A remarkable achievement, read Jim’s account here:

http://www.h2openmagazine.com/readers-swims/jim-bouchers-second-english-channel-crossing.html

The Mayor will officially open it at 9am, season ticket holders can get in and have their first swims of the season from 9.30am before the pool opens to the public at 10.30am.

The 2Swim4Life 24hour swim challenge that is taking place in half the pool starts at 9.30am and ends 24 hours later on Sunday morning. The challenge is set to raise thousands for Help for Heroes, both through the sponsorship efforts of those taking part and the sale throughout the day of merchandise and raffle tickets. Please come along and enjoy an early season swim, show your support of the Lido, the swimmers and the charity. It’ll be a great day for all!

2Swim4Life
Each competitor is going to attempt to swim 1 mile on the hour, every hour, for 24 consecutive hours!  Yep, they are going to be swimming through the night!  The event was originally founded by Stewart Rush in 2008 as a charity fundraising event to raise money for Action Duchenne which exclusively funds research for a cure and promotes campaigns for better medical care for Duchenne and Becker Muscular Dystrophy. 

The Guildford Lido 2Swim4Life’11 event will be in aid of Help for Heroes and is being organised by Lesley Zimmerman with lots of support from local swimmers and supporters as well as those coming in from further afield. The event is expected to attract swimmers from around the country.   Burning between 8000 and 11500 calories each, equivalent to 15 roast dinners hence sustaining food intake and keeping it down is going to be a further essential challenge!

Details are being finalised right now and we will post more information here over the coming weeks. In the meantime, if this is something that you would like to be involved with, either swimming or supporting the swimmers – they’ll need lots of it – please get in touch with us now. 

Come along and support us. It should be a great day!

To read more about Catherine’s challenge visit her blog:

http://www.10poundpom.blogspot.com/

There’ll be more to come soon, including an account of how the increasing interest and resurgence in the popularity of outdoor swimming is being embraced by Surrey swimmers as over 70 people attended the Big River Jump in the Wey on July 11th in support of the Europe-wide Big Jump campaign to raise awareness of river and water quality across Europe. The event brought together many Lido swimmers, and newly recruited FOGLs in a show of somewhat spontaneous solidarity.  It was quite a sight!

“ I have been using the Lido since the beginning of May to train for the British Gas Swim last weekend and it was a godsend as I needed the extra distance and outdoors, having only been used to an indoor and 25m pool”. 

Do get in touch, post a comment here or email us direct, all news is very welcome!

http://www.greatswim.org/Events/British-Gas-Great-East-Swim/Default.aspx

There’s lots to see and do and these events are for swimmers of all abilities, not just good ones!

It may seem incredible to many but there are some FOGLs for whom swimming the English Channel and pounding up and down the Lido just isn’t enough exercise (or challenge, or cold, or whatever else it is that pops into the minds of these guys). This weekend FOGLs Jim Boucher and Rory Fitzgerald will be braving the chilly waters of the Irish Sea to make the 35 mile crossing between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. Jim gives us an outline of what’s ahead:

“We are building upon the successful challenge of last year’s IoM “End-to-end Swim”(E2E) that covered a comparable distance from Pt of Ayre to the Calf Sound. However last year we were sticking close into shore and benefitted from a few changes of tide that helped a little. We are the same team of 4, myself, Rory, Carole Laporte, a French lady and Mark Gorry a Manxman, all representing the combined Gaelic nations.

In the aftermath of the E2E swim, we considered the next step and the distance from Peel to NI is only slightly more (on a dodgy map). The target is a landing in the vicinity of Ardglass on NIreland’s Co Down coast. This is home soil for myself and Rory, albeit a few miles to the south. We can’t go much further north as the outflow from Strangford Lough is extremely powerful (the tidal movements provide one of the first tidal energy prototypes in UK). We don’t expect much tidal influence as we are passing into the area where the tidal flows north and south of Ireland cancel each other.

We are going early in the season to try and avoid the jellyfish that come in as the water warms up – although they did put on a show last year which was around this time. Likely water temperature is 11-12C and we will probably go for one hour relay legs as the cold will probably prevent us using longer legs. The ultimate choice will depend on weather. We have a team of experienced sea-kayakers who have previously assisted us in IoM waters and we have a small deep-sea fishing charter boat as our “mother ship”. We start at 4am hoping to make maximum use of the long daylight hours and are anticpating 16-18 hours swimming time. We are in standard “Channel” kit, ie a costume, goggles and a hat, unlike a team of 8 Irish who by pure coincidence are swimming the same day in the opposite direction….in wetsuits.

We wish everyone well in this challenge and will post up details here and on our Facebook page over the weekend as news comes in.

http://www.greatswim.org/