James has always swum, but in 2008 an amateur swim contest between Southend’s pier and the yacht club changed his life, and got him hooked on marathon swimming forever. “It was the only time I ever swam in a wetsuit,” he chuckles. “I met up with a few triathletes, started swimming Box Lake and then one day decided to swim the Channel.” He wrote a cheque out to a boat pilot on New Year’s Eve, went for a run and that was the start of eight months’ training.

The English Channel is a mean sleeve of cold water. Without protective clothing, a normal human will lose dexterity within 10 minutes of splashing into its waters, suffer from exhaustion and unconsciousness within one to two hours and have a projected survival time of under six hours.

“The English Channel is a mean sleeve of cold water…a normal human will suffer exhaustion and unconsciousness within one to two hours…”

It is also the busiest shipping lane in the world with over 500 steel leviathans jostling for space in its narrow waters, and it generates brawny tides that sweep hapless swimmers in a titanic, energy-sapping S as they struggle from Dover and the closest landfall in France, Cap Gris Nez. As the crow flies it is a 21-mile dash from coast to coast but the powerful ebb and flow of tides mean that a swimmer can swim up to 68 miles, as was the case for Jackie Cobell whose swim, the longest in the history of crossings, took 28 hours and 44 minutes.

Fewer people have swum the Channel than have climbed Mount Everest, a total of just 1,731 swimmers, since the first recorded swim in 1875 which took Captain Webb just under 22 hours.

The water measured 9 degrees celsius while the air temperature was a pleasant 12 degrees. It was the opposite on his later swim record on November 10^th when the sea measured 12 degrees and the air was cold enough to give James second thoughts about going in: “Driving down to the harbour it was 4 degrees outside the car and the swell was kind of big outside [Dover] harbour. I was looking at Andy [the pilot] to call it and I have a sneaking suspicion he was waiting for me to.”

“It was hard and horrible and on the second and third feeds I didn’t want to be in there at all,” says James of that second November swim. “But having been in there before and knowing the regime of feed swim feed I knew I was going to have to be in trouble or kicking and screaming for my team on the boat to let me out. They just played dumb.”

Channel swimmers burn 1000 calories an hour on a crossing but have a routine of feeds, thrown to them from the boat consisting of hot sweet tea, mixed with protein powder to keep up their energy and core warmth, plus the occasional dose of Ibuprofen to fight off muscle pain. James’s were every 50 minutes. He also did a minute of sprints every 25 minutes, which in his words “broke the monotony and kept the blood flowing”.

“The salt water takes its toll on the body with sores developing where body parts rub; it also makes your tongue swell and the inside of your mouth fall apart.”

The salt water takes its toll on the body with sores developing where body parts rub; it also makes your tongue swell and the inside of your mouth fall apart. James tells me: “I’ve seen pictures of cauliflower tongue but that was the first time I had experienced it. It was swollen and pitted like the chalk is when the tides out. Just horrible.”

To get to the point of entering the water at Shakespeare Beach it takes months of hardcore training, with cold-water immersion particularly important for both of James’s records.

His workout mantra was: “Get up. Swim. Eat pizza. Go to bed,” which he appropriated from Eddie Izzard when he attempted 27 marathons. “It took his body 10 days to adapt (to the exercise),” says James, “and then all of a sudden getting up at 5.30 it knew what it had to do.”

James took to swimming the 61m Parliament Hill lido in London for his early session, where the water was colder than on the South Coast. He was linking two sets of twenty lengths with an hour break in between before the water dropped from 12 to 7 degrees with the onset of winter. “I remember 7 degrees being a struggle,” recalls James. “I did an hour and had a wobbler, a real wobble. The lifeguard said: ‘Get straight in the sauna!’ I went in and I felt like someone had spiked me. I took me a long time to get over that one.”

He had one word for training for both records: “MANIC”. He says: “Any spare moment I was in the water trying to push as far as I could without going into the danger zone”. Hypothermia was something that scared James after his lido experience: “I would start feeling a little different whether it was hypothermia or I had just started to think about it and panic had set in”.

He set a new record for the latest Channel crossing on November 3rd, 2016, in 11hours 38minutes, breaking a record last set by Mike Reed in 1979: “Reaching land knowing you’ve made, it is like: ‘Wow thank god it’s over,’ but it took me three months to get back into enjoying swimming again,” explains James. He’s already doing pool work for his next mission, but hasn’t been in the sea since November 3^rd. “The thing is if I don’t have a new challenge I go off the rails and lose motivation to swim.”

The zenith of a marathon swimmers career is completing the Ocean’s Seven challenge, a wet version of the Seven Summit mountaineering Challenge. Traditionally it includes the North Channel between Ireland and England, the English Channel, the Cook Straits, the Straits of Gibraltar, Tsugaru Strait and Molokai Channel in Hawaii and the Catalina Channel.

James already has two of these boxes ticked but his view of what makes endurance swimming a challenge is an idea very much of his own making. “I think I have three or four more marathons left in me,” said James after receiving a host of awards at the end of season gala dinner of the Channel Swimming Association in Dover. “Its not the Ocean Seven that I’m after, it’s my seven.”

To read the rest of February’s ‘Challenge’ Issue head here 

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