a little Google map search to see if there are any lakes. I see there are a few. What sort of temperature are they? Are they swimable? Do you live near them?
Regarding what channels to start with, I started by doing 10K swims and then kept upping the distance from there.
Regarding you query about training, I don't have an answer to that, it's something that I'm constantly fine tuning. I'm sure a lot of people here are the same. The general rule of thumb that I follow is to swim the distance in a week that you plan to swim in a day. So, to illustrate, if your chosen swim is say 20k for example, then you should be doing 20k per week. What I do is start by swimming say five 4k sessions per week. And as the date of your swim approaches I gradually reduce the number of sessions per week all the while maintaining the distance per week. So five 4k sessions then becomes four 5k sessions, then three 6.5k sessions, then maybe two 10k sessions and then maybe one 15/17k sessions. I almost never swim the full distance that I'm aiming for in training.
As per tips or guidance as to how to get there - you gotta just keep swimming! It took me time. I'm still trying to push my distances. It's a great learning experience, I'm constantly picking up new information from better swimmers than myself.
@LouisM Thank you so much for the response! There is some great info there. There are a few decent lakes around where I live. The temperature's dont get too high and the only months where I can realistically swim outdoors are between June-September. I did do a swim in early May but the water temp was below 10 deg C so it was rather unpleasant haha.
Sorry, re-reading my previous, I should edit it slightly and say that I didn't just start swimming 10K's - that sounds a bit arrogant. 10K is where I felt I started in terms of marathon swimming