If you've read any of our other blogs, or our About page, you'll know that I grew up swimming and that I was fortunate enough to achieve a lot and make lifelong friendships along the way. National titles, World Championship teams, a career spent chasing the Olympic 10km. But my biggest achievement and fondest memory isn't one of my own races. It came in August 2022, coaching and supporting my dad, Michael, to swim across the English Channel. Let's wind it back a few years first.
Why the Channel still means something
When you talk to someone who doesn’t know much about marathon swimming, they always ask the same thing: have you swum the English Channel, or are you interested in swimming it? Marathon swimming technically begins at 10km, which is the professional event distance, and anything over 20km is classified as an ultramarathon. The Channel doesn’t sit neatly under either label, but it’s the one that always comes up.
Is it the hardest ultramarathon swim out there? No, not if you’re comparing average conditions. But on any given day it can be completely impassable, which is exactly why you’re given a week-long window rather than a fixed date. And just because it isn’t the hardest doesn’t mean it’s not bloody hard, plenty of accomplished swimmers have failed it. For what it’s worth, I haven’t done it myself.
Some people compare the Channel to climbing Everest. I’ve never liked that comparison much, mostly because I have no idea how hard Everest actually is. Where the two are alike is that you need close to perfect conditions to pull either off. Fewer people have technically crossed the Channel than have summited Everest, but I’m not sure that number means much on its own.
Getting back into it
It was 2018, and my dad had got back into swimming, well, he'd never really stopped, but with four kids now grown up and a bit more time and money with everyone out of the house, he decided to swim his first marathon swim, the Rottnest Channel Swim. He'd done some 5km races back in his 30s, but this was him properly getting back into it. He was doing most of his training in the open water, since he lived on the Victorian surf coast. He completed the swim in a little over 6 hours, which is pretty good for a 20km open water race, and for someone in their late 50s.
Setting the date
A few months after Rottnest, he started thinking about the English Channel. I rang around, spoke to Australian marathon swimmer John Van Wisse, and booked my dad a spot to attempt it in August 2020, during a neap tide. I was also going to be the one coaching him, the furthest I'd swum myself was 25km at the FINA World Championships, so 9km short of the Channel distance, but similar territory.
As part of his medical clearance, he needed an ECG. It was during that test that we found out his VF had come back. He'd had an ablation in 2013 and would need another one. That knocked us around a bit, you don't book a Channel swim and then get told mid-preparation that your heart needs another procedure first. He had it done and was cleared again, ready to go, and then Covid came along and the swim got pushed back entirely. With flight restrictions still in place across parts of the pandemic, we delayed it past 2021, and the date was finally set for August 2022, with a week-long neap tide window. By the time it actually arrived, that date had been three and a half years in the making, not the one-year build most swimmers get.
Why the neap tide matters
If you've never looked into Channel swimming, the tide talk probably sounds like background noise, but it's actually the whole game. Pilots have traditionally booked swimmers onto neap tides rather than spring tides, because the tidal flow is gentler and the window around the turn of the tide, the calm patch before it switches direction, lasts longer. That matters most right at the French end, near Cap Gris-Nez, where a strong tide can sweep a swimmer past the cape entirely and force them to fight the current for hours just to get back to land they could already see. A neap tide gives a pilot more margin to actually land the swimmer where they're aiming, instead of wherever the water happens to push them. Booking my dad onto a neap window wasn't just scheduling, it was buying him the best odds the tide could offer.
The build-up
My dad swims regularly, he was already doing about 4 sessions a week at the beach, but with 20 weeks to go until his swim window, he started ramping it up. He got to around 40-50km a week, with me writing the sessions. The goal was never just to complete the Channel, it was to have enough in reserve that he could pull on that confidence if he needed it, and enjoy the swim rather than survive it. My dad is one of those people who wants to walk into something knowing he's done the work.
Coaching your own father is a strange kind of job. Every other athlete I've written a program for, I can be purely objective about their fatigue, their niggles, their pacing. With my dad, every session had a second conversation running underneath it, the coach in me wanting more data and more consistency, and the son in me not wanting to push a man in his 60s with a heart history too hard on a Tuesday afternoon set. I leant on the numbers to settle that argument with myself. If the sessions were getting done and he was recovering well, I'd back the program. If he was carrying fatigue into a week, we'd back off, no matter what the plan on paper said.
The water temperature, sitting around 16 degrees, was never going to be an issue for him. Wetsuits aren't allowed for a ratified Channel swim, but he's always been comfortable in cold water. The bigger question was the distance itself. Covering it in the pool isn't physiologically the same as open water, but mentally it mattered, so he did one 30km session in the pool, and I jumped in with him for the first and last 5km. I remember finishing my 5km before him, sitting on the pool deck at 6am with a coffee going cold, watching my dad grind out lap after lap on his own, and thinking that whatever happened in France, he'd already proven the important part to himself.
Race week in Dover
My dad flew to England a week earlier and rented a house in Deal, about a 30-minute drive from Dover. I flew in two days before his window opened. I also left my partner at home, 30 weeks pregnant with our first child on the way, really good look. She knew how important this was to me, but she wasn't exactly thrilled about it either.
I flew from Melbourne to Perth, then direct from Perth to London, before getting the train down to Dover, where I met my parents. They also had their friend Russell with them, who they'd met on a previous adventure.
I was jet lagged when I landed, but it was good seeing my parents and getting in a swim with my dad. His official window was due to open in 3 days and ran for about a week, so we were fairly relaxed to start with. At that stage we were watching the weather, and it was looking like it might turn and be pretty average for most of the week. The plan was for my parents to meet the skipper the next day.
The following day, my parents met the skipper for the first time at 9am. I was actually out for breakfast with Russell when we got a call from my dad saying he was swimming to France that afternoon, 3:25pm start, boat leaving at 2:30. Wow. It was on, and I was sitting there having breakfast with Russell. Not that it mattered, my dad had all the nutrition he'd need for a double crossing, he was that prepared. I got back to our accommodation fast, and we all headed down to the boat in Dover to depart. With Michael going in at around 3:30pm, he was going to be swimming the majority of the crossing in the dark.
The crossing
We were all on the boat and ready to go. We departed, and before we knew it we were greasing Michael up with lanolin to keep him warm, although with the water near 17 degrees, the sun out, and him being comfortable in colder water, it was unlikely to be an issue. He jumped in and swam to shore, then looked back at us from the water, with the white cliffs of Dover behind him. He started swimming, and we'd talked beforehand about going out easy, adrenaline can wreck your race strategy if you go out too hard early and pay for it on the back end.
He was swimming strong and easy, about a metre off the port side of the boat, and we were cruising. He fed every 20 minutes, three times an hour, aiming for around 80-90 grams of carbs an hour, since that was a volume he could eat comfortably.
The sun was setting and I was sitting on the bow, looking back towards England. It was a perfect night, clear sky, slow rolling waves, no chop. My dad was powering through as the sun went down. His instructions were simple: don't tell him how far he had left. He didn't ask either, he just wanted to keep swimming until his hands touched sand. As the moon came out, he had a light on his cap and was lit up by a flood light off the port side of the vessel, tucked in just past the bow, with our skipper keeping an eye on him the whole time through a camera pointed down at the water.
There's a strange stillness that sets in on a support boat at night. No one's talking much. You're not swimming, so there's nothing physical to do except watch and feed him on schedule. I spent a lot of those hours just watching his stroke rate, counting it without really meaning to, the way you do with anyone you've coached for long enough that it becomes automatic. It never dropped. Hour after hour, in the dark, on his own, it never dropped. That told me more than any conversation could have.
From the rushed start to the water itself, it turned into close to the perfect swim: a clear night, a smooth, calm ocean, and the water actually warming up as we got closer to France. From the boat we could see the lights near Cap Gris-Nez, which we were aiming for. We had the tide on our side, which would carry us onto the beach right at the cape without pushing us past it. That's the skipper's job, get the swimmer onto the beach or near the cape on the tide. Miss it, whether because of the swimmer's pace or the skipper's navigation, and you can end up swimming against the tide, stuck in the same spot for hours. That was never a risk with my dad.
Touching French sand
As we got closer to shore and my dad neared the end of the 34km swim from England to France, the boat couldn't get any closer than about 300m out, the water was too shallow for the vessel's draft. That's when I jumped in and swam next to him as safety support until he touched the sand with his fingertips. Swimming ahead of the boat, I had to keep directing him toward the dimly lit beach, he was a little disorientated by that point, which after 12 hours in the dark is about as normal as it gets. When he finally touched down and stood up, I had to hold him steady. He'd been swimming for 12 hours and 41 minutes, which is pretty bloody good for a 62-year-old, and well inside the reserve we'd built into the training in the first place.
Looking back towards England, it was about 3am, and it happened to be Father's Day. I got to hold him and give him a proper hug, just father and son, and have a moment with him on that beach. It brought a tear to my eye. I don't think he actually remembers it, he was too deep in it by that point, running purely on the last of his adrenaline and whatever was left of twelve hours of feeds. We didn't stay long before swimming back out to the boat, the tide doesn't wait for a moment on a beach, no matter how much it deserves one.
The trip home
Back on the boat, we celebrated, and he had two beers, which came straight back up. Turns out 12 hours of energy gels and two beers right after each other don't mix. It took about 2 hours to get back to England. By the time we arrived, the sun was coming up and we were ready to start the day, running on no sleep and more adrenaline than any of us had any right to still have.
What it taught me
I've had a lot of my own moments in the water. Wins, near misses, the ones that got away. None of them sit with me the way that night does. I think it's because for the first time, none of it was about me. I wasn't the one who had to perform, I was just there to make sure the person who mattered most to me got the best possible shot at something he'd earned the right to attempt. That's a completely different kind of pressure to racing, and I didn't fully understand it until I was sitting on the bow of that boat with nothing to do but watch and count strokes.
It also changed how I coach. Watching my dad's stroke rate hold steady for twelve hours in the dark taught me more about what actually gets someone across a long swim than any session I ever wrote for myself as an athlete. It's not raw fitness in the end, plenty of fitter swimmers have failed that crossing. It's whatever it is that keeps a person's technique together when their body is telling them to stop, hours after the adrenaline has worn off and long before the finish is anywhere in sight. That's most of what I try to build into the athletes and swimmers we work with now, fitness gets you to the start line, but it's that other thing that gets you across.
This is hands down my fondest memory from my swimming career. None of my own wins come close. This is what endurance sport is actually about.
