The River Dart 10 km - my "A" race

I survived.  My "A" race is finished. It's over and I will try and explain to you what it was like, from my point of view.  It was a year ago that my swimming pal Matt Drew mentioned this race to me. We should both enter he said. 10km I thought. You must be mad but it is a stretching target so I agreed. Immediately I posted it on the blog but as the time approached to register, Matt had backed out - probably too easy for him as he's a real swimmer. But I'd posted it so there was no going back.
800 places disappeared in under 2 hours and I was one of the lucky ones. I still hadn't worked out how I could swim that distance. Anyway I had a 53 mile ultra marathon to worry about 1st.
As summer went by I started to pick up my swimming activity and I had a few rough sessions in Loch Lomond with big waves and at the time, while battling through the waves I thought to myself this could come in handy one day. How true that turned out.
So on Saturday I met up with 2 other swimmers from Glasgow , Gary Hurr and Jessica Livingstone. We had a cup of tea while looking at the River Dart, a tidal river. All we could see was mud / sand and it didn't look pretty. The following morning we arrived and the river was going in the wrong direction - shit! But as the race started the tide turned. We waded into the water which was brown and salty with leaves, branches and sea weed floating along.  My goggles started leaking but with hundreds of people around me I couldn't sort it for a while. When your arm entered the water you couldn't see it. This meant you couldn't see someone's toes in front so there was quite a bit of climbing over or being climbed over at the beginning. I settled down trying not to go off to quickly. The tide is meant to improve your speed over a mile by 2 mins but you weren't aware of it. Before I knew it I was at the first feed station (4k) which gave me the opportunity to get some lucozade and get rid of the taste of salt. I felt really good but that was about to change.
The next feed station was at 7k but the river was getting wider (1k at its widest) and very choppy. It was getting like a washing machine and in the waves I was swallowing salt water.  This led to me being sick on a number of occasions and my concentration had to be of getting any water out and not swallowing.  The river seemed to go on forever, a bit like the desert last year, and I tried to enjoy the scenery but the constant bashing by waves made me think more about survival.
At the 7k feed station I took on more lucozade and some jelly babies. A marshal said we'd come through the hardest part but the final section wasn't much easier and I was getting tired - the furthest I'd swam before was 5k and that was only the weekend before. Again the waves were battering me and I was taking water on and being sick. I notice one marshal on a body board keeping an eye on me but by now I was determined it was just keeping moving forward and I'd get there. Swimming in such a large river takes a different mind set because you don't have a turn every 25 or 50 metres. My eyes kept looking at the geography to try and work out when the finish would come into view.  It seemed to go on forever and my swim stroke was shot. I was just holding on. Then, above the waves and the mass of bodies in the washing machine, I saw the end. My stroke came back as I focused on the finish. And it was almost an out of body experience in the last 500 m. Before I knew it I was coming out of the water, in 2 hours 47 minutes, and for a change, I wasn't staggering. I came in 321st out of 722 who finished the race. I felt quiet emotional, I don't know why but that was it. My stretching "A" race for the year finished. All I had to do was walk 300m across a pebbled beach (ouch!) and collect my medal. As I did that I reflected on the journey and was so pleased I had chosen my weakest discipline to work on. I've grown to love swimming, especially open water swimming. The excitement is the risk and the freedom - when I was throwing up and struggling to stay afloat I had to work out how to survive. You don't get that in a pool. The scenery is amazing but I won't be rushing back to a mucky river swim. I think I'll stick to the crystal clear lochs in Scotland.