Swimming

Annoying and irresponsible--I always find it amazing that so many people don't seem to have heard the frequently-repeated warnings of how dangerous the Thames is.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/30/thames-safety-warning-after-film-maker-has-to-be-rescued-from-river

Who knows whether he would have been OK if those guys hadn't pulled him out, despite wetsuit and all.

Here's a little photo essay on closed swimming venues in London:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2020/dec/01/deep-dive-empty-swimming-venues-during-lockdown-in-pictures

Interesting, thanks for the link.

"It has a slightly odd length at 30.5m, which makes the maths a bit tricky when trying to work out how far I’ve swum’"

Only if you think of it in meters. 30.5m will be a 33+1/3 yard pool so 3 lengths is 100 yards.

Also:-

"
Staff have been keeping the temperature at the usual 29C (84F) during lockdown
...
‘I always find this pool a bit on the cold side when I swim here, but the colder water does seem to sharpen up the stroke somehow’
"

29^oC cold for an indoor pool? What kind of insanity is that? Most aim for 26^oC-28^oC (and Olympic pool regs are 25^oC-28^oC.) I hate pools when they're too warm.

I find it persistently annoying that the [sup]o[/sup] isn't available on UK keyboards. As a symbol, º is called the 'masculine ordinal indicator' in LibreOffice, as I just discovered when I copied it across.

Good point about the measurement, but slightly more simply, 30.5 (strictly speaking 30.48m) is 100 feet. 1 yard is 3 feet, so the primary measure that those who devised the pool length were thinking about was clearly feet. Good to see that the pool is still flying the flag for metric martyrism. :)

Yes, that remark about the temperature mystified me, too. I can only imagine that he must mean the air temperature--29ºC as water temperature is *really* warm.

so the primary measure that those who devised the pool length were thinking about was clearly feet

No. My local pool is 33+1/3m long (as is the one I grew swimming in 30+ years ago). There's no metric equivalent of a 1/3m so that argument falls away. It's purely so that you swim a specific distance in a whole number of lengths. Most pools built nowadays are 25m, 33+1/3m or 50m for this very reason. Other lengths are generally due to space constraints.

The pool in question was obviously built when swim distances were based on yards.

29 degrees must feel like swimming in a bath! I was out in the Atlantic both days on the weekend, I think I might invest in something to cover my head a bit more as i could definitely feel it!

Any recommendations for a good open water swimming watch? Apple Watch se seems to be a decent shout but I don’t really wear watches daily so open to something more training focussed.

The pool in question was obviously built when swim distances were based on yards.

Ah, thanks, I just thought it would be easier for mental arithmetic to think in feet. Perhaps it's just that the thought of always having to swim lengths in multiples of 3 to get to a round figure worries me. :)

I have noted all the different lengths of London lidos before but wasn't sufficiently aware that there were 33 1/3 metre pools, too. I thought they'd all been built before the EU destroyed our native British culture with its (the EU's) dastardly metric system.

Dont tell me there are fucking Strava segments in the ocean too?!

Well it’s hard to post mid swim pics on instagram so I need to show it on some form of social media

Good point. Though this follower would be happy with a wetsuit #swimbod on the beach selfie 😍

Any recommendations for a good open water swimming watch? Apple Watch se seems to be a decent shout but I don’t really wear watches daily so open to something more training focussed.

I've used a Forerunner 920xt, 935 and 945 for open water swimming. All a bit hit and miss but then if you read the DC Rainmaker reviews of open water swimming watches you'll find that they all suffer from similar problems.

Here's my Swim Serpentine swims from 2019:-

• https://www.strava.com/activities/2728678742
  
• https://www.strava.com/activities/2728678743
  
• https://www.strava.com/activities/2728678738
  
  

No idea why the watch (the 935 at the time) decided not to log the first activity properly, looking on Garmin Connect it had no problem recording strokes and HR for the activity. Miles 3&4 and 5&6 recorded fine though.

The Garmin Connect activities give you much more info than just Strava:-

* https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/4080714384
* https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/4081131371
* https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/4081595722

(Requoted to stop the forum expanding the garmin connect links.)

My brother seems to get by quite well with his Garmin Swim 2.

(I'm selling my 935 for £200 in the classifieds. I upgraded to a 945 because of the PulseOx measuring [I wear the 945 all the time, including when asleep] and for wrist based HR when pool swimming. For open water swimming I was happy to wear a HR strap but it's annoying for pool swimming.)

I always find it amazing that so many people don't seem to have heard the frequently-repeated warnings of how dangerous the Thames is

This pisses me off. Swimming in the Thames has risk but people want to do it for all sorts of reasons. Banning stuff never works. Educate people and facilitate them to reduce the risk.

For open water swimming I was happy to wear a HR strap but it's annoying for pool swimming.

I don't understand unless you are one of those neoprene wearing people?

I use a go pro mounted on a kick board which I tow along as a tow float. Partly because the distances I swim at the moment are so short and the gps on my watch often plots them on the land. I need to have something to prove I’ve been in.

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I don't understand unless you are one of those neoprene wearing people?

Only if I don't have time to do enough open water training (which I rarely do get time for). For SS 2019 I didn't get a chance to do any open water training and faced with the prospect of 3h30 in 17^oC water it wasn't a difficult choice to slather myself in neoprene.

This pisses me off. Swimming in the Thames has risk but people want to do it for all sorts of reasons. Banning stuff never works. Educate people and facilitate them to reduce the risk.

I do share that general attitude, but it didn't occur to me in the context of the Thames. It would be interesting to get a full run-d0wn of the risks--in news reports, you only ever hear a few that people use to make the general point, but I'm sure there must be more. I personally can't understand why anyone would want to swim in the Thames in London, but what I've always wondered about is why, if the river is now supposed to be cleaner than it was, there isn't one of those lido platforms that you get in other European cities. I mean, Livingstone wanted to copy the Paris Plage, but without people actually being able to swim in the Thames, but there are plenty of river swimming facilities elsewhere. Perhaps there are some constraints that really can't be overcome so easily.

The basic risks in the Thames are temperature, pollution, current and boats.

Temperature is manageable with acclimatisation and/or neoprene.

Pollution is an issue as the sewers frequently discharge into the river, mostly after heavy rain. The water is fairly safe a few days after a discharge as the sewage gets flushed out to sea. This will be better, but not fixed, when the Thames Tideway Tunnel opens.

Current is more tricky. You are okay at slack tide but the pull even 20 minutes after the tide turns is quite something. You need to plan where you are going to get in and out carefully. Tide tables are only approximate due to weather influences so you really need some local experience and knowledge or a guide.

Boats are a problem. A swimmer in the water is tiny and difficult to spot and some of the boats go quite quickly. You basically need a roped off area or an escort boat.

The legal position is swimming in the Thames between Putney Bridge and Crossness requires permission of the PLA. As far as I can tell they always say no, even to people that have things like support boats and have done similar things in the past.

Plus there is swimming in some of the docks: https://londonsroyaldocks.com/open-water-swimming/

Those solve many of the problems listed above: (pollution, current, boats, permission, safety)

Thanks. Other things the latest article mentioned were specific to jumping from height, which I'm sure is not something that even Thames swimming advocates would recommend:

“Jumping from a height into the river brings all kinds of hazards. The Thames is a very fast-flowing river, running twice as fast as an Olympic swimmer can swim, so anyone jumping in will be swiftly swept away.

“There is also the danger of hitting hidden obstacles, particularly close to shore. A tidal range of seven metres means there’s a huge difference in the depth of the water between high and low tide.”

Even if a jumper didn’t hit an obstacle, the spokesman added, jumping from height can leave people severely winded and there is a danger of suffering cold-water shock which can result in drowning.

I'm sure that different water levels can be a problem even when not jumping, or indeed objects underwater (such as those kl mentions exist in Shadwell Lido, but which in this case again would probably mainly affect people jumping in).

Ah, that's good. It seems to correspond to the approach jellybaby recommends.

It's well-documented that there are objects way under the water in Shadwell, but if they're more than 3 metres down, they're not going to be a real issue for anyone. And as they've never become an issue for anyone, they're more than 3 metres down.

Haven't been in since early Oct as I got the COVID and haven't fully recovered. Missing out on the most important winter acclimitisation period of the year, it'll be a tough curve when I finally get back in...

Tower Bridge apparently has a clearance of 8.5 m at high tide which isn't bonkers high. You could probably make an Olympic sport out of jumping from that sort of height but you wouldn't catch me doing it. Even at low tide 16m is the kind of height (other) people jump when doing things like coasteering.

The obstacles bit is about some local knowledge or a guide again. I took my daughters coasteering in Cornwall this summer and we paid a reasonable fee per person to be in a small group with a guide that knew the area. Others were on their own and our guide commented that where some people were jumping would be too shallow to land safely in about an hour, hopefully they knew that.

Fortunately for my coasteering exploits my daughters are less adventurous than me so I can pretend to be invincible when really I was bricking it at the though of going much higher...

I'll be in the fantastic West Reservoir tomorrow morning. After a month out and with the current weather I'm way behind the curve and will probably be in and out rather fast.

As @Greenbank says West Reservoir ticks many of the boxes around safety. Royal Docks is great too but much further from me.

Watching this makes my palms sweat:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDqN8sEl6oE

I don't think I realised you had it. Get better soon!