We catch up with two of the Irish Life staff who are going to swim the English Channel
T HIS September 19th Irish Life investment managers and a lifeguard will take on the English Channel. Twenty desk jockeys versus 20 miles of the busiest shipping lane in the world. Portfolio managers and investment analysts against a million jelly fish, the cold, the tides, the sea sickness and the sewage. Cue that Jaws music. The great adventure continues. Here’s how two of them are progressing.
Andrew McClatchie, group property manager (40)
“At this stage some of the group have lost the run of themselves. People are entering mini-triathlons.
At 40 I’m the second oldest of the bunch. I’m eating for Ireland just to replace the calories I am losing. You have to feed your body and I’m enjoying that part immensely.
Mrs McClatchie is looking at me as if I have gone insane. She is impressed that the bulk has moved from the middle up towards the chest area but baffled as to how I still get out of breath running up the stairs.
The four mini McClatchies aged 10, eight, six and three are an even harder audience to impress. The 10 year old is mildly intrigued. They came out to Skerries to watch us swim in the sea and they found that interesting. But generally the English Channel is a fairly remote concept to them.
I tend to emphasise the amount of crap I will have to swim through and the incredible number of jellyfish I will do battle with. That’s cooler.
There’s a limit though. You don’t want to fill their heads with too much of it in case I hear back from other parents that I’m swimming around the world, through shark-infested waters.
We’ve been doing some sea swims now that the weather is getting warmer and they are certainly useful. Simple things. When you go to the sea with the kids you go into the water up to the waist or chest and splash around.
You never swim out away from the shore and just keep going. That’s not a natural instinct.
The nearer the time comes the better acquainted we get with the problems. We had a fella in to speak to us a while ago called Jim Swift, he is from Waterford and he swam the Channel at the age of 21. Made us think.
Whatever way the tides were, he had to set off at quarter to nine at night. The little open-backed trawler boat brings you from Folkestone to a beach. You get into the water and swim into the beach, get out of the water and then step back in again and begin swimming away from the land.
Jim’s energy drink mix didn’t agree with him and five minutes into the swim he puked in the water.
And he kept going. Swimming in the darkness all through the night. He got out of the water at one or two the next afternoon.
At least he was in the water. The worst part of relay swimming apparently is the little pilot boat which guides you through the channel. There are no cabins, recliners or room service facilities. You haul yourself up after your hour’s stint and sit, bobbing slowly, sucking in the diesel fumes hoping not to get sick from the motion or insane from the company of your team mates who all seemed like fine people until you started feeling like this.
As part of our fundraising drive we did a mock channel swim a couple of weeks ago. Mock channel swim maybe gives the wrong impression. We did a 36km swim in the 20 metre pool which Irish Life keeps for staff!
Two teams of 10 matched off as evenly as we could. I did my hour at 2 o’clock and came back later for another half hour. Full tilt.
We were very pleased with it all. A guy worked it out later and we had completed the swim an hour and a half faster than was anticipated. Still! Twelve hours of swimming up and down a heated pool over a black line, knowing where you were going and seeing everything? We know it’s not the real deal.
And do we give into the temptation to push off the wall? We definitely do. We raised €3,000 that day though so plenty to be pleased about.
Not so happy, however, with the news from France. I think the French Ambassador is due a visit. When swimming to France, you have to bring your passports with you on the boat with you but the beach you land on is not considered an official entry point.
So the last person on the relay shift gets into the water, swims to the beach, kisses the French sands and is required to turn around and swim back out to the boat. Then we all sail back to Folkestone in our little tub of diesel fumes.
As the climax of my eating-for-Ireland campaign I had dreamed of croissants, wine and baguettes on the beach in France and the local populace greeting us like heroes.
I hope I don’t run into these difficulties when I swim the world battling sharks.”
Aoife Broderick, portfolio construction manager (26)
“We had out first sea swim last Sunday: 1,500 metres in the water off Windsurfers Pier. The women headed off first. I’m told there were 70 of us, but in the open sea 70 feels like a pretty small amount.
There are things you miss when you are in the sea. That black line at the bottom of the pool is one. And kicking off the wall is another. In a sea race you are bobbing about and the race starts and that’s it, you have to get going under your own steam.
I started in the middle of the pack in the women’s race and pretty much finished there. I was happy enough. The boys raced a little later and they began at the back and finished there. Just a little further back.
Apparently between the women’s swim and the men’s swim the sea had become a sort of minefield of jellyfish and other perils which the lads had to battle through.
I was feeling pretty pleased about it all until they pointed out, later, the child on the pier getting changed. She was the 13 year old who had won the women’s race.
‘At least we didn’t get beaten by a 13-year-old girl,’ is all I have heard since.
It’s such a strange feeling racing in the sea. When I started first I went to the Forty Foot and it terrified me. The idea of putting your foot down and feeling nothing there. Just a moment of panic.
After a while, though, your mind gets used to the fact that there is no point in putting your feet down because there is nothing underneath, also, racing out to a distant buoy which never seems to get any nearer is tough.
I knew I could swim 1,500 metres but in the sea with all these people around it’s different. And when swimming out to sea you have no concept of the distance you have covered.
We’ll be doing these sea swims regularly over the next month or two. They are a hardy bunch the regulars, an elite group. We haven’t decided yet if they are sane. The bigger question is, are we sane?
We went down to the Bull Wall last week. The bad rain had churned everything up. We were swimming through tonnes of seaweed which gets in your face and hair and all around you. And that was the least of it. All that other stuff we swam through? Please say it was just sand and stuff churned from the bottom. Anyway we’ve washed our towels out about a 1,000 times since.
The hardest thing right now is getting up in the mornings to put in the time in the pool. Once you are there and in the water it is fine, it’s just the thought of getting out of bed and heading out which is tough.
We’ve discovered a sort of competitive spirit in ourselves though, so half the time we are competing against each other and trying to outdo each other and the other half we are terrified of being the one who lets everybody down. So that’s what gets us all up and into the pool.
That and the support we have. So many people who didn’t want to swim or couldn’t swim or who were just sane have rallied around and helped with the fundraising. The swim has turned into a long campaign of fundraising by colleagues.
We had a swishing party there recently. It sounds a little nautical but swishing was a new concept for me. Everybody brought along all those things in their wardrobe that they had bought once and never worn. We sold them all off for a tenner apiece. Obscene amounts of clothes. Designer stuff with tags still on. Women came in from Clery’s to do make-up. Other people did hair and nails. There was champagne. Nibbles. We made €7,000 and it was great to feel so much support and interest.
Back in the pool that black line at the bottom is getting a little monotonous to look at. A couple of the guys have got themselves waterproof iPods but I have resisted. It would become a crutch for me and when it came to the Channel the crutch would be kicked away.
The Channel Swimming Association wants every swimmer to experience the same conditions as the first Channel swimmers, so they allow one hat, a pair of Speedos or swim suit, no leggings or body armour. Lights for your arms. And that’s it. No iPods. We can’t be sane.”
To learn more about their progress or to make a donation see http://IASC-swim.com