Camp Eton and Lemons-into-Lemonade

Two weeks ago, I made a quick visit to the UK to be a guest coach at an event called Camp Eton. English Channel luminary Nick Adams hosts this camp for English Channel aspirants annually at Eton, the historic boys school (founded by King John V in 1440) near Windsor Castle at which Nick teaches math and coaches the swimming team. Nick and I had talked for years about my participating as a guest coach. Back in February I’d decided—if I’m ever going to attend Camp Eton, it has to be this year.

Nick has swum the Channel dozens of times, dating back to his mid-teens, including several 2-way crossings and one unsuccessful 3-way attempt. Swimming the Channel has become almost routine for Nick, as he does it annually. Most years he also guides a group of Eton boys in a relay crossing.

During the weekend, there are morning and afternoon pool sessions each day, wrapped around seminars on essential topics such as:

• Feeding and Hydration

• Pilots, Tides and Courses (the best route across can change on an hourly basis, depending on shipping traffic, wind, and how water is moving through the channel)

• Hypothermia and all things medical (expertly delivered by Sakura, Nick’s wife, who is both a Channel vet and an MD); and

• The Care and Feeding of one’s Support Crew.

The pool sessions were devoted mainly to long sets of relatively short interval repeats. This was a valuable experience for camp attendees because while most have a lot of experience with long training swims in open water, few have experience with organized repeat training in the pool.

I joined the campers in the water for a portion of both morning practices, swimming 3000 meters on Saturday and 5700 meters on Sunday. The group did 100 x 100 (something I’d done in a 25y pool on March 26 and wrote about in the post A Birthday Swim to Remember) on Sunday morning. They began at 6am sharp. I opted to sleep in, because my body clock still thought that was 1am. But I arrived in time to swim 57 x 100m on an interval of 2:10.

I was hugely pleased with this repeat series because

• Unlike nearly every other practice I did during April (see below), I felt really good.

• I paced it exceptionally well, starting my 100m repeats at 1:58 (going super-slow to ease into the groove of a long set) and swimming my final 100 at 1:43. I’m quite sure no one else in the pool managed to swim their final 100 15 seconds faster than their first.

• I felt relaxed and highly efficient throughout—averaging 16-to-17 SPL for 25m until the very end when I intentionally increased to 17-to-18 SPL.

• I shared a lane with a couple of participants who’d swum the Channel in the last year or two, and consistently outswam them by a fair bit, while swimming much more easily. This got me started thinking “Could I still swim the Channel, despite my health challenges?”

A pool full of Channel swimmers—transformed in 2 Hours

My favorite part of the weekend was when TI Master Coach Tracey Baumann and I got to teach TI techniques. When we walked on deck at 7am Saturday, I had to metaphorically avert my eyes, so unpleasing was the overall quality of movement among nearly all of the 27 swimmers packed into six lanes. In fact, I immediately noticed the lone swimmer in the pool whose stroke was graceful.

When I pointed him out to Tracey, she replied “That’s my swimmer, Kevin Mullarkey.” Kevin’s had lessons in her Swim Studio in Wraysbury (10 min drive from Eton) England and swims regularly in her Thursday evening TI group practice.

Tracey and I taught TI for a total of two hours over the weekend—30 minutes at the end of the afternoon pool session on Saturday and another 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon. We also recorded surface and underwater video of each swimmer for analysis in the classroom.

On Saturday afternoon, we worked on achieving a weightless, aligned head and the Mail Slot entry. They looked considerably better already. In the change room afterward, a couple swimmers commented, “I wish we’d done that at the beginning of the day.”

On Sunday afternoon, we reviewed Saturday’s skills for 30 minutes, then worked on the recovery, with Rag Doll and Draw a Line focal points, and finally worked on sneaky and seamless breathing. Though we were only two coaches working with a pool full of 27 swimmers, did no drills and no hands-on coaching, the profound transformation of movement quality all over the pool was thrilling. We both feel as if the significantly improved efficiency of these swimmers will give them all a much better chance of injury-free preparation for their Channel swim and a greatly enhanced chance of making it to France.

My April chronicle: Embracing the challenge—Making lemonade from lemons.

Swimming-wise, April has been a challenging month for me. After my fantastic experience swimming 100 x 100 on March 26—and feeling full of energy afterward—about a week later I began to fatigue unaccountably while swimming.

The symptoms have remained consistent throughout the month. No matter how easily I swam I felt breathless after 100 yards. I also felt a burning sensation in my chest and arm muscles, that I’m familiar with as signaling the presence of lactic acid in my muscles. Both sensations are symptomatic of being in an anaerobic state—though I was swimming about as easily as I could, and mostly for durations shorter than 2 minutes.

I swam a 1000-yard race on April 7 and—though I’d rested (no swimming) for three days prior to the meet, and swam very conservatively throughout–I already felt breathless by 500 yards. My 1000-yard time of 16:19 was a slower pace per 100 than the 1650 (65% longer) I’d swum just three weeks earlier, during which I felt fantastic and completely pain-free throughout. How could I have lost so much in just three weeks, I asked myself?

It got no better from there. Each of the next three weeks, I recorded a new ‘lifetime slowest’ 100 yards (a swim paced to complete multiple repeats, not an all-out effort) seemingly every week. However, I responded to each in the same way.

1. I embraced the principle stated in the title of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron’s book Start Where You Are. I accepted that I ‘owned’ the time I’d just done.

2. I then began to work on finding still easier ways to swim that time, by streamlining better, slipping my arm in with less water disturbance, applying pressure in the catch with more patience and sensitivity.

3. Sure enough, not only was it easier to swim that time, but it began to improve.

Last night, at Masters, my first 100 of the evening was 1:53. Two years ago I’d have found it impossible to swim 100 yards that slowly. However my final 100 of the practice, a bit over an hour later was 1:35—a time I’d seen only once previously this month.

This month I made lemonade from lemons among the English Channel aspirants at Camp Eton, then with my own swimming.

The efforts I applied last night to bring my 100y time down from 1:53 to 1:35 were directly inspired by what we teach in TI 1.0 Effortless Endurance Freestyle Self-Coaching Course.

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