What's it all about?

Well, I've been swimming for about three years now after Cheeky Pete gave me some top tips and I read Total Immersion. Prior to that I could swim one length of a 25 meter pool at a time, now I can swim for at least a kilometer!

In 2009 I did a triathlon with Tim, this helped keep me in the water, especially with a wet-suit. Most of my training involved wet-suited swimming in Brixton Lido, supplemented with a few lengths of Peckham Pulse indoor pool.

I've always enjoyed open water swimming, this has included: A New Years Day sea dash in South Wales (wet-suit free) with Josh; Many swims in Grimsby docks (the last being Alexander Dock in 2009); Probably hundreds of beach swims all over Britain, Europe and the world; rivers, canals, lakes, waterfall pools and even messy bogs that should have been streams!

Over the past couple of weeks I've returned to Brixton Lido for 7am swims with Tim and Chris (Sicantsan) and loved the feeling of swimming in cold water (A little over 13° C), also for my birthday last week Tim bought me a copy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin - the combination of these two recent factors lead me to think of doing more open water swimming.

Given that I was 46 years old last week, I thought I'd aim to do 46 open water (outdoor) swims before I'm 47 - hence 46-swims-12-months!

I'll log venues, dates, times and swimming partners and the only rule I have is that I cannot count the same place twice. I can include the same towns and cities, for instance in a seaside town I can swim in the harbour/port/dock and the beach and any local lakes and rivers. I canalso include the same body of water, for instance I may choose multiple points on the Thames.

I hope you enjoy this blog, if you would like to swim with me please see my forecast that I shall try to update as-and-when I have dates.

Thanks, Tony