Man vs Ocean - One Man's Journey to Swim The World's Toughest Oceans

by Walker, Adam;

  I had private healthcare through work so I managed to get an appointment quickly. The scan showed no issue, which seemed very odd as I knew there was an obvious problem. The surgeon suggested I could have stretched the tendons, which the scan might not see. He advised me to build up the muscles in the back of the shoulders in order make the shoulder more stable, as I had a lot of movement there.

  I did what he said and spent the next year trying to build the muscles up. I also limited my swimming. Every time I swam I would get a pain at the top of the shoulder that continued down the front of my arm and felt really tender. It was difficult to motivate myself to churn out the miles when I felt, with every arm stroke, that I was damaging myself further. After twelve months of no improvement, I contacted the surgeon again and he suggested surgery as an option.

  I was going through a bad period in my work life. I had left the job at Russell Hobbs for a promotion with a packaging company but was made redundant within nine months due to the company’s financial difficulties. It seemed the best time to have my shoulder operated on.

  What the surgeon discovered was more severe than he had envisaged. In the year following my swim, the long head of the biceps tendon connecting the upper end of the biceps muscle to the bone had partially ruptured and attached itself to the supraspinatus tendon at the back of the shoulder. This would explain the painful tightness I experienced: even to just raise my arm to shoulder height would hurt. It seems from the surgeon’s explanation that my shoulder had most likely been damaged prior to swimming the English Channel, and therefore I had completed the swim with the short head of the biceps tendon the weaker of the two that holds the muscles together. I thought it hurt a little! During the operation he attached it back, but he wasn’t able to unstick the tendons.

  After this first operation, the surgeon asked me, ‘Do you ever want to swim again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to swim from Spain to Morocco.’

  He replied, ‘When I said “swim again”, I meant for leisure!’

  I had been thinking for a while that it would be a good challenge to do Europe to Africa. I hadn’t said anything to anyone as I wanted to get my shoulder fixed first and give myself a fighting chance.

  The surgeon laughed and said, ‘In that case we will have to look at it again in eight weeks and see if it has healed.’

  I could tell he thought I had very little chance of swimming it.

  I had six weeks in a sling with a rolled-up towel under my arm and was not allowed to extend or move it from that position. After that time, I was able to mobilise it for two weeks before he operated for a second time.

  The operation was supposed to be a quick look to see that the attachment had healed; it was scheduled to take no longer than forty-five minutes. Whilst I was under anaesthetic, the tendon tore further and had to be repaired. In total, the operation took almost three hours.

  Afterwards, the surgeon didn’t fill me with too much confidence when he said, ‘Hopefully, with all the shoulder rotations you will do in swimming, it will unstick itself.’ He indicated to me that the shoulder was not really in any shape to do a marathon swim; it was approximately 60–70 per cent fit and we were also relying on the reattachment of the tendon holding; there was no guarantee, after thousands of overarm shoulder rotations, that this would be the case.

  After the second operation I had a further six weeks in a sling. It was not a great time for me, having to be driven to job interviews by my parents, and I tried to focus on staying fit even though my arm was in a sling. I would go to the gym and train on the exercise bike. I would try to conceal my arm in the hope that the staff wouldn’t see my issue and not allow me to work out. This really helped me mentally, giving me an outlet and release from the negativity in my work life, and continued to provide some structure and balance. I am not good just sitting at home.

  I had a follow-up appointment with the surgeon to find out how the operation had gone and he reported that it had been a partial success. Well, it was better than no success, but it left a doubt as to how my shoulder would cope if I carried on with open-water swimming.

  I counted down the weeks until I would be able to swim again. He had advised me to do some light swimming ten to twelve weeks after the operation, and as soon as the ten weeks were up I went back into the pool. My shoulder was quite stiff and sore, so I took it very slowly for the first few sessions.

  I had at least landed a temporary job working at a charity for underprivileged children, which was completely different from what I was used to. It made me look at work a lot differently, in a positive way, as this job was giving back to the community. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to live on the wages and I fell back into a more familiar commercial job working in a marketing company. This turned out to be a mistake and three months later I was looking for work again.

  I was constantly frustrated and couldn’t understand how I had got into such a mess in my work life. The thought of starting the swim training again and taking on a new challenge was the only focus that made sense, the only thing that gave me any feeling of work–life balance.

  Fourteen weeks into the rehabilitation of my shoulder, Chris phoned me out of the blue one evening and said, ‘Do you fancy coming to Dover Harbour with me? I need to do a training session at night.’

  I’m not very good at saying no at the best of times, and when it comes to swimming I never say no. I immediately replied, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll be over in thirty minutes.’

  I packed my things and went over to his house. When I arrived he said, ‘I was only joking.’

  I couldn’t believe it. Agreeing to join him hadn’t been the most sensible thing to do as I had been operated on only fourteen weeks previously, but I just hadn’t wanted to let him down. I said, ‘Well, I’m here now – what do you want to do?’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  It was 9 p.m. and it would take at least three and a half hours to get there. It seemed crazy if he wasn’t bothered about going and I was only doing it to support him, but we went anyway and arrived at the coast around half past midnight. After getting an hour or so’s sleep in the car at some nearby services, we headed over to the swim spot we’d trained at before the Channel swim, arriving at 2.15 a.m. Now that I was there it was quite exciting, in a strange way, as well as being a crazy idea. It made me feel happy that I would be reacquainted with the open water after well over a year of not going in. The thought of swimming in pitch-black added to the excitement. It had really been tough not swimming for so long and I felt like a piece of me had been missing.

  A night security guard who was patrolling the area suddenly appeared with a torch. It was the annual regatta weekend once again. We started to get changed into our swimming trunks and he said, ‘What are you doing?’

  I replied, ‘Going for a swim.’

  He said, ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We are training and need to get some night-swimming in.’

  He looked at us both as if we were mad. We had light sticks attached to our trunks for visibility and I said to him, ‘If you don’t see a light flashing then you know something’s up.’ It was meant as a joke, but he responded with, ‘Nothing to do with me!’

  We were making our way down over the rocky beach in the dark when I had a sudden thought: having left our clothes in the car and locked it, where was Chris thinking of putting his car keys while we swam? To this he replied, ‘I’ll tie them to my trunks.’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘Isn’t it central locking? Won’t water damage the battery?’ But I said nothing and my mind switched back to thinking about the swim and how my shoulder would fare. I walked into the water and instantly felt happy to be back where I belonged.

  I didn’t know how long I could comfortably swim for with the shoulder, but my plan had been to do a couple of hours until the sun came up. Given that it was only 2.30 a.m., a couple of hours were never going to take me through to sunrise, and I decided to stay out there for as lo
ng as Chris wanted to, if I was able. I didn’t want to leave him out there in the dark by himself in case there was any issue. Training in the dark brings with it added hazards, especially in the sea. Having someone spotting from shore would have been preferable, just in case one or both of us came into difficulty. There are now organised night swims, which are not only great fun, but a much safer way to practice.

  It dawned on me how much I had missed swimming in open water. Swimming in the dark is a good mental challenge it adds another dimension when you can barely see in front of you. The only lights that guided us were those of the buildings running parallel to the harbour. It was quite disorientating and after a short while, even though the water was flat-calm, I started to be sick. I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking my head in confusion as to why this would happen. Chris started to laugh, although it backfired on him: hearing me vomit made him retch and be sick.

  After this embarrassment was over, I felt a lot better. My shoulder was stiff throughout, but really started to get sore at the two-hour mark. It was still dark, as expected, so I carried on. At three hours fifteen minutes, I felt that I needed to rest my shoulder, the light had started to come up so I felt happier leaving Chris to cover a few more hours by himself. He untied his car keys from his swim shorts and passed them to me. I walked up the bank and pressed the button to unlock the car. As predicted, the door wouldn’t open. What made matters worse was that it was now starting to rain, so the air temperature wasn’t great.

  I turned the key in the lock, which opened the door but immediately set the alarm off. I put the key in the ignition and the alarm was still going off. I grabbed my change of clothes and locked the door, as it was the only way I could switch the alarm off and not wake all of Dover up. I waved at Chris to come out of the water.

  ‘I can’t get in,’ I told him. ‘The fob doesn’t work! I need to ring roadside assistance.’ Chris replied, ‘I’m not a member of roadside assistance.’

  Fortunately I was and so I rang them myself, resisting the temptation to kill him. When I got through, I told them the embarrassing situation we were in: that a friend of mine had tied the keys to his trunks and gone swimming in the sea, and now the battery wouldn’t work. The cavalry arrived and I’m not sure how he kept a straight face.

  I said, ‘I bet you’ve never been called out for something like this before?’

  ‘You would be surprised at what we are called out for,’ he replied.

  By this time there were other swimmers who had turned up for training that morning and they thought it was hilarious. We looked a couple of idiots.

  The swim had served its purpose: it got my competitive juices flowing again and I thought more seriously about the Gibraltar Strait swim that I had mentioned to the surgeon. I liked the sound of this swim as it would be a good challenge, swimming from Tarifa to Tangier, Europe to Africa. The swim has very strong currents, high winds, big swells and the temperature fluctuates from 21 degrees to 15 degrees where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic in the middle of the Strait.

  I spoke to Chris about my intention to swim it and persuaded him to join me. The swim is around 10 miles long, which is half the distance of the English Channel. Something in my head was telling me it wasn’t enough of a challenge and that I had to consider a return trip. Only five people had ever swum there and back before, none of them British, so as well as being a major challenge it also presented an opportunity to be the first British person to achieve a two-way, which tugged at my competitive nature. The strait is home to a large variety of marine species including pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins. I have always been very passionate about marine life and thought it would be very apt to raise money for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC).

  I contacted Rafael, president of the Gibraltar Strait Swimming Association, to tell him our intentions. He tried to put me off the idea, telling me we would have to cross in three and a half hours, the British one-way record at the time, in order to swim back. You are pushed for time and as there are only eight miles of coastline, if you are not far enough back to Tarifa, the current could sweep you out to the Atlantic Ocean. As water flows in and out of the Mediterranean, there are two currents that are formed. An upper layer of Atlantic water flows eastward into the sea, over a lower layer of Mediterranean water flowing westward into the ocean. This is known as the Mediterranean outflow water.

  Rafael said we would have to swim 4 kilometres an hour throughout, minimum, to stand any chance of completing it. Great, a target!

  As I began training for the swim, my shoulder continued to be sore and my concern was that, if I swam the way I did for the English Channel, I might not have a shoulder left. I had ignored injuries in the past and was at risk of proving Einstein’s definition of insanity: ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. I realised that this time I had to do something about it and change the way I swam.

  A friend recommended a local swim instructor and I had a couple of lessons. I hadn’t been coached before and it made me think about the front crawl differently as the technique he taught focused on rotation. It’s a concept that has been a talking point in swimming for a number of years, with different theories as to why and how the rotation should be carried out to benefit the swimmer. For example, some coaches will talk about a body roll, which involves shoulder, torso and hip together. I personally needed to offload pressure from the left shoulder and be as delicate as I could on hand entry and extension, so as not to cause irritation to the shoulder.

  I thought about the core and how it powers the whole motion for so many sports, including golf, boxing, cricket and shot-put, and I looked at sports and activities with very similar actions to swimming, such as kayaking. The core is a muscle group with the fastest, most efficient way to propel yourself into a movement, maximising power and saving energy. Therefore, if the core rotates the torso instead of the other way around, it will take pressure off shoulders, wrists and elbows. This is exactly what I needed to do – I just had to find a way to make it work for swimming.

  I practised completely relaxing the front arm as it entered the water and using the pulling arm to guide it into extension. Doing this didn’t aggravate the shoulder, and incredibly I seemed to glide further and save energy if I was in the right position. I wondered whether this was as a result of the chest muscles on the extended arm being completely relaxed.

  The rotation was also a revelation. Getting as close as possible to a full 90 degrees from side to side created a maximum force to power me forward, as long as I started the motion by turning the core muscle (top oblique) first, before pulling with the arms and shoulders. To rotate over 90 degrees didn’t work as it instigated my chest muscles, while under 90 degrees gave me less power and less forward motion.

  It was then down to timing and the position of my head and front arm, which needed to be deep in order to create the optimum streamlined body position with my hip up. By swimming hip to hip, I had less body mass going through the water, which proved to be more efficient as there was less drag.

  All these findings were so exciting, though I wasn’t sure how they would affect my speed; this swim across the Gibraltar Strait was all about how fast I could go.

  I didn’t have long to make these changes to my stroke; although the principles were there, I wasn’t confident that I could put them all into action in such a short period of time, let alone with speed.

  14

  SWIM #2 GIBRALTAR STRAIT – SWIMMING BOTH WAYS SEEMED A GOOD IDEA!

  At the end of June, Chris and I travelled to Tarifa, the starting point for our swim across the Gibraltar Strait. The odds were a little stacked against us making the two-way, but we had to believe it was possible. I knew we would need to be at our best to stand a chance, and we needed the weather to be kind to us.

  We met up with Rafael a couple of days after arriving and he said, ‘You will need to be across one way and three quarters back by seven hours thirty minutes, otherwise you w
on’t have a chance of making it due to the current.’

  We accepted this and I discussed with Chris that we couldn’t even think in terms of swimming both ways: we just needed to focus on going one way, and only then should we think about making it back.

  Every day we would do forty-five minutes to an hour in a bay, hoping we could go the next day, and each time the weather let us down and Rafael would call and advise that it was too windy. I knew this waiting game all too well from the English Channel, but that didn’t make it any easier. After eight days we still hadn’t gone and we both had a plane ticket home in two days’ time. We started working out if our places of work would let us have any more time off and if we should get another flight ticket.

  We stayed with our families in what can only be described as two large huts. They were situated on a farm with little wind protection. The wind was so strong on some of the nights that the buildings shook and felt like they were going to collapse.

  Finally, on the ninth and last possible day, we received a call from Rafael around 8 a.m., saying the conditions were good to swim and that we should start at 11 a.m. It was a shame for Chris’s girlfriend, Angela, as she had been required to go home a couple of days earlier due to work.

  We arrived early at the harbour with my parents, who had arrived a few days earlier to give us a send-off, and Gareth, an old neighbour and friend of theirs who now lived in Spain, came along as well. I was a little nervous, but they were good nerves. We knew our strategy was to swim as fast as we could one way and not even think about the way back. It was important we stuck together and worked as a team, for safety reasons. I had more speed than Chris, but I knew he would give it his best.

  We were due to leave the harbour at 9 a.m. Rafael had expressed the need to leave on time as we could be affected by the current later on in the swim, so every minute counted. But at 9 a.m. there was no sign of the pilot. It wasn’t until 9.20 a.m. that they turned up, which made me a little nervous. There were two boats, a RIB and a fishing boat that would go up ahead and track the best route with GPS. The RIB would be alongside us at all times. This was different from the English Channel, which is normally just one large boat. As the RIB was close to the water, it would make it easier to distribute the energy drinks. It would also be great for morale to be able to hear any clapping or shouting from our crew.