Channel Challenge: Chris Fairweather

“When you first sign up for swimming the Channel, the first task is to identify a boat pilot to accompany you to France. The swim windows that are offered are two years into the future so, having accepted one and paid a chunky deposit, nothing happens until you start serious training. For a long while you forget about it, but then time catches up with you. “On Sunday 18th July I drove down to Dover with my brother, Jack, and my friend, Jess. They were to be my support crew for a swim planned for 6am the following morning. Upon our arrival the sky was so clear we could see the French coast. I’d never seen it from England before and it was a huge confidence boost. There’s no doubt I was still nervous. After months of training and daydreaming though, I was ready. At 3am the next morning we woke to our alarms and saw a message to say that problems with the boat meant the attempt was off. So close, but yet so far. “My options now were either to try again overnight on Tuesday or to swim during the day on Wednesday. The former was not appealing because I was very tired after having had such little sleep on Sunday and I had not done any night swimming during my training. That said, the daytime swim posed different problems because the tide was to be so much stronger. I consulted a few friends and, with the consensus being that the daytime tide was the greater concern, I decided to swim overnight. “We returned to Dover on the Tuesday and at 8:04pm that evening I was standing on the beach, when the boat’s siren signaled the start. There wasn’t room to allow thoughts of how far it was or how long it might take. It wasn’t a race. I just had to keep going. This was it. “I hoped to get to the six-hour point feeling in control as that was a regular training distance. In actual fact, the sun started going down inside two hours and the night started to feel like it might be rather long. At three hours (11pm) I was already starting to feel tired. “I was stopping every hour for 60 seconds to feed from a water bottle (filled with a magic powder of maltodextrin, the fuel of choice for distance swimming as solid foods take too long to chew) and these stops became the milestones to track my progress. The bottle was thrown to me as I was not allowed to touch anybody or anything during the swim. “The boat can’t go as slow as a swimmer and so moves ahead, lets you swim past, then moves ahead again. On one such occasion it was so far ahead I lost sight of it. This was the only time that the night concerned me. Here I was,

halfway to France at approximately 1am, in darkness, with no food, no wetsuit and no buoyancy aid. There was no time to dwell on this. Instead, I put my head down and kept my arms turning. “The morning took a long time to come. The sunrise was going to be a big deal. It meant I was eight hours in and, hopefully, two thirds of the way across. There was no doubt the light was a motivator, even being able to see my crew on the boat again was a pleasure. By this stage I was struggling to keep my drink down, which meant I was not only struggling for hydration, but for calories too. The crew got worried. “It’s one thing being determined (or even stubborn), but humans don’t work without calories much as cars don’t run without petrol. This needed to be fixed. The crew opted to Chris took on the challenge increase the rate of my feeds from every hour to every 45 wearing his Bolton School minutes and then to every half hour. Forcing it down was water polo trunks! thoroughly unpleasant. In my mind I felt uncomfortable, but I was still making progress. From the crew’s position, I was getting ever slower with the risk that the changing tide would push me northwards and threaten my chances of finishing. “Jack got in for an hour as permitted by the Channel swimming rules. The idea is that it would help focus me on moving forward and remove some of the monotony. It did help and it didn’t. I was so tired I was struggling to keep up and the carrot wasn’t worth chasing. I was tired and it became a fight. “From about eleven hours I could see the French coast and it was teasing me as it didn’t appear to be getting any closer. Jack got in again. ‘This is the last push now. Get it done.’ I pushed and pushed. I had felt like I had been doing so for three hours now. Then I saw the bottom. Sand. It was a bright morning on a shallow beach, so I still had twenty minutes or more to go, but I was getting there. Then I could make out people and trees on the beach, then the water became warmer as it got shallower. Then my feet were down. “I took a moment to steady myself. To finish you have to fully clear the water, so I took myself up the beach. I had made it in a time of 13 hours 39 minutes and, according to my watch, 2 seconds. “I can’t say I experienced a wave of euphoria or relief: I was just tired. I sat there, we took some photos, picked up a pebble from the beach and swam (breaststroke!) back to the boat. You’re only allowed about five minutes in France! “It’s only now, in the days and weeks after the event, that I’m beginning to appreciate what I’ve achieved. It’s the enthusiasm others show and the size of the blue gap on google maps that brings it to life. It’s the thought that I didn’t put my feet down from when I left England to when I arrived in France. Of that I’m truly proud – but never again …” While it was not his primary goal, Chris is delighted that family, friends and colleagues have donated over £2,200 to Macmillan in recognition of his fabulous achievement.