Sylle Swims

www.sylleswims.com

The most common questions (along with ”How thick is your wetsuit?”) you get asked after someone reads ”English Channel Swimmer” one line under your name on your name-tag:

- What do you think about during long swims? Don’t you get bored?

- Nope … don’t get bored … ever. What was the first question again? Oh … right. Well … I count my strokes…

- …

Herding sheep can cause strokes ...

See, even in the circle of open-water swimmers, it is sorta frowned-upon to count strokes. But you see, I like numbers. And swimming too. I get really enthusiastic when I see numbers like 47.49, 6:57, 28:21 or 23’32″ (little game: try to figure out what they correspond to).

It’s usually quite disheartening to do long swims in open-water with a watch … odds are that you’ll be disappointed every time you look at it and it shows that you have swam 30 minutes less than what you thought you had. That’s when the stroke counting comes in handy.

Here is how I usually proceed. I count every other stroke in my head (sometimes out loud too), so it goes … 2 … 4 … 6 … 8 … …296 … 298 … 300 … and then back to … 2 … 4 … 6 …

The idea is that 300 strokes corresponds to approximately 5 minutes for someone with a stroke rate around 60 (strokes per minute). And for some reason time passes much quicker while I’m counting than when I’m not. I think it comes from the fact that in the second case I always know where I’m at timewise and do not have to be all worried about how long is left before the next feed. I can then assign the couting to a bunch of neurons in the intraparietal sulcus and focus a bit more on enjoying the Britney Spears / AC-DC / Black Eyed Peas song(s) that are stuck in my head. Swimming a marathon is all about swimming from one feed to another … for me this turned into taking 1500 strokes + 1500 strokes + 1500 strokes + 1500 strokes + ….

If you’re doing other strokes, it works just as well. Typically I’d take 20 strokes per minute in butterfly and breaststroke and 40 per minute in backstroke.

I believe that this idea (among others) came from Ned Denison who is famous for (among other things) being an expert at predicting (to the one stroke) how many strokes he will have to take to go from point A (say, first corner of Sandycove Island …) to a point B (Baltimore Beacon ? hint hint).

Oh and that’s not the full extend of my counting routines. There’s also techniques for counting pool laps (1km = 40 laps, plenty of chances of getting lost), repeats of 100s as well as one Inception-inspired way (one counter embedded in another one) to keep count of the number of feeds whilst counting one’s strokes and computing the number of jelly fish encounters.

And then of course if it’s not enough to keep you amused during your long swims you can also start getting amazed whenever a prime number, a perfect number or one that’s dear to your heart pops up in your mind. Or you can try counting in other languages, backwards, backwards in another language, only odd numbers, replacing numbers with alphabetical characters, members of the French Rugby squad (sorted by height) or Olympic Host Cities.

Am I an exception as an obsessive compulsive swimmer?

Here’s a short video clip taken by Greta during my (unsuccessful) 24km medley swim attempt. What you’re seeing is a butterfly stroke with a Stroke Rate of about 20 strokes per minute (one stroke every third second) and a speed of just over 3km/h. There is quite a long underwater phase and I’m actually trying to go quite far down which (probably) explains why my feet are very much clearing the surface.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the music

So this is what my stroke looks like not only in open-water, but for anything over 200 meters in the pool too. Naturally, it’s not quite the same as what you see during the Olympics, but an English Channel crossing (if you’re not a pal of Petar Stoychev’s) is not so much about speed as it is about being able to keep going comfortably for a long while. In my opinion it is all the more true with butterfly that you run the risk of burning yourself if you go out too fast and might end up not being able to have your arms clearing the water surface.

This is actually one of my biggest fears. Imagine after swimming for 12 hours and getting closer and closer to La France, I haven’t broken my stroke once, I am done with my 22nd feed (Maxim, hot water and blackcurrant), drop the cup and to everybody’s surprise start taking a couple strokes of front crawl … This isn’t far-fetched as you get in a state of high confusion after hours and hours of mind-numbing plodding around in the rough, cold water of the English Channel. It would only take seconds to completely ruin a butterfly attempt. If this was to happen, even if 99.9% of the swim had been done in butterfly, could I HONESTLY say that I’ve achieved what I came to do? … not sure about that.

Same thing if I suddenly find myself unable to lift my arms over the surface … according to the article SW 8.2 of the FINA rule book (which I’m memorizing at the moment, as I’m sure there’ll be at least three FINA officials all over me during my September 2013 crossing) I would get disqualified. Good news is that the rule SW 8.5 allows me to dolphin kick for 15 meters when setting off Shakespeare Beach!

And of course there’s the story of the feeds. You’re expected to have to stop in order to feed, right? So technically, you end up breaking your stroke every 30 minutes or so … I wonder what the observers are supposed to look for during a butterfly (or backstroke, or breaststroke) attempt? I might ask.

So anyway, that’s one of the things I’ll have to practice … not breaking my stroke … ever … no matter how tempting it is and how tired, confused or upset I’ll get.

PS: I’ve just updated slightly the Video section

• I would like to facilitate donations to my two chosen charities. What sort of widget/plugin/platform would you recommend for fundraising? The charities I’ve chosen aren’t in the lists for mycharity.ie or humanitic.fr …
• Any idea what the reason is why the homepage of this blog still shows sylleswims.X10.MX instead of sylleswims.COM … while all the other pages are alright?? I’m using WP.org and have a domain name from GoDaddy.

Reward to whoever can help!

Not sure if this has only hit the swedish radio waves …

Put a La la lu on, come on, come on
Grow your hair out long, come on, come
Put a t-shirt on
Do me wrong, do me wrong, do me wrong

I finally remembered where this butterfly business all started. See, I have been asked this quite a few times already in the short period of time when my intention to swim butterfly across the English Channel has been made public. I would usually say it started after I did my Sandycove Island medley or right after my first Channel swim when I trained for one hour or so in Dover harbour alongside Dan Martin. These are key moments, but when did I decide that this stroke was mine? When did I decide that I felt the need to get better at it?

I finally remembered. I can’t tell you the date or even the year actually … Either 2005 or 2006, it’s a bit fuzzy. I was doing a session with the swimming club in my hometown of Villé. I think it was during warm-up, the coach (who will recognize himself … or not) asked us to do a couple of 100m in medley. I was happy enough with my technique at the time, so it came as a big shock when the aforementioned coach told me what I remember as “I’m sorry to say, but your butterfly is de la merde“.

I think that’s what set everything in motion.

The summer after that, I teamed up with a few local swimmers with much more knowledge than me about the art of moving one’s arms forward simultaneously over one’s head while kicking twice. We did 10 repeats of 25m on 1 minute. Then 20 repeats, then 40. Then we did them on 45 seconds and if I remember correctly we eventually did 80 of them. All of that while receiving valuable advice and tweaks for my stroke.

By the end of the summer I could swim these 25 meters in 16 to 17 seconds again and again and again (which I wish I could still do right now).

This is when I met up with the now-twice-mentioned coach who told me that while doing 25s was fun and all, I should really try to do repeats of 50s instead … and that 1’10″ could be a nice interval.

I think I tried five of them, very nearly fainted at the end of them and forgot all about this set until my preparation for the Channel in 2008.

So … thank you Gaétan, Marc, Robin and Théo for kick-starting the butterfly in me!