8 Miles...done and dusted!!!

Body is battered...but very proud.
All of the 8 Mile swimmers together, raised a total of nearly R1.5 million for various charities!





Kudos to everyone!

Statistical swimming...

Yes, I have been thinking about this weekend way too much...can you blame me?
Check this out:


Hmmmmmmm?!?!?!?!

 8 MILES is equivalent to:

• 12.874752 kilometres
• 506 880 inches
• 1 287 475.2 centimetres

It takes me about 17 strokes to swim 25m at a comfortable pace so:

8 MILES is equivalent to:

• 512 lengths in a 25m pool
• 8704 strokes
• 4352 breaths

I will burn about 10 000 calories over the 8 MILES, so

8 MILES is equivalent to:

• 42 000 kilojoules
• 16.3185 Big Mac burgers with cheese

8 MILES is also the same as nearly R20 000 for CHOC, so bring on the burgers.
See you on the other side!

Midmar swim looms...

I have often stood at the side of the pool and thought that I should really be snuggling under the covers rather...
Well, with 9 days to go, I am doing the shuffel towards the pool with eager arms!
I have been off for the last ten days with a ridiculous chest infection. Have coughed so hard I nearly dislocated my spine!  That would have been a good chuckle?!? I can see the headlines now:
MAN COMPLETES MAMMOTH SWIM LIKE SPINELESS EEL!
Well, jokes asideI am crapping myself. But my greatest supporter is quietly confident in my abilities.
I do love the GoodWife!

I will be swimming alongside the Human Polar Bear! Yes, Lewis Gordon Pugh is one of the 50 8-Mile swimmers! I say I will be swimming alongside him, but really, it won't be for very long. Perhaps we can enjoy a chat on the boat ride back to the start??

Later Y'all

Exhausted - What a swim!

Yes, the 25km swim is done and my body is rather worse for wear...
Man, it was long...

Honestly, the swim was really, really good. It is amazing how you learn about the capabilities of your body during an event like this. Something that you are sure that you will need to bail out of after the first stretch, seems efforless now that it and so much more has been completed. The first leg of day one was a monster 3.5km in water that really felt like the Engish Channel at the height of a North Sea storm surge! The waves were massive. The rest of the legs were really not that bad. Like I said, after the first and longest stage I told myself: "For the rest of the swim, there is nothing longer that needs to be swum."
99% of an event like this is the mental battle.

As I was swimming, thinking about what I would write on my Blog, it occurred to me that this mental battle was similar to what Craig would have dealt with (only on a seriously minor scale).
Hats off to you my friend. My battle was tough enough and with yours, you have simply kept your chin high...

You have my ultimate respect my friend!
You are a TROOPER!!!!

Capital 3 K!!!

Greetings from a rather stiff and sore Braddles to you my avid readers!

Yip, the Capital K was swum on Sunday and much to my delight the sun shone for the first time since I was six! I did the Three kilometre even, nice and early and thank goodness. Between 1.5km and about 2.5 km the wind picked up and it was like swimming in a blender.  Every breath was met with a flurry of chocolate dam water...YUMMY!!! Finished in 1:01.27, sot not too disappointed about that.  The one thing that played through my mind as I chugged ever so slowly towards the finish line was how tired I was - and that this was just shorter than one of the legs of the "Lap of Midmar" swim - and there are 8 legs!!!!!

5, V, Five, 5 days to go until the "Lap of Midmar" event starts and i am making funny squeaky noises in anticipation. Yes this is only a training swim towards my 8 Mile, CHOC, Craig Bainbridge swim in Feb, but I am really looking forward to it.

Craig has also been writing, he may have been misdiagnosed!!!! HECTIC!
Check out the details on the link below! He is a real machine, cycled the 94.7 Cycle challenge this weekend!
http://www.facebook.com/#!/?sk=messages&tid=1351201198464

Have an awesome day y'all

B-Dog!

First swim in sight...

Ah, lookee... The weathe has finally broken enough for me to walk down to the pool and dive in without losing bits and pieces to frostbite.
Speedo's really don't offer as much insulation as one would think!

First "pre-swim swim" is on Sunday and i feel like... OK, not quite comfortable with the word 'confident'...comfortable? Yes, I am confident about comfortable!
It's the Capital K at Midmar Dam.  The letter K, implying one Kilometre. Well, I'm doing 3...
The 3km race starts at 7:30 and I'll be off.
I'm taking it easy though, a training swim.  Remember I'm confidently comfortable, not comfo.....you get the point.

This is how I felt this morning in the pool...phew.  Wish me luck!

Training swims…underrated!

Swimming is probably the most unnatural thing that the human body could do, other than attempt to copy Daedalus by jumping out of plane from 10 000 feet with nothing but an oversized shopping bag strapped to your back…but we do it anyway. There seems to be a certain serenity as our bodies glide through the water like a misshapen log. Well, I love it!

Training is going pretty well so far and I am managing to haul myself out from beneath the covers at 5am most mornings. The whimsical tunes of the boys boarding-house wakeup call gives a little company in an otherwise lonely Clifton pool. I am doing a 3km training swim with the Howick Prep swim team at Midmar dam on Friday. That should be fun…no walls to push off every 25 yards shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge…I hope. I will be accompanying them on their annual Midmar Dam Swim Tour from the 27th till the 30th of November. One lap of Midmar in four days – EPIC!!! Did it last year and it was AWESOME! The only really freaky bit was swimming across the dam wall…the concrete really dug into my chest *joke*! But really, I could stop thinking about those giant catfish called Vundu that exist in Lake Kariba; could there be one in Midmar? Lurking in the inky depths at the foot of the wall?

Maybe I’ll drag a line from my toe with a chunk of bait on the end and find out…

Big swim at Midmar - Part 3 - The conclusion

Last night was crazy!  We had all had a fantastic supper of pootjie and rice and were relaxing comfortably by the now dying fire and admiring the beautiful lightning over the hill when the wind began to blow.  And did it blow!!!  We all ended up using our bodies as sandbags trying to keep our main tent from becoming the next and cheapest weather satellite as the wind pounded us...that settled, now for the rain!

Needless to say, we all woke somewhat bleary eyed and not in the mood for the last day of swimming.  After all the rain, the water was a lot colder than that of the previous three days, but once the skin goes a little numb, it seems to insulate rather well!

We completed the day by swimming across the front of the dam wall (a seriously unnerving experience) and were then met by the thunderous applause of the camping grade 5's on the slipway.
Well, I have to say: well done to me!  I took the average number of strokes that I usually take in a 25m length of the pool, and did some sums and came to the following conclusion: I took around 18000 strokes over the four days...and my shoulders seem to remember every last one this evening...OW!!!

One lap under the belt...
How many big laps have you done?

Big swim at Midmar - Part 2

Days 1 and 2 down and we are half way.  Little bits of me are strating to peel off and I am losing kilograms as fast as the kilometres tick by.  I must say that the children from grade 6 and 7 at Howick prep are swimming out of their socks.  They really are soldiering on despite the rather nippy water.  Anyways, 13km down, twelve to go.

The day's swim, just a hair under 7km.

Day three...things should have completely fallen apart by the end of this day with there being little more left of me but my spirit...this sort of thing wasn't made for people like me!

Big swim at Midmar!

Tomorrow is the day that my complete lack of training has set me up for. 
About a month and a half ago I agreed with a collegue of the GoodWife's that I would accompany him and some of his school pupils for a marathon swim.  As the days have drawn nearer, I have been more and more convinced that this decision was not one of my better ones. There is a large dam not too far from here called Midmar.  It is the home of the Capital K and Midmar Mile swims.  Incidentally, the Midmar Mile won a Guinness last year for being the largest inland, open water swimming event.  It saw very close to fourteen thouand swimmers last year!

Well, to complete the Midmar Mile, you swim across one of the bays, which is ...yes, a mile wide... we, the brave are going to swim around it in four days.  It is not a massive feat, but it's not easy...

Here is a map of the dam,

Compliments of Google-third-rock, this is day one.  We start at the big red square and finish 7km (4.3miles) later.  Yes I am sure I will have enough energy at the end of the day to keep you updated, so follow along.  If you are in the area, stop by, the kids and I would love your support!

What challenges do you have for the week?

A polar-bear wannabe, that's me...not Lewis Pugh!

A while ago we here at our lovely school were joined by a rather inspiring man who seemed to spark a fury inside me. A fury to put my body to the test and just do it.

This man has that fury burning inside of him, and a spark that that is bigger than us all. His motivation to do what it is that he does is the fate of the little rock that we all call home. He was outraged that the polar ice caps were, and still are melting and toiled at what to do about it. He came to the conclusion that global awareness needed to be raised before anything could actually be done. And to do this, he said:
“I like swimming…let’s do a swim at the North Pole.” People laughed at him, said it couldn’t be done. Till he did.

Lewis Pugh is now known as the Human Polar Bear…and he swam one kilometer at 90 degrees North. Just to give you an idea of how cold this water is, you normally bath in water around 48 degrees Celsius, the ocean temperature in Florida is about 27 degrees Celsius, the sea at on the west coast of South Africa about 15 degrees. Water is at its most dense at 4.1 degrees Celsius…the water that Lewis swam one long kilometer in was -1.7 degrees C (that's between 28 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit). That is tooth shatteringly, ice-cream headachy, numb-bummingly cold. And he swam in a Speedo.  After his talk he opened to the floor of adolescent boys shocked into silence by a man who had apparently gone completely bonkers and was trying to recruit. One lad pierced the silence with outstretched finger and a very matter of fact question: “Sir, why didn’t you wear a wetsuit if it was so cold?” He answered: “I want people to take me seriously, and make difficult decisions that may cost them a lot of money…it’s not as hard in a wetsuit, it’s not as serious either.”


Within twenty minutes of walking out of his speech, and feeling exceptionally motivated, I was in the pool with my good friend Kyle, ploughing through forty lengths. At length thirty two I thought to myself, being tired and this being our first swim of the season that thirty two lengths would do. But then my thought train was halted. Lewis Pugh would never have stopped, so neither did I.


I swim often now. There is a certain sense of freedom and serenity when you are slogging through the ripples of a dam or the white foam of the ocean. A sense that there is nothing else really that matters but the effort needed for the next stroke. It is a quiet time for me to think about the day and get my mind in line for the next.

People do different things to make a difference.

If you are in any way interested in what I have to say and are at all curious about this phenomenal man who risks turning into an ice cube for the good of the planet, check out his site: http://www.lewispugh.com/.


What have you done to help?