They calculated the river flow was three kilometres an hour and ‘estimated it would take around a week for me to swim the Thames, possibly ten days. So my entire team took fourteen days’ leave and we hired a barge. I was working in London at the time, I could only train for forty-five minutes three times a week, but because it was flowing nicely I thought, go for it! Then, on 7 July, I got to the source and saw it was dry and thought, this will be a slog.’
The Thames Head stone was surrounded with parched grass, so along with another friend, Alex Wales, he ran for twenty-five miles until they found the river deep enough to swim. Finally, Lewis entered the water near Buscot Lock, a couple of miles downstream from the Round House, and what struck him was the stillness of the river: after weeks without rain it was ‘like a millpond’. There was no chance of being carried along; instead, a week’s swim turned into a twenty-one-day odyssey.
Andy and Lewis are not the only long-distance swimmers to set their sights on the Thames, for a waterway that stretches over 200 miles is ideal for anyone who either wants a challenge or simply to experience what it’s like to swim in the same river day after day.
The Walsh brothers (Mark on the left and Richard on the right) share a laugh at Boveney Lock in the summer of 2009, after four days swimming along the Thames.
In 2009 brothers Richard and Mark Walsh similarly started near Lechlade when they decided to swim the non-tidal Thames to raise money for leukaemia research, following the death of one of Mark’s teaching colleagues. Two years earlier the pair had swum the length of all the lakes in the Lake District – fifty miles in forty-eight hours to raise money for Guide Dogs for the Blind. ‘We were looking for something bigger and better,’ says Richard, ‘we both grew up in and around Windsor so we had swum in the Thames, it had always been there as a backdrop and I knew of Lewis Pugh’s swim and thought we could give it a go. It was just me and my brother swimming next to each other in the Thames, and Dad in a canoe.’
The idea was to begin at Cricklade Bridge, upstream from Lechlade, but ‘there was just enough water to cover the top of our feet, I could see the river meandering off, but we didn’t want to walk the whole of the first day dragging a canoe’. Even when they started swimming from St John’s Lock on 24 August ‘there was no flow at all. But we knew it was relatively clean, in some parts it was crystal clear, in others there was dead tree matter but it’s all organic. I didn’t get sick, my brother did afterwards but I kept my mouth shut. The Thames is a safe environment to do long distance, rather than swimming forty miles out to sea; if you get into trouble you can put your feet down and find a place to get out. It’s a unique environment.’
The brothers’ equipment was minimal. ‘I later saw David Walliams on the TV, he had four people drying his wetsuit with hairdryers while he ate his lunch, whereas we camped by the river and put on the same cold wetsuit that we’d taken off six hours before. Every morning at four o’clock was difficult, especially the second day, but by the third day your body gets conditioned to it.’ Richard found himself mentally drifting off while swimming and humming songs to himself: ‘an hour would pass and I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking about.’ While they succeeded in their challenge and finished the swim after five days, they only raised around half of their intended £2,500, but he would like to try it again: ‘swimming is such a tonic, isn’t it? It makes you full of life, especially in open water.’
The following year it was the turn of American Charlie Wittmack. His plan was to undertake an eleven-month 10,000-mile world triathlon, swimming the Thames and the Channel, cycling from France to Nepal and then climbing Mount Everest. ‘Originally my idea was to connect Captain Webb’s Channel swim and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest,’ he explains, ‘then I decided to make it a world triathlon.’ Charlie tested things out by climbing Everest in 2003, where he learned about mother and child mortality in Nepal, and decided to raise money to improve basic health care by supporting community health workers. Charlie and his wife Cate withdrew their life savings, sold their house and car and took out a hefty loan, and Charlie also insured himself for $2.5 million – in case the journey killed him. ‘I had read a lot about Pugh’s swim, and as I researched further I got even more excited when I realised the environmental success story that the Thames presented. It was a dead river, now there were 320 types of aquatic life. I even heard on the BBC there were little seahorses swimming around London.’
Charlie was then thirty-three and working as an attorney and college professor, and, while he’d been to London a few times, he’d never swum in the Thames. He was aware of the Channel Association people who trained in the river, as well as SwimTrek, and he’d followed the progress of the Walsh brothers, ‘but most people in the US don’t know much about the Thames, people are not that intelligent about geography around the world and certainly not Britain or the Thames, so I would tell them its history, where it starts and goes’.
The reaction to his intended swim ‘wasn’t that great, it was more than people could imagine. A 250-mile swim is not something most Americans would ever think about, marathon swimming is not a very popular sport in the US, we don’t have that rich history that you all have with the Channel Swimming Association. In the US people don’t really understand exploration and adventurers, the public are more interested in traditional sports, like American football and basketball. If you want to go climb a mountain that’s even offensive to a lot of people, they see it as sort of selfish and egomaniacal and grandiose. So as an adventurer it’s always fun being in the UK because you really understand why it is that people want to go out and push the limits of human endurance.’ And that’s why he chose the Thames, a testing ground for human endeavour for hundreds of years and where his hero Captain Webb once trained.
A triumphant Charlie Wittmack on the escort boat just off the coast of Cap Griz Nez, having swum the Thames and then the Channel as part of his 2010 world triathlon.
Like others before him, Charlie initially wanted to swim through London, but he couldn’t get permission from the PLA. American press reports say he ‘started at the source’; swimming 275 miles ‘up’ river, but in fact, like Lewis Pugh, he too began around Buscot Lock. ‘The first day was really tough, it was eight to ten miles and every few strokes I would get stuck on something and have to stand up and walk again, about twenty per cent of the first day was spent walking and a lot of it was just spent floating and doing breaststroke and trying to get through shallow water.’
Charlie was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the water: ‘in the upper Thames it tasted great, it was very clear, and most of the time I could see the bottom.’ However, like other long-distance Thames swimmers, he did get sick. ‘I went to hospital twice, the doctors weren’t really willing to say what exactly was wrong, some people thought it was some sort of amoebic dysentery, but your medical system is different from the US and folks in the UK don’t worry about that sort of thing too much. In the US I would have gone through days and days of medical tests and evaluations at great expense. In the UK I was just told I was foolish for swimming in the Thames and I should go home and not do that any more.’ Charlie also lost ‘about four toenails’ during his swim, cut his feet on wire and glass and one day, because he was so tired, accidentally dropped the kayak he was carrying on his foot.
‘There was no real euphoric time, it’s just hard, you’re in water up to sixteen hours a day, you just take half an hour at a time. I knew I had ten months left of the rest of the expedition, swimming the Thames was only a small part. I tried to enter a meditative state because if you allow yourself the indulgence of thinking about things aside from the swim it really becomes such a distraction that it makes it hard to complete the challenge you have in front of you.’
Getting started each day was the most difficult thing and he ‘ate everything I could find, sandwiches, bread, fruit’, as well as consuming a litre of high-carbohydrate drink every half-hour. He had one person paddling in a canoe next to him, wherea
s for the Channel part of his swim he had a support crew of twelve.
Charlie says it’s hard to say how much money he raised, but ‘at the end of the day the programme in Nepal was fully funded through Save the Children. You need to be careful that the money goes to the charity and not to fund the expedition.’ As for the future, ‘I would absolutely love to swim the Thames again, without all the pressure of a world triathlon on the other end and the financial pressure of funding it. The Thames is such an extraordinary place, it’s absolutely beautiful and the swim was so serene, but oftentimes I didn’t have the opportunity to really appreciate it. I really regret that. It’s difficult on a year-long expedition to stay in the moment and I struggled with that. My advice to others is absolutely do it, particularly the upper portion, wherever you can get in.’
In 2011, when David Walliams started his Thames swim he began upstream from Buscot Lock at Riverside Park near Halfpenny Bridge, striding into the water at 8.22 a.m. and ‘walking into a bath of ice’. He’d assumed the river might be warm in September, but it was 15 degrees, colder than when he’d swum the Channel five years before. It was when ‘a blue tinge’ began creeping up his back, one of the first signs of hypothermia, that he was advised to put on a wetsuit.
David, already well known as a TV comedian and for his Channel swim that had raised a million pounds for Sport Relief, has a family tradition of Thames swimming. ‘My mum swam in the Thames, she was a keen swimmer and in a swimming club and she did races in south London,’ he explains. ‘She always liked open water and lidos. Most people don’t like swimming outdoors, they like swimming pools, they’re clean and they like the temperature.’ But his only experience in the Thames had been a dip on a summer’s day in his twenties near Henley. ‘When I told people that I was going to do it their eyes lit up because it was for Sport Relief and they were pleased and excited because it was something dramatic. For us, the thing was working out how to do it and make it interesting and make it work as entertainment on TV. That was the challenge, otherwise it might be boring.
‘When I began my swim it was unseasonably cold after a bad summer, and it’s tough. The cold really tires you out, you expend so much energy fighting the cold, just being in it is tough, you need to keep moving. My mind was focused but in the Thames there is so much to look at, the banks were lined with hundreds of people, you go through villages and towns, people come out to have a look. There’s a lot to see and react to. But you don’t hear so well in the water and it all gets a bit dreamy. You get glimpses, as you lift your head out to breathe, you get snaps and snatches, it doesn’t feel like reality. Swimming the Thames is just very iconic, there are so many landmarks on the banks and it gives you a new perspective doing it at water level, it feels very special.’
While the Lechlade area is today known as a starting point for long-distance swims, and in David’s case marked the point when watching someone swim the Thames became mass entertainment, others like to bathe here, too. Roger Deakin of Waterlog fame swam at Buscot Pool, where he found the river a ‘modest affair’, the water clear enough to see tench weaving among the lily stalks, but he decried the ‘big, ugly notices proclaiming the danger of deep water’.
Grafton Lock, a couple of miles downstream, is another favourite spot for modern swimmers, such as Phil Tibenham. He first came to swimming after a back injury. ‘I always wanted to try outdoor swimming and I had always swum in the sea, but I started swimming in the Thames around six years ago whenever I could.’ He has taken part in a number of organised events, but also swims on his own. ‘It feels like I’ve done it for ever, swimming in the Thames. First I tried a little paddle and it escalated from there. It’s the most interesting way to swim. A couple of times I’ve swum at Grafton Lock alone, people are not happy about that, particularly Mum. Once I swam just before Christmas, it was chilly and I wore a wetsuit. Dusk was falling and the moon was just coming up, and I swam about half a kilometre. To be in water under a moon alone . . .!’ When his daughter was seven he took her for a dip at Grafton: ‘it was cold and there were a couple of grumpy swans nearby, but swimming in the Thames is definitely something that one can pass on to one’s children. It’s a gift for life. I’ve never got ill. Higher up in the Cotswolds it’s really clean. You get out and your hair feels like it’s got conditioner in it and your skin feels like silk, it’s like a mud treatment. I’ve swum other rivers and the Thames is cleaner. It’s a sanctuary for me. I did a two-day swim near Grafton Lock, we got out there at night and the lock keeper made us tea and we became friends.’ Phil usually straps a knife to his calf if he’s swimming alone, not to fend off anything but in case he gets caught in something. But the worst thing that’s ever happened is losing an earplug. He is a Shaw Method swimming instructor, a method that focuses on body awareness and a swimmer’s relationship with water. To him, swimming is ‘science crossed over with art and, for want of a better word, the spiritual side’.
It’s because of this rich recent heritage of Thames swimming around Lechlade that I’ve signed up for a one-day swim with SwimTrek, covering five miles from Buscot Lock to Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire. SwimTrek has been running Thames swims since its inception in 2003 and founder Simon Murie says he enjoys ‘things that are iconic. I need something classical like the Greek islands, the Hellespont in Turkey, and the Thames; it’s a famous river.’ He has vivid memories of spending childhood summer holidays in Ham in south-west London in the late seventies. ‘My mother was a keen river swimmer and I remember sitting on the side of the Thames with my thermos flask, her listening to the radio and me with my comics. I was a young boy and conscious of what others would think and I sort of dreaded it. But my mum liked getting away from things, the stresses of everyday life, and we spent a lot of summer days swimming against the current and crossing over to the canoe club. In the evenings there were pleasure boats with disco lights flashing and there was me, a thirteen-year-old, and people looking out of the windows thinking, “what the hell is he doing?” As I grew older, I got more into it. When I was young I would think, “who’s looking at me?” By the time I was fifteen or sixteen it didn’t worry me. It was very important for my mum to be able to get away from it all, and when she died we scattered her ashes on the place she liked most.’
So perhaps it’s not surprising that he chose the Thames for SwimTrek’s first swimming holiday. ‘The reaction from people is different now, we used to be asked, “are you allowed to do it?” and “are you doing this for charity?” They couldn’t think why else we’d be doing it; we had to explain we were doing it for pleasure.’ With the first group of Thames swimmers many lived in London and wanted to immerse themselves in a river that flowed past their backyard. The company has continued to run Thames swims every year: ‘we get a lot of Germans. After the British, they’re into open-water swimming; it’s the Saxon heritage. But ten years ago open-water swimming was not nearly as popular or fashionable as it is now.’
As I set off for Lechlade I’m wondering what my experience will be like swimming in the upper Thames. Will it be as clean as people say, or will I get ill? Can I enjoy a proper swim, whisked along by the current, or will I only be wading in freezing cold water?
2
Cotswolds Swim
‘Of exercises, swimming’s best,
Strengthens the muscles and the chest’
Dr E. Baynard, Health, 1764
It’s a Monday lunchtime in early August and when I look out of the window of the train from London there are low black clouds most of the way to Swindon. I’m anxious about a few things: mainly if I will be able to cover the whole five miles. I’m a fair-weather swimmer; for me it’s a solitary activity done for pleasure. I’ve always swum outdoors, starting as a toddler at the unheated lido on Hampstead Heath in north London and then as a teenager in the Heath’s bathing ponds. But cold water has become more of a challenge as I’ve grown older and I only venture to the lido or ponds on warm days. While I don’t mind swimming with weeds and fish, I’ve never
been competitive and I’ve never swum any set distance.
In February, shortly after I visited Thames Head and the source, I started my ‘training’, aiming first to swim twice a week at an indoor pool. I knew I’d have to be able to swim for at least an hour at a time for this trip, and it was a couple of weeks before I managed a mile, with quite a bit of stopping and starting and a growing sense of lane rage. Then I decided, for the first time in my life, to wear a wetsuit, optional for SwimTrek but providing protection against the cold. The label on mine said it was inspired by the killer whale and when I tried it on I immediately felt encased; it was like wearing a thick rubbery inner tube. I tried it out at the Gospel Oak lido; the water was just 15 degrees, which would normally be too chilly for me, but with the wetsuit on I was able to swim straight away. I was oddly bouncy as I started doing front crawl, travelling on the surface of the water as if held up by some invisible force. Then I tried breaststroke. My feet popped up out of the water as if they were made of cork; I couldn’t kick; I had no power in my legs at all. I did two lengths and gave up. As the weeks went by I managed to swim further, then I moved to the Heath’s mixed bathing pond, deciding this would more resemble the experience I would have in the River Thames, but I still didn’t know if I could do five miles.
As the train reaches Reading I see the river from the window again: it looks very wide, empty and cold. I have other worries apart from the distance, especially swans. I’ve heard many tales of having to escape hissing swans, or what it feels like to be at water level faced with a 6-foot wingspan. I was scared enough of swans to begin with; now I’m just praying I won’t see any.
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