I am doing the English channel next Sept 2011. I am trying to get a good handle on the cold water thing. So this is what I have been doing but if anyone knows of other tricks I would love to know what they did to prepare for the English channel cold water.
At the moment I take a cold shower every day and 2 times a week sit in a bath full of ice. I live close to lake Michigan and right now the temp has been around 56-64 I have been doing no wet suit. I am up to a 2 hour swim in the cold but have to do a 6 hour cold water swim this Oct. At about two hours my feet lose feeling and my hands too. I can feel my core start to really get cold.
I have used may things to keep warm on being Vaseline did work just got my goggles all messed up, Crisco has done ok. But I am think of getting some Lanolin but dont know if it will be better. Has anyone used it and feel like it has worked far better?
The other thing is my Coach and I are going to set up a floating raft ancoared down and us it for a feeding station. I was thinking of putting a jug of hot water in there to pour over my self. Has anyone tryed this? I want to do hot liquides but my coach said the last guy he trained for the channel had hot tea and he cramped up. Wonder in if that was just him or because the water is so cold with the hot it Shocks your body. My coach told me to not worrie this will all come in time but I have 2 months till my 6 hour swim in 60 or less water temp and it is freeking me out. So any one that knows of some tricks please post them!!!! thanks Aurora :coffee::coffee:
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Former Member
Been a while since I logged in, away doing the Channel myself.
There's a few things I guess I'd add.
First is I'll go against the majority view. There's no real need to put on weight if your speed is ok. I'm 5'8", 76 kg (168lbs). Average shape so? I'm about 3200 metres per hour, maybe, continuously, so not the fastest in the world. But my stroke rate int he channel was 60 to 70 per the whole thing, due to a very high (insane actually, given I'm late 40s and only swimming 5 years) training load.
E.g. We did about 250,000 sea metres per month in May & June.
I put on about 5 kg total, not deliberately, just from eating to support the training. My weight never moved, no matter what I ate, while in the pool. Those extra kg came on when I moved to 100% sea training. I lost 4 kg during my swim and few days after also.
I'm in Ireland so the water temperature is cool anyway. Best we'll get here is about 61/62F right now at the end of August, with the warmest water we've had here for at least 3 years. The Channel was 16.5 to 17 (62F) the day I swam. It was like a warm bath for me.
I swam through the last 2 winters every weekend. Temp got down to 5C (41F) once or twice. I did about 15 minutes in that, when i was only 70kg. (Regular, cold swimming had enormous effects on getting used to it.)
My first 6 hour qualification this year was a lake swim in May, really warm for us then at 14.5C (58F) as at that point I could only manage an hour and a half in the sea, about 10C at the time, if I recall. By doing it a lake in May, the lake was much warmer than the sea, so it felt great, & we could get the qualification out of the way early.
A month later we did 8 hours in the sea at the same temp, (58) and it was fine.
The weather turned in late June and the temp dropped. I did 6 hours in 11C (52) that was unspeakable hell. Finishing made us feel like superheroes.
I am lucky to belong to the Sandycove group of swimmers in Ireland. We now have over a dozen successful Channel swimmers (and plenty of other places) so our local shared knowledge is good and always getting better (4 this year so far).
Grease has no effect on cold. Our winds here are biting and I've noticed no noticeable remediation effect. Vaseline/Lanolin/Channel grease. Same for all our swimmers.
The transition to daily cold water training at the beginning of May, at 8C (46F) was the worst week. Getting deeply cold and taking 3 to 4 hours every day to rewarm was awful, and I mentally cracked that week. My food requirement also went through the roof, obviously being used to rewarm.
One of the guys would only put on a t-shirt after some swims. His cold tolerance now outweights us all.
I didn't lose my final worries about the temp though until I had a swim in Dover a few days beforehand. I'd been there for a double relay in 2008, but even so I needed to remind myself.
Also, being a geek, I'd looked into the recent research on brown fat and found it very comforting. It develops as a consequence of regular cold exposure. It has less volume than ordinary white fat, is still an insulator, but is also metabolically active. Check out the New England Journal of medicine for the papers.
So bottom line for me...Regular cold water swimming, plus a high stroke rate = Channel a warm place.
BTW, due to our experience here, I take the Lewis Pugh Arctic swimming Discovery Channel documentary with plenty of salt.
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Former Member
Been a while since I logged in, away doing the Channel myself.
There's a few things I guess I'd add.
First is I'll go against the majority view. There's no real need to put on weight if your speed is ok. I'm 5'8", 76 kg (168lbs). Average shape so? I'm about 3200 metres per hour, maybe, continuously, so not the fastest in the world. But my stroke rate int he channel was 60 to 70 per the whole thing, due to a very high (insane actually, given I'm late 40s and only swimming 5 years) training load.
E.g. We did about 250,000 sea metres per month in May & June.
I put on about 5 kg total, not deliberately, just from eating to support the training. My weight never moved, no matter what I ate, while in the pool. Those extra kg came on when I moved to 100% sea training. I lost 4 kg during my swim and few days after also.
I'm in Ireland so the water temperature is cool anyway. Best we'll get here is about 61/62F right now at the end of August, with the warmest water we've had here for at least 3 years. The Channel was 16.5 to 17 (62F) the day I swam. It was like a warm bath for me.
I swam through the last 2 winters every weekend. Temp got down to 5C (41F) once or twice. I did about 15 minutes in that, when i was only 70kg. (Regular, cold swimming had enormous effects on getting used to it.)
My first 6 hour qualification this year was a lake swim in May, really warm for us then at 14.5C (58F) as at that point I could only manage an hour and a half in the sea, about 10C at the time, if I recall. By doing it a lake in May, the lake was much warmer than the sea, so it felt great, & we could get the qualification out of the way early.
A month later we did 8 hours in the sea at the same temp, (58) and it was fine.
The weather turned in late June and the temp dropped. I did 6 hours in 11C (52) that was unspeakable hell. Finishing made us feel like superheroes.
I am lucky to belong to the Sandycove group of swimmers in Ireland. We now have over a dozen successful Channel swimmers (and plenty of other places) so our local shared knowledge is good and always getting better (4 this year so far).
Grease has no effect on cold. Our winds here are biting and I've noticed no noticeable remediation effect. Vaseline/Lanolin/Channel grease. Same for all our swimmers.
The transition to daily cold water training at the beginning of May, at 8C (46F) was the worst week. Getting deeply cold and taking 3 to 4 hours every day to rewarm was awful, and I mentally cracked that week. My food requirement also went through the roof, obviously being used to rewarm.
One of the guys would only put on a t-shirt after some swims. His cold tolerance now outweights us all.
I didn't lose my final worries about the temp though until I had a swim in Dover a few days beforehand. I'd been there for a double relay in 2008, but even so I needed to remind myself.
Also, being a geek, I'd looked into the recent research on brown fat and found it very comforting. It develops as a consequence of regular cold exposure. It has less volume than ordinary white fat, is still an insulator, but is also metabolically active. Check out the New England Journal of medicine for the papers.
So bottom line for me...Regular cold water swimming, plus a high stroke rate = Channel a warm place.
BTW, due to our experience here, I take the Lewis Pugh Arctic swimming Discovery Channel documentary with plenty of salt.