Well that's reassuring

In my last post, I told you about a training swim that had seen five of us swim from Bondi to Bronte and back again. About 4.5km all up, and double what most of my regular swimming crew and I would already consider a decent race distance (the annual 2.2km Bondi to Bronte oceanswim).

It had gone well, everyone was feeling pretty stoked, and within a few hours of finishing that swim, the texts were already circulating proposing a bolder, much longer training swim: Bondi to Coogee and back again. A neat 10km or so.

Bold indeed. None of us had ever done a race or swim of anything like that distance, and in fact the furthest any of us had swum in a pool before was about 6km.

Bold also because this was going to take us a long way off shore. You can see from the GPS trace of our route below that we were a long way out, particularly off Bronte/Glamarama where we were probably close to 1km off shore.

That is a long way out. Really.

Out there, bobbing about in grey water, so deep you can't see anywhere near the bottom, you do feel a bit exposed.

So this was going to be pushing the boundaries.

At first, it was just Robbo "The Salmon" Salamon and me toying with the idea. In truth, had it just been two of us on the day, I would almost certainly have chickened out and voted for the slightly less scary trip to Bronte again.

But, already fulfilling his intended role, Fred "The Lynx" Linker came to the rescue. He wanted to get a few more open water kms under his paddles before the big event, so he said he'd accompany us in the kayak.

Suddenly this was sounding like it might happen.

The opportunity for chickening disappeared altogether when Kevin "The Kingfish" Einstein said he'd come and swim with us too.

Super Sophie from Ozpaddle made it all possible, getting a kayak to Fred on Friday night.

We were now three swimmers and a paddler with a kayak, and no excuses for not doing it. Gulp!

Saturday dawned overcast but completely still. So just before 7am, there we were at the beach, staring at the very distant headland - the ominously named Shark Point - that we'd have to swim around to get to Coogee.

The result? Well, you can watch for yourself because we took some video footage. I've tried to embed it in the space below, but if there's nothing there, then click on this link to watch.

After this many blog posts, you'd think I'd have figured out how to embed the videos properly. Alas no. They work ok if you're looking at this on a PC screen, but not on mobile devices for some reason.

So it seems that, on a good day, in calm conditions, I can swim 10km in open water. And so can Robbo and Kevin. After such a sterling performance, Robbo has even decided to enter the South Head Roughwater himself. Good onya Robbo!

Have I just killed all the suspense for the actual race itself in just 10 days time?

I don't think so.

Race day itself - Sunday 19 May - will present a whole lot of new challenges, including:

• conditions that can only be worse (given how good they were last Saturday);
• having to swim in through the Heads of Sydney Harbour - a notoriously currenty and treacherous bit of water;
• there being no psychological safety net of somewhere to bail out en route - when swimming to Coogee, if we'd got into trouble we could have swum in to any of a number of beaches along the way eg. Tama, Bronte, Clovelly, Gordon's Bay. On the way to South Head, it's just cliffs, cliffs, cliffs - they don't call the suburb Dover Heights for nothing, you know;
• a bunch of other swimmers, kayaks and boats to navigate around;
• swimming after a crappy night's sleep - I know already that I will be tossing and turning with nerves the whole night before the race, anxiously looking at the bedside clock every hour or so and stressing that I'm not sleeping; and
• the pressure of knowing that so many people have contributed so much time, effort and money to supporting my swim, and the corresponding need for me to deliver!

On that subject, I'm delighted to say that fundraising is now well past the $9,000 mark! With a bit of luck, the original goal to raise $10,000 ($1,000 per km) will be met. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed.

This coming weekend? Nothing quite so epic as last weekend. Hoping perhaps for a few good laps at Bondi (1km per lap) or maybe I'll join the Hammer Squads again at Icebergs.

It's hard to believe that the event has come up so quickly. I'm getting pretty excited about it...