Swim the English Channel

I guess I will swim the greatest length as well as the most common route of 21 miles.

Yikes, I thought 21 miles was long! I’ll see you all in France in 2010.

Sounds good, but I am confused… is this a new feature/type of challenge? Does everyone who makes it the distance gets the award or is it still the first place winner?

I think this is approximately the distance between the island of Hawaii and the island of O’ahu. It seems less daunting already :)

StephenB, are we starting on the English side or the French side? I need to know if I need Pounds or Euros to buy the first to finish a pint. :)

@stansj: This is a new type of challenge where everyone to complete the challenge wins the prize (here’s a blog post about it).

@StevenG: Take your pick :-)

@stansj and @AZ let’s see some action, is know you will complete this ahead of StephenB. :)

I entered a wrong figure in my swimming. I typed in 1200 to enter 1200m, but I didn’t realize that it was by default in km. So I corrected it, but it seems that the wrong distance got recorded in the challenge… so my 1st place is not right. My distance should be 6.7 miles or so at the moment.

Hmm, I thought that was an incredibly long swimming leg for a triathlon.

No worries, it happens in quite a few of the challenges, Gyminee was supposed to be implementing a system that 1) asked the user to confirm larger than normal entries and 2) re-opened the challenge when the user corrected their entry.

At present it still seems to work like a lobster-trap. Once you put your distance/hours/weight in you can not get it back out without the assistance of a Gyminee staffer.

Attention Gyminee Staff – The English Channel Swim needs your attention. Please adjust IronDave’s total to date.

@IronDave, @StevenG: Thanks for pointing out the problem. I updated IronDave’s value to 6.7 miles, hopefully that’s close to the proper value. We are still planning on developing a better fix for when this happens.

Thanks StephenB

Thanks StephenB. I guess 6.7 should be right (I’m counting in meters, so that was an aproximate conversion, but I’m guess we can all live with a few tenth of miles aproximation).

Just want to say to all the challengers, don’t let those numbers at the top of the ranking get you down. The first English Channel challenge took four months to complete and there was a lot of juggling. The fable of the tortoise and the hare really applies to these long challenges. So keep putting in those laps!

Hi All,

Just joined the challenge, and it should be great motivation to help stick to a swim workout I’m starting.

If all goes according to plan by the end of six weeks, I’ll be swimming a mile straight, and log over 13 miles along the Channel.

Here’s the full workout schedule in case you’re interested:
http://ruthkazez.com/SwimWorkouts/ZeroTo1mile.html

@swimrunner, glad to have another swimmer in the challenge. You might get to that mile faster than you think.

Thanks Steven. Your encouragement and this challenge helped me extend tonight’s swim to get my total to 1650, thinking that would be a (swimmer’s) mile. But I guess Gyminee calculates miles as 1760 yards.

Great work Swimrunner, I knew you would get that mile swim well before your six week goal. Next step, is two which I found to be more a matter of will than a physical challenge. I bet you will get to that 2 mile mark within a month if you keep the current pace up.

Hey IronDave, I just noticed you are running out of room for medals. I wonder if Gyminee is prepared to have two rows of awards below your picture. :P

Well, I haven’t done a mile NON-STOP yet. I’ll try to get there in 4 weeks (or less) though!

@StevenG: well I guess we’ll find out pretty soon how Gyminee handles too many medals ;)
I know I can handle more of them :)

Swimmers in the U.S.A., be aware that your local pool may be closed on December 19th 2008 until they are in compliance with the new Virginia Graeme Baker Federal Law for pool main drain covers.

The city of Boston, for example, is closing all but one of it’s pools until sometime in January. Luckily, it’s my nearest pool, which will soon be a lot more crowded!