My mother and I have challenged ourselves to swim the length of the English Channel in aid of Heart Research UK. You can read about the why on our JustGiving page, but on this blog I want to share updates of our progress, and, if I pick up any hints and tips along the way, I'll drop them here. In case anyone else wants to take on the virtual channel swimming challenge.
As someone who only swims casually and rather sporadically, this was going to be quite some challenge. Yet it turns out that one of the biggest sticking points early on was actually deciding where to go swimming in the first place!
The full virtual channel swimming challenge is 22 miles, which for those of us who don't work in old money, is 35.406km. Put plainly, this was going to take a lot of lengths....and the likelihood of us getting bored of looking at the same four walls was pretty high.
So we decided to keep changing those four walls and sometimes scrap the walls altogether by adding some variety to our swims and trying out different pools around West Yorkshire in the process.
For the first swim, we took it one further by choosing the Swim2Music session at Bramley Baths. After all, what better way to kick off our virtual channel swimming challenge than by paddling to power ballads.
I had been wanting to visit Bramley Baths for some time now, as this historic gem is the last Edwardian bathhouse in Leeds. Having opened its doors in 1904, Bramley Baths was originally built as one of eight bath houses in an effort to improve public health in the time of a cholera outbreak.
Back then, the bath house included a Russian Steam Baths as well as twenty slippers baths but over the years, it has had many reincarnations. During the Great Depression of the 1920s the pool was emptied and the space became a dance hall (today, we got the best of both worlds with melodic bathing) as well as hosting a variety of different events from Wrestling during WW2 and even rolling skating tournaments.
Through constant reincarnations, community support and a little bit of help from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Bramley Baths was a perfect place to start our marathon swim. The question is, where to next?
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