This blog is ostensibly about a very long swim. But the bit I really want to reflect on is the power of the right (or wrong) mindset to impact on your physical strength and general wellbeing. I had a really interesting physical reaction in the water which I want to explore a bit.
Firstly, let’s talk about the adventure itself. I had spent a day in Glenridding with Pam a couple of weeks ago as part of our staycation and seen people swimming in Ullswater. As we began the drive home, along the length of the lake to Pooley Bridge, an idea formed, and I coerced a couple of vaguely willing accomplices to join me.
My friend and semi-official nutritionist Sarah has been learning how to paddleboard with her son Toby, and had recently invested in brand new boards. What better way to practise paddling, and start getting their money’s worth, than to support me swimming the 12km length of Ullswater?
I’ve done a lot of these homemade endurance events in the last couple of years, and they’re always more fun when you have friends to share them with. So as well as Sarah and Toby, I started working on Jess. She’d recently completed the Outlaw and was suffering a bit from post-event hangover. A new challenge would be the thing, I said. Something to focus on, I told her. Meh, it’s about 10K ish, I lied. She was in.
Jess and I drove up in the morning to meet Sarah and Toby, who had been camping. There were some logistics to work out as we needed one car at the finish and another at the start point. Remember that riddle with the fox, the chicken and the grain? There was a bit of that going on as we figured out where to put dry clothes, keys, phones, etc. (The trick is to take the chicken back on the paddleboard and leave the fox at Glenridding.)
This coming and going also meant that we couldn’t inflate the paddleboards until the last minute, so there was some concerted pumping all round as we pushed enough pressure into the boards. Then we packed all the kit into Sarah’s dry bags, jumped over a little fence by the lake and made our way down to the water.
We picked our way into the water across the shallow rocky bottom. Jess’ watch later reported the water was 18-20 degrees throughout the day: perfect for swimming at a steady pace. As we launched ourselves southwards, the rocks receded underneath us, and gave way to reeds before the depth of the lake disappeared below us. The water was as clear as a mountain stream.
Let me outline here the psychological pattern of the race. It was a game of three thirds. The first and last third were great, with the middle section being absolutely awful. In hindsight, it’s fascinating how big a difference my state of mind made to my physical performance.
We made good pace at the beginning, sighting towards a white house on the right bank in the far distance. Without her glasses on, Jess can’t see anything beyond the edge of her nose so she was really just heading in vaguely the right direction and trying not to bump into the sides. I am slightly faster than her so we would swim for ten or fifteen minutes then have a moment to come back together before pressing on. I was a bit worried that I was getting longer rests than she was, but I was careful not to rush her back into swimming, and she appeared to be okay.
Sarah and Toby were paddling around us, and it was reassuring to see them standing sentinel nearby to alert any passing boats to our presence. We had tow floats, and the lake is not terribly busy, but it was a comfort to have them there.
The route was simple, and I had committed the map to memory. We would swim down the right bank until the point where the lake had a dogleg turn. Then we would shift over to the left bank and swim around the inside line until finally crossing the lake again to reach Glenridding. The problem came later on when I couldn’t figure out how far we were down the lake, and I was getting increasingly frustrated at what I wrongly thought was a lack of progress.
Back to that first stretch, and the swimming felt smooth. We stopped after just under an hour to eat and drink. I had a couple of mouthfuls of electrolyte, and two small energy protein balls. It would probably have made more sense to have stopped a little more often and eaten less each time, because I was burping for the next five minutes as I went back to my horizontal swimming position.
As we crossed the lake, with Sarah and Toby as our safety guides, we had a new sighting point of a large grassy outcrop on the left where we would turn. This was where my head started to go. Firstly, this sodding green bank just never seemed to get any closer. It took us the better part of two hours to eventually reach it. It just seemed so frustratingly distant. The bigger problem was that I was miscalculating our position. The grassy bank we were perpetually chasing was actually only about 90 minutes from the finish line, but I had convinced myself it was a much earlier corner before the half way mark. All this seems completely illogical now, but at the time, as I was cursing this apparently endless swim to a random waypoint, I had decided that I had completely miscalculated the distance and that we weren’t even half way along the lake.
What is really interesting is how this mental frustration translated into physical outcomes. My shoulders started to hurt, and my stroke felt choppy and inefficient. For the first time, I felt cold. My reaction to that was that I hadn’t eaten enough, so at the next stop I wolfed a big chunk of flapjack, and then spent the next fifteen minutes feeling terribly sick before actually throwing up a little bit. Don’t tell Jess – she was behind me.
Every time a boat passed us on the lake, their wake would swell us up and down for a few seconds. The charm of this had now completely worn off, and I was cursing these stupid playboys on their stupid boats with their stupid motors.
At one point, a couple of fighter jets overflew the lake, presumably practising low level flying for if they ever have to go and terrify swimmers in Iraq or something. The deafening roar of their engines penetrated the water and, for about two seconds, I was just waiting for my head to be chopped off by the motorboat I assumed the noise to be. Stupid pilots with their stupid planes.
All of this crappy attitude could simply be assigned to the fact that we were three and a half hours into an arduous swim, and these things naturally get harder as you go along. I would totally accept that if not for what happened next.
We finally reached the grass bank and stopped for a feed. I knew that there was a jetty on the opposite bank that would mark a point along the lake that was about two thirds of the distance. It was nowhere to be seen, and I was still convinced we were a long way behind schedule. I was also getting cold again, so I grumpily decided to swim to the side and sit on a rock for a minute to get a warm in the sun. I was really fed up.
I reached the rock and stood up so I could stretch my back a little, and let the sun hit me. I grumpily scanned the opposite bank, scanning way down in front to spot this ferry jetty. Nothing. Bollocks.
Then I looked the other way and saw the jetty. It was several hundred metres behind us. It was a lot smaller than I was expecting it to be, but there were tiny figures queuing for the next launch, and I recognised the little pebbly beach next to it. From my low level perspective in the water, and with my focus completely on the green sodding bank we were working towards, I had missed it. This meant that we were nearly there. It meant that my grumpy miscalculations of the distance covered were wrong. It meant that everything was going to be alright.
My attitude just changed in that moment. I tried to shout to Jess and Sarah that we were further on than I thought, but they wouldn’t really have known what the hell I was on about, because the angry discourse of the last hour and a half had played out almost entirely in my head. I launched myself back into the water, away from the bank, and back on course.
Here’s the really interesting bit… I was no longer cold. I didn’t feel sick. My shoulders felt good as new, and my stroke was again smooth. Not long afterwards, another pair of fighter jets flew over. This time, I recognised the noise and flipped over onto my back to watch them go by like a kid at an airshow. A ferry passed us and I actually waved at the passengers. I bloody waved!
It wasn’t long before we went around the final corner and could see the Glenridding Hotel on the opposite bank. Toby paddled over to make sure we were in the right place, then we swam across the lake, almost into the path of the Pooley Bridge ferry (Jess didn’t see it), before clambering out onto a shallow pebbled shore full of families enjoying the sun.
So what was the difference between the second and third section of that swim? It was entirely my mentality. I went in an instant from “We are never going to complete this,” to “Oh we’re nearly there.” I didn’t suddenly get stronger or fitter as I spotted that jetty. The only thing that changed was psychological.
There is no doubt that the nausea, the lowering core temperature, and the shoulder tiredness were real. I wasn’t imagining them. But the way my brain processed those physical sensations – the way I reacted to them – was completely different as we turned the corner. This is incredibly instructive, and shows me very clearly where I can make improvements for future events. I can’t completely avoid sinking into those negative thoughts. But I can be aware that it’s happening, and develop tactics for pulling myself out of the hole more quickly.
I am more and more convinced every day that psychology is perhaps even more important than physical fitness. You need both of course. But I don’t think you are ever going to get your body into optimal shape unless you get your mind in the right place too. And once you achieve a level of fitness that can sustain you through an endurance event like this, then your body is no longer the weakest link. The mind – or at least my mind – is more fragile, and I need to spend more time training that with the same systematic approach that I have trained my body.