andy’s english channel swim: august 2007


June 26, 2007

2007 06 26

Filed under: swimming training — andy @ 4:40 pm
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I got to the Pavilion on a rainy windy Sunday morning to find 65 year-old Paul L’Anterme had beaten me to the pool, so snapped a pic with my cell phone camera. The following week Paul, an ex national lifesaving champion from Durban (very warm water), completed his first Robben Island – Blouwberg 7.5km swim, making him one of  only three over 60’s to have completed the swim.

Looking back at last years’ training (extreme left of graph above), the big load was in June, with consecutive weeks of 32km, 25km & 35km but very little after that. In fact during the 8 weeks training before my actual crossing attempt only 2 weeks included training distance over 20km. While there were contribututory factors to this, in retrospect I cannot help thinking that that exceeds the boundaries of a reasonable taper by an absurd amount.

Current training looks as follows:

– 05h30 5 days x 4.3 km consisting of either Brian Buttons squad session or:
  500m warmup
  3 x 1100m (300m@50sec/50m 100m@45sec/50m 300m@50sec/50m 100m@45sec/50m 300m@50sec/50m)
  2 x 100m@1m20s  50m easy  2 x 100m@1m18s
 
– 18h00 x 2 days x 2km with Kevin Fialkov’s squad
-Weekends
  1st Sunday of each month: Clifton 1.6km time trial (sea)
 Other weekends: LSD (long slow distance) at Pavilion (50m open air salt pool) 4km & getting longer
–  Rest: Saturday or Sunday. Complete rest – no walking the dog, no horseriding, no climbing Table Mountain. Just eat, read & sleep!

June 6, 2007

2007 06 10

Filed under: swimming training — andy @ 5:13 pm
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"One cannot discover new lands without losing sight of the shore for a very long time" (Andre Gide).

No significant swims last week, but the consistency is settling in. Only two months of training left, before losing sight of the shore for a very long time! 

June 1, 2007

Month ending 2007 05 31

Filed under: swimming training — andy @ 5:18 pm
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The month started well, with 60km in the 1st three weeks, but ended with a week overseas & a week with sinusitis on my return.

The photo on the right was taken near Lake Geneva (fountain in background) after six South African hedge fund management businesses attended very slick Capital Introduction events in London and Geneva, arranged by Jon Baker and the extremely efficient Credit-Suisse Prime Services team.