So summer is now officially over. The completion of the Dart 10k swim marks the official end of summer in my mind. It was a week ago that I completed the swim and already I have resorted to wearing jeans and shoes and socks for the first time since April. It feels decidedly weird and un-natural but the weather has definitely made a turn for the worse.
This was the second year in a row doing the Dart 10k and I had a strange mix of excitement and dread. The excitement because it’s great to go on an adventure with friends down to Devon and the general personal challenge aspect of it, and dread due to the fact that last year, my overwhelming memory of the start was how cold the water was. (Read about last years swim here). This was compounded for me, as I swim without a wetsuit.
Last year my friends were all in the Medium swim wave so they started 15 minutes before me, leaving me standing on the bank battling my pre swim nerves. This year we were all in the same wave, and although a couple of our team had dropped out before we even got to Devon, there were still four of us making the epic swim down the river Dart from Totnes to Dittisham.
We woke on the Sunday morning with a sense of nervousness. My plan was to have a full English breakfast, but I ended up having a bacon sandwich, which due to my nerves and stomach churning like a washing machine on spin cycle, I couldn’t finish. We weren’t due to start the swim till about 11:30, so we had several hours to kill. This was both a blessing and a curse. I like not having to get up early and rush about, resulting in forgetting something or panicking that we wouldn’t make the start on time, but on the flip side, I hate sitting around waiting. That gives me too much time to think about the negatives of the swim, namely the cold. We were told the water temperature was 16 degrees, but at that point none of us could really remember what the temperature was last year, so didn’t know if that was good or bad. All I knew was that last year it hurt! Last year getting in the water was like someone connecting a car battery to your nuts, while simultaneously dropped you in a skip sized raspberry slushpuppy. This year I was hoping one of two things had occurred. Either my tolerance to cold water had improved and it would not seem as bad or the water was actually a couple of degrees warmer than last year and easier to cope with.
Once at the start we got changed; my friends into their wetsuits and myself into my trunks, and I was looking around frantically for the comforting site of other swimmers who were crazy enough to swim without a wetsuit. Last year there had only been one. This year I counted five. That was encouraging and despite the other six hundred people swimming with wesuits, it gave me a little pat on the back that I hadn’t made the wrong decision, and was only slightly eccentric rather than straight jacket mental. We stood on the river bank in a mass group half listening to the safety briefing and half chatting and joking nervously, waiting to begin. After the safety briefing we were herded to the boat ramp which constituted the start.
As the mass of swimmers shuffled down the concrete boat ramp to the waterline we stepped over the timing mat which triggered the timing chip that each swimmer had attached to their ankle and stepped into the icy water. Immediate relief.. the water was not as cold as last year. Don’t get me wrong, it was still colder that the water that comes out of your cold tap at home and it still made my nuts disappear underneath my chin, never to be seen for the next couple of hours, but it wasn’t cold enough to make me immediately think “Oh shit I can’t do this!”.
I began to try and get into a rhythm, but it was hard. It always is at the beginning when your mind is trying to deal with everything else that’s happening to your body and the mass of churning water from several hundred swimmers making the river like a washing machine. I knew that I should be into a good rhythm and used to the cold at around about the 1k mark. There was a big yellow board on the side of the river at 1k. Or at least there was last year, but try as I might I couldn’t see one this year. Had I missed it? Was there not one this year? Am I swimming slower than last year? I glanced at my watch. I’d been swimming for about 16 minutes. I must have reached it or been very close to the 1k board. Maybe if I had actually listened to the safety briefing instead of nervously chatting, I would have known that there wasn’t a 1k board this year. Anyway, I got my head down and ploughed on. I mentally spotted a swimmer in front of me and made that swimmer my next target to catch and overtake. I continued to do this, swimmer after swimmer until I saw about 200 metres ahead, the first feed station. Wow that was 4K already. That seemed to come around really quickly.
As I approached the raft floating in the middle of the river surrounded by swimmers clinging onto the edges, ramming handfuls of jelly babies down their throats, I quickly tried to decide whether I actually wanted to stop or not. I didn’t feel like I needed to, but I thought, better to stop now and take my fill of sugar rather than get several kilometres along and wish I had stopped. So I grabbed the side of the floating pontoon and my hand was immediately filled with a pile of jelly baby sweets. Instead of hanging around at the raft eating them, I pushed off and did breast stroke for a few minutes while I chewed my sweets, giving my body its first sugar rush. This took longer than I thought, as I had shoved the whole handful in my mouth at once, not wanting to get them covered in river water, but this was like trying to chew a mouth full of marshmallows. The hardest part was trying to breath and chew at the same time. I realised how much more you breath when exercising, and this upset my rhythm, to the point I wish I hadn’t bothered stopping.
After the first feed station the river curves round to the left in a long never ending arch, with trees lining the outside bank. It’s a beautiful spot and it was at this point while trying to chew my fist sized ball of jelly babies that I had a chance to glance around at the scenery. It really is one of the most beautiful swims I have ever done.
The river then begin to widen as you approach a right hand bend, with a tiny group of houses on the far river bank and a flat area of grass with grazing cattle on the right hand side, it was at this point that I almost lost track of which direction I was supposed to be swimming in. I was swimming quite close to the river bank, about 10 metres from the edge and I felt something touch my hand. I then realised it was the bottom. On the inside of the bend in the river it was very shallow and as my hands began to claw into the sloppy mud on the river floor. I quickly changed direction to move further out into the middle of the river, but after about 30 metres hit a very shallow spot. It was only about a foot deep. I went to put my knees down and half stand up, but that just resulted in my legs descending rapidly into the mud. It was like quick sand. I clawed and pulled myself along for two or three metres before the water was again deep enough to swim. I began swimming hard, now with the added ballast of the 30 pounds of mud I had been caked in. Thankfully it soon all washed off after a minute or two of hard kicking.
As I again settled into a rhythm the river became wider and wider, with lots of boats, from expensive yachts and motor launches to tiny row boats tied up to bouys in long lines down the river. It became difficult to even see where the river was going at this point, as when your eye level in only a couple of inches from the water surface the horizon is all water and you cannot determine distance very easily. Consequently, as the river became wider it made you feel like a very small fish in an ever expanding pond. The river is almost a kilometre wide at this point I became very aware that I was in sea water. The salt content of the water had slowly risen as we got nearer to the sea, and as there had been no rain for a couple of weeks, the river was mainly sea water at this point. Salt water has a strange effect on you. It’s a lot more abrasive than fresh water and the salt opens your pours, cleansing your skin. However, this also has the effect for making your lips, tongue and the inside of your mouth feel very weird. Almost ike it’s swollen and you’re chewing on cotton wool balls.
As I continued on I could see on the horizon the second feed station. Well technically I couldn’t see the actual raft, but could see the bright yellow flag that marked it’s location in the middle of the every expanding mass of water up ahead. However, this was a little deceptive as unlike the first feed station where you came around a corner and it was there in front of you within a couple of hundred metres, the second feed station was still well over a kilometre away. Mentally this was horrible, as you could see where is was as you lifted your head between strokes, but it never seemed to get any closer. Like a cruel mirage trick, it seems like however hard and fast you tried to swim, it was always the same set distance away. And that distance was “f**king miles”. I decided not to look at it and just keep my head down and swim. Keeping going in the right direction by just following other swimmers that were around me. After what seemed like an eternity, the raft loomed into view a hundred metres ahead.
This time I grabbed hold of the side of the raft and stayed a little to munch through my fist full of gratefully received jelly babies and also some much needed fresh water, which was lovely compared to the salty brine of the river. I clung onto the raft for a minute or two until I had finished chewing and exchanged a few brief words with a gold cap swimmer who was clinging on next to me. A gold cap swimmer is someone who has done the river dart swim 3 times or more. They are classed as VIPs and get champagne and a jacuzzi at the finish. I’ll have to wait until next year for that privilege. Having had my fill of sweets and water I pushed off the raft, confident in the knowledge that there was only two kilometres to go. That should be easy I thought to myself as I began swimming again. I swim 2k in the pool almost every day. This will be easy. Oh how wrong I was. As I started to get back into swimming again I immediately felt pain in my shoulders. Stopping for even those couple of minutes had been a mistake. I should have just kept moving. My shoulders and whole body, if I’m honest, hurt. It felt like, while I was happily munching on jelly babies for two minutes, my mind had time travelled 30 years into the future and arrived in my body that was now 30 years older. Aaaaaaaahhhhh…. this hurts..!!!! And to top if off, I knew from last year, that this stretch of the river was the worst. Simply because it was wide and straight, lined with a seemingly endless line of mourned boats that made this part of the swim the longest, both physically and mentally. It was never ending. With the river being so wide it gives the impression of hardly moving and being tired your stroke begins to get sloppy and progress is agonisingly slow. Towards the end of this straight you get the false hope that you’re almost finished. If you glance up at the hillside you can see the mass of cars parked on the hill at the finish. The cruelty of this reality it that despite them being apparently so close, the river in fact bends around to the left and away from the finish at Dittisham, before bending round the headland to the right in another endless curve back towards the finish. This last section of the swim is a real mental test. You want to swim close to the inside of the curve in the river, but you can’t because it’s so shallow, you’d end up as a monster from the deep crawling around in the sticky mud. You have to stay about 75 metres off shore making the bend in the river even longer. It makes you feel like a hamster in an endless treadmill.
Eventually I could make out the mass of people standing on the shoreline. That must be the finish. Through the mass of moured boats and floating bouys I could see a giant floating 10k symbol, and beyond it people pulling themselves out of the water and staggering onto shore.
Strangely, this very action of getting out of the water is physically one of the hardest parts of the whole swim. Your mind wants to jump up and run out of the water, but your body is saying “Oi what the bloody hell are you trying to do?”. Just trying to stand up in the foot deep water is a real problem. You become light headed and have the feeling of being drunk as your body struggles with the fact it’s now got to pump blood up into your head after not having to for the last two hours, thanks to you lying down in the water. Consequently you look like a new-born foul or Bambi on ice for the first ten steps. Then your body slowly catches up with what your mind is asking it to do, and you regain some resemblance of control of your faculties and the realisation that you’ve done it.
Time to get dressed, get warm, get fed and get home.
Until next year rolls around again and another chance to challenge my body and mind before the coming of winter months.