This weekend was one of those weekends when it’s hard to keep up to date with all that’s happening. As well as training there were swims to track.

It was definitely our busiest results week so far.

Wasn’t the weather fabulous too. After weeks of the water temperature hovering around 16C, this weekend it shot up!

Your pod leaders’ observations

With the swim season really getting underway now the dynamics on the beach are likely to subtly change. Familiar faces start to reduce as swims go ahead. New faces come as we welcome visitors and overseas swimmers into our sessions.

The nature of the questions start to change too. What we’re being asked now are more practical questions as you gear up for the big day, for example

How do I mix my feed?

Come and ask your questions on the beach. Watch how we make up the feeds for training. It’s pretty simple and just knowing that can instantly reduce anxiety levels.

How often should I feed?

We’re aiming to teach you a process that you can follow on the day and many people have replicated exactly what we do.

What should I put my feeds in?

OK, so some basic answers to these questions are below, but first I’d recommend you read Nick Murch’s excellent blog on the science behind feeding. The takeaway messages are:

Feeding is mostly psychological, so if it works for you fab. We’ve seen all sorts of concoctions over the years
Use what you plan to use on the day in training
No matter whether you use maltodextrin or UCAN (or any other substance), you won’t be able to absorb as many calories as you burn, therefore you will go into fat burning as a source of energy. Even the leanest triathlete has enough stored fat for a long swim. Once you realise this you can release any concerns around trying to cram in calories.

Read blog

Maltodextrin

We still refer to CNP, but what we’re using is a different brand. We’re using MyProtein 100% Maltodextrin Carbs. It seems to always have a special offer, so you shouldn’t need to pay full price!

Mixing: put 1 litre of water into a mixing jug, add 6 scoops of the powder, add flavouring of your choice (we use Peach & Raspberry or Vimto) and mix. Put it into a container. This is double strength. You make it back to single strength by adding hot water.

UCAN

UCAN works differently to 100% maltodextrin in that it doesn’t trigger an insulin response and it promotes fat burning as a steady source of energy. It does have the tendency to dehydrate so we alternate a UCAN feed with a feed of other fluids such as sugar free squash, black tea (no sugar) or similar.

Mixing: fill a shaker bottle most of the way and add two scoops of UCAN then shake. Simples.

A tub is £65 and lasts forever as you don’t use much. If you’d rather buy it by the scoop, let me know and I can help with that.

General thoughts

Volume: We’re giving you about 200ml. On the day this should also work though I tend to make up 300ml and not drink all of it. If you’re not peeing or are thirsty, increase the volume or frequency. If you feel nauseous, the first thing to try is less volume.

Frequency: Many people follow the pattern that we use on the beach, feed after 2 hours and then hourly.

Electrolytes: Have an electrolyte only (no maltodextrin) every 4-6 hours

Sickness: If you’re sick, take the feeds back to something very simple like water, black tea, peppermint tea, ginger tea or squash until you’re settled again.

Speed of feed: This is absolutely key. Aim for your stop time to be no more than 20-30 seconds. Learn to pee whilst swimming. It’s not a time to chat, it’s a feed. Get it done quickly. It’s not like a lake where you’re in the same place when you finish your feed as you were when you started, all the time you’re stopped you’re drifting with the tide and the pilot has to work to get you back on course. At its worst you can undo all the good work that you did since your last feed. That doesn’t just add seconds or minutes to your swim, it can add hours.

Feeding bottles: keep it simple. I use one of two options. The most basic is a 1 pint milk bottle with a piece of cord through the lid and attached to the handle (no faffing required to keep hold of the lid). Or one of the Trespass bottles that we’ve used from time to time in training (and are available in the shop). Both as quick flowing and easy to use.

Reels: you see some really complicated contraptions which can over complicate things. Your bottle attached to a reel via a carabiner is simple to use and does the job well.

Shout outs (training)

When you are involved in a sport like ours, you surround yourself with people who routinely do amazing things. You’re all pretty darn amazing to be honest. These shout outs aim to highlight some of the breakthrough moments or big training weekends that we notice. There are many more. Please please give yourself a shout out in our Facebook group if you had a personal breakthrough moment or are proud of your achievements. I’d love to hear about it.

Channel swimmer on the beach!

What an incredible weekend with DCTers all over the place. I’m worried that I’ll missing calling out an achievement and apologies if this is you, give me a nudge and I’ll edit!

Swims to call out this week:

Pod leader extraordinaire on his 3rd successful solo in a pretty consistent time!

Ullswater: DCT class of 21ers (people who have done some or all of their training with DCT this year) - Anthony Baxter, Alaine Berry, Lucy Bessant, Nicolie Chaffe, Vikki Chester, Allie Park-Crowne, Sue Daley, Vicky Elson Smith, Jamie Farquhar, Andrew George, Michelle Mead, Bethany Murphy, Jevon O’Neill, Laura Sharpe, Helen Smith, Kristen Smith, Ben Taylor, Christina Trueblood.
Ullswater: Numerous DCT alumni
Helen Smith who completed Windermere the day after Ullswater.
Jon Southey for his third English Channel solo on 18th July in a time of 15:07
Jane Carnall for her English Channel solo on 18th July in a time of 17:06
Gina Harden for her English Channel solo on 18th July in a time of 16:17
Team Tayka Peru for their very tough English Channel relay on 17th July in a time of 17:18
5 go swimming for their English Channel relay on 18th July in a time of 16:30

Well done to all swims this week, wherever you trained. We enjoyed tracking you. 😊

A few of our end of session celebrations (more videos can be found on my Vimeo channel)

Weekend Stats

Note: Water temperature taken during the swim session in the harbour. The lowest recorded reading is shown here. Air temperature, wind direction & wind speed taken from the Port of Dover app.

Saturday:

Swimmers: 21
Water temperature: 17.4C
Air temperature: 19.1C (hotter at the top of the beach)
Conditions: Force 3 gusting force 4 NE. Sunny, calm by ferry wall, choppier by beach.

Sunday:

Swimmers: 15
Water temperature: 19.6C
Air temperature: 19.3C (port control), 28.4C (top of beach)
Conditions: F2 SSW. Glassy smooth. Hot sun. No clouds.

Volunteers & beach crew

Thank you to the pod leaders and to our volunteers. Thanks to everyone who rolled up their trouser legs and helped.

Reminders

Remember to book your sessions online. Bookings close 24 hours before the session, it would be a massive help if you booked by Thursday morning.

The system doesn’t arrange automatic refunds, so please message me if you cancel ahead of these deadlines and I’ll arrange a refund.

You don’t need to sign into the website to book a session - just pop your email address in to the booking system and it will remember you. Remember to click into the discount code box if you are a subscriber and it will auto complete your discount code. If you are a pay as you go swimmer and are also a member, remember to use your discount code to get your membership price.

Long swim opportunities

We will be running 10 hour swims on Saturday 7th August. If you are tempted and want to find out more, please get in touch. There will be a different start time for these swimmers only.

Paddlefish Ponderings:

“Failure isn’t an option for me”

— More swimmers than I care to count

If I had £1 for everyone who said that to me I would be very rich.

They say it in all seriousness as if they are the only person who has ever said it or of whom it could be true. Perhaps they believe that failure is an option for everyone else, but if you only knew their story, you’d realise that they are indeed the only person for whom failure isn’t an option. They go on to emphasise, “no really, failure just isn’t an option”

Perhaps we should do a poll around the beach…. “Is failure a good option for you?” “Yeah, I’m planning to fail” said no one ever! Of course there are those of us who have honed our imposter syndrome skills and whom think that failure is a likely outcome, even if that’s not our perception of their reality.

So where am I going with this?

A few things come to mind.

I don’t believe that anyone sets out to throw away several thousand pounds.

I do think that self-doubt can get in the way and can even lead to self-sabotage.

The brain can’t handle a negative

There’s no failure, only feedback

No one sets out to throw away several thousand pounds

OK, so let’s agree on that. We know that you really can’t afford to fail, for whatever reason - time, money, fear of loss of face - whatever your reason, it’s important for you to succeed. Let’s step away from ‘I really can’t afford to fail’, let’s take your strong desire to succeed as a granted and let’s also assume that the same is true for everyone else.

Self-sabotage

The mind is very complex. As are our emotions and the things that make us tick. For some who have a buried belief that is holding them back, if they start to look like their having a good run of luck and achieving, it’s not unusual for a bit of self-sabotage to take place to put them back in the place that they think they deserve to be. Everyone looking from the outside in will see it differently and can’t understand why they put themselves down so much.

The best way to tackle this is to get to the root cause. This isn’t always obvious and often links to something that we’re not even consciously aware of. We can tackle the symptoms all you like, but if you don’t get to the root cause the self-sabotage rarely stops, it just changes form. Don’t get me wrong, if the root cause is a binary issue (phobias are often examples of binary issues) then they can be easily dealt with. As can a general lack of confidence by following the process that we run in training.

I was self-sabotaging big time in the lead up to my first successful solo. The closer I got to success, the more the self-sabotage kicked in. In the end I had some NLP intervention and, well, the rest is history. For me it came down to a simple limiting belief

I am a crap swimmer

Whether that is true or not is irrelevant (it’s not by the way, I wouldn’t have achieved all that I have if that was true), what that belief was doing was putting massive barstools and demons in the way. We moved them.

Some people say that you shouldn’t start a swim unless you are 100% confident that you can complete it. I disagree. I didn’t know whether I could and yet I still did. I have had swims where I was 100% confident and haven’t completed them and ones where I was 100% confident and have completed. I simply don’t think there is a link between a belief that you will succeed or fail and that being a 100% guaranteed outcome. I’ve even started events in the pool not knowing I could finish (200 butterfly long course is pretty brutal!).

The brain can’t handle a negative

“Don’t think of a blue tree”. The brain can’t think in negatives, in order to not think of something the first thing that you have to do is consider the thing that you don’t want to consider and so a blue tree will pop into your mind.

So if failure is the thing that isn’t an option for you and you have a mantra around it “Failure isn’t an option”, or “Don’t fail, don’t fail, don’t fail”, guess what, you are instructing your brain to focus on failure.

It’s a bit like a crew member should never say “Are you cold?”. Until that point, your swimmer may not have considered whether they are or are not cold and now you have asked them to think about it. More than that, you’ve actually planted the suggestion that they are indeed cold. Now that’s fine if you’ve already made the decision that the swim needs to stop on safety grounds as you have identified that they are too cold to continue and the swimmer may be unaware (we’re often the worst judge of this), but if it’s a casual question it’s a very bad idea!! “Actually, I am cold, now you come to mention it.”

So by focusing in on failure, you are actually drawing yourself towards it and not away from it. You’re likely to achieve the very opposite of the outcome that you want. You’re making failure the centre of your universe. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on the process that is going to lead you to success?

There’s no failure, only feedback

A pre-supposition of NLP is that there is no failure, only feedback. Whether that is something that didn’t go to plan in training or on the big day, take the feedback and any lessons learned and use it to build success next time.

Let’s face it, our sport is not an easy one.

It’s not ‘normal’ to spend the length of a working day swimming around a cold harbour only to do it all again the next day. We normalise it because we spend our time with other people who do the same thing.

It’s not normal to jump off a perfectly serviceable boat at 3am into dark water in a shipping lane to take over from another person who did the same thing an hour ago.

I’d go as far as to say that it’s OK to fail. It’s best to fail in training and get the feedback there which you can take with you on the big day. However, not making the big swim, as devastating as that can be, really isn’t the end of the world. The swim will always be there.

You’re on a journey, it’s not just a destination.

So let’s go big and fail in training every now and then. It’s ok. We can all have an off-day. We often think that everyone else is OK, it’s only me that struggles.

NOT TRUE

I have the ability to stand back and see everything. I see the big, obvious struggles. I also notice the little ones too, the ones you try to hide.

If you’re honest you’ve probably all failed at something in training. Perhaps it was being late for a feed or bobbing for a minute or two when you really should have been swimming. Perhaps you failed to book a session. Maybe you failed to pack your underwear once, or a towel, or a red hat.

Maybe your fails were more obvious and ones that you would count as fails, like having a bad day in the office when you got out early and later regretted it.

It’s ok. None of this really matters if you learn from it. In fact, it could end up being the learning experience that makes the difference that leads to success on the big day.

Take the feedback. Ditch the self-criticism.

So let me leave you with a quote from someone who invented the lightbulb. I think we can agree that he was a success despite the fact that he failed to create a lightbulb several thousand times before he was successful.

“The world is full of people who didn’t realise how close they were to success when they gave up.”

— Thomas Edison

If you think that you have a complex issue that is leading to self-sabotage or an unhelpful belief about yourself that is keeping you from success. Get in touch. Perhaps a breakthrough session is what you need. We’d spend a day and get to your root cause and then remove it. It’s a life changing investment in you!