As part of a six-person team (nicknamed the Tough Titties – well, it was a female team!), I swam the English Channel both ways non-stop in July 2005. The weather was horrendous and the whole thing took the Titties 30 hours and 40 minutes. We got blown so far off course we ended up actually off the chart which the boat crew use to plot Channel swims. We landed somewhere without a name! (It was near Sandwich in Kent as it turns out).
I love my ladies and am very proud to have been part of this, but I don’t think I’ll do a relay again. It’s much easier just to swim the whole thing yourself. Getting in, swimming, getting out, trying to get dry, trying to eat, and trying to sleep before then having to put on another costume and get in that water again when you’re half asleep…well, it’s heartbreaking. The prospect of repeating that six times and you feel like throwing yourself overboard forever. I did, anyway.
This is us before we started. We looked even worse by the end.
The Fit Writer Nicola Joyce 
[…] was seeing my friend Lucy waiting for me at the finish line. Lucy was one of the Tough Titties two-way Channel relay team and, like me, is also a Channel solo swimmer and round-Jersey swimmer. Dressed in white, she looked […]
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[…] the footage of UK coastguards at work. Whilst asleep on Channel swim boats (for instance, during my two-way relay), I used to love the soporific sound of the uber-polite, gentle coastguard voices over the radio. […]
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[…] if not greater – than the physical ones. I remember that one of the worst bits about the two-way Channel relay I did in 2005 was the “getting in and out and in again” aspect. I wonder how the […]
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