At 67 years old, OE Ed Horne, became a Channel swimmer. Completing approximately 42,000 strokes in crossing the English Channel, Ed overcame many challenges including exhaustion, dehydration, cramps, jellyfish stings and rough seas to achieve his goal. Ed wrote the following piece about his journey to becoming a Channel swimmer.
Where did it all begin?
Growing up, I had no great dream to swim the English Channel. Indeed, from when rugby began to take over my sporting life at Emanuel School aged 11 years until I began to teach my daughter to swim some 33 years later, swimming was purely a holiday recreation.
If it was my daughter that got me back into the water, it was the members of the RAC Masters Swim Squad that introduced me to open water swimming. My first event was the Henley Classic, a 2.1k swim upstream over the course of the Henley Royal Regatta finishing at the grandstand, the weekend before the annual international rowing event. The event’s novelty is that it starts at 4.30am and you swim into the dawn. By 6.30am, I was dressed and sitting on the banks of the Thames sipping champagne and eating croissants and bagels with friends. I was well and truly hooked.
I had a prostate cancer scare back in the summer of 2011 as a result of which I vowed to get as fit as I possibly could, to live each day as if it were my last and to always think and act positively. I think that sometime around that time the thought of doing an ultra-long distance endurance challenge entered my psyche without me really knowing what that meant.
For the next marker in my development, I can thank Professor Greg Whyte, an elite sports endurance coach and sports psychologist who each year is responsible for coaching the celebrity undertaking the big challenge for Sport Relief. It was Greg who coached David Walliams across the Channel and down the Thames and Davina McCall down from Edinburgh to London cycling, running and swimming (in a very cold lake Windermere) etc. It was Greg’s story of the swim section of James Cracknell’s challenge at a dinner that sparked my interest. James’s challenge was to row the Channel, cycle across Europe and swim across the Gibraltar Straits from Spain to Morocco. On the swim, they were accompanied part of the way by a pod of pilot whales. At the end of the speech, I turned to my two friends sitting either side of me and simply said ‘I’m doing that swim’.
3-4 years and a left hip replacement later in late June 2017, Michael Fabray, a fishmonger (where’s the irony?) friend, and I set off from Tarifa in southern Spain and crossed the 10 miles of the Gibraltar Straits to Point Cires in Morocco in 3 hours 36 minutes. Not a pilot whale was to be seen. Tarifa is a delightful unspoiled kite and wind surfing town and the swim itself was exhilarating. Aged 62 years, I had become a swimming ‘adrenalin junkie’.
Almost a year later to the day, I found myself wrapped in a towel by a jetty in Ambleside at the northerly tip of lake Windermere having just completed the 10.25 mile swim from end to end in 6 hours 22 minutes. It was here that my boat pilot for the day asked the simple question: ‘What next?’ And, before I could say anything, he added: ‘If you can swim Windermere, you can swim the Channel!’ The gauntlet had been thrown down.
2019 and the pandemic years
Although I had a solo Channel slot booked in 2019, a mixture of inclement weather followed by a boat malfunction the day before my re-arranged slot meant that I never got to swim.
I had, however, begun fundraising for four charities all linked to conditions afflicting my four siblings. I raised circa £25,000 including gift aid and was totally overwhelmed and humbled by the generosity of so many people including many OEs. I hadn’t swum……..but I was now honour bound to do so!
The onset of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns left my wife, Dale, and I separated on different continents. We had both lost our nonagenarian mothers in December 2019 and Dale was now in Florida preparing the family home for sale and winding up her mother’s estate. We were finally reunited in June 2021.
In May 2020, Boris Johnson made two of his better decisions as a Prime Minister. He allowed domestic cleaners to go back to work and he allowed open water swimming to start up again, albeit restricted to only meeting with one other person. I no longer had to clean the house and I could start swimming again.
It was at this time that I contacted Kevin Murphy, a delightful if quirky man in his early 70s who is also known as the ‘King of the Channel’ having swum it 34 times. Kevin was to become my mentor, an integral part of my team on the boat in 2022 and now a lifelong friend. I cannot thank him enough but more of that later.
When my slot in 2020 came around I had only been back in training for 10 weeks. I had packed in as much sea swimming as was humanly possible including the 6-hour qualifying swim, back to back 7 and 6 hour swims on consecutive days and a 10 hour dress rehearsal swim starting at 6.00am. I was as ready as I could be given the time available. What I wasn’t ready for were the sea conditions I was dealt.
On 29 July, I began the swim at 7.00pm in the evening in really rough seas which persisted for 3 hours. I then had to swim through the night. My recollections of that swim were: only 3 boats went out; the first swimmer quit after 4 hours. He was an experienced channel swimmer looking to do his second crossing and had been ‘throwing up’ on the boat on the way to the start. The second swimmer quit after 10 hours. A much younger swimmer, he was mentally spent to the point that he could not flip open his feeding bottle and had to be pulled from the water by his crew. I soldiered on always fearful that all of the salt water that I had involuntarily imbibed in the early evening would come back to haunt me. Sure enough, after 13 hours and shortly after reaching French inshore waters, my breathing became shallow and intermittent. The excess fluid in my body was pressing against my lungs. My crew aborted the swim. It was the right decision.
During the first part of the swim in the rough conditions, my only objective had been to avoid total embarrassment by lasting at least two hours. The fact that I lasted 13 hours and was ‘the last man standing’ gave me a sense of achievement but left me with unfinished business.
In 2021, the build up to the swim was not a lot different to 2020 in that it was plagued by lockdowns. To maintain cold acclimation from January to March, I would walk 3 miles through the streets of Barnes, west London, every morning as the dawn rose wearing nothing more than a pair of Levi 501s, a white t-shirt and trainers. It was my attempt at a Marlon Brando Streetcar Named Desire look!
The swim itself, however, was much different to 2020. It was an early morning start. The water was a couple of degrees colder than in 2020. Disappointingly, the swim started in fog and remained in fog all day. The sun only emerged for maybe 30 seconds. We couldn’t see the tops of the white cliffs of Dover at the start and, although no more than a mile from land as the crow flies, at the end of the swim we could still not see France.
I turned into French inshore waters after 12 hours and thought I had the swim under control. However, I had severe cramp in both hamstrings which I couldn’t shake. I had dehydrated from not drinking enough in my effort to avoid the issues of the first swim. After two more hours, my stroke had lost its rhythm and I slowed down to the point where I was no longer crossing the tide merely riding it north towards Calais. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have persevered and ‘limped in’ but, already 14 hours into the swim, I couldn’t process the thought of swimming in agony for another 3-4 hours.
The swim in 2022
If 2020 had left me with unfinished business, 2021 had left me with a severe itch that needed to be scratched! I was quietly determined to try again but wanted to take the pressure off myself by ‘staying under the radar’. As I trained, I was merely telling people nothing more than, ‘If I get fit and feel I can do it, my pilot will find a slot to take me’. During the winter, I did no real distance training largely staying cold acclimated by swimming 4 times a week in the unheated Tooting Bec Lido. I am a Southfields boy born and bred so Tooting is like a spiritual home for me.
At the beginning of May, I was back in the sea and put myself through a now very familiar 10-week training regime. Starting in water around 11c, I double dipped for a few sessions where you swim for an hour, warm up for an hour and then get back in for a further 90 minutes. Within three weeks, I had joined up the swims up to two 3-hour swims on consecutive days. Then, the real tough stuff started. In four consecutive weekends, I swam 6 hours and 3 hours, 7 hours and 6 hours, 7 hours and 3 hours (I only did 3 because the conditions were so tough and I wanted to avoid injury) and completed the 4 week set with a 10 hour dress rehearsal up and down the coast in Deal. The water was now above 15c and I could taper down, recover and prepare myself for my 3rd attempt sometime between 3-11 July.
Between my 2nd and 3rd attempts, I came to finally realise that I couldn’t reverse the aging process. At close to 67 years old, I had to accept that my body may not quite be as efficient as those of the younger swimmers taking up the challenge. I was already taking a daily liquid iron supplement. I now added magnesium tablets to reduce the risk of cramp. In consultation with my GP, I also began to take muscle relaxant pills to make it easier to pass water while swimming (apologies if this is too much detail). Finally, I added a steady intake of electrolytes into my feeding plan on the day to help maintain a good balance of essential salts and minerals in my body. This package of adjustments helped reduce many of the mental doubts lingering from the two previous swims.
For this 3rd attempt, I also changed my crew. I wanted to treat this swim as nothing more than another training swim so it was important to me to have the people who looked after me week in, week out in training on the boat. With hindsight, the masterstroke here was to have Kevin Murphy on the boat. In my mind, it was a bit like having Alex Ferguson on the touchline. There was no way I could fail a man who had swum the Channel 34 times and who had volunteered to crew for me on a swim starting at 4.00am. I was looking at him pretty much every time I breathed, so every 2.5 seconds for the 15 hours and 51 minutes of the swim.
The swim itself started in the dark in calm seas from Abbotts Cliff, Dover, at 3.47am on Friday 8 July. I suffered a slight energy blip around the 5-hour mark when the body had exhausted its calorie store and started to burn fat. I got stung a few times by jellyfish. It’s a ‘right of passage’. The effects were nothing more than a tingling sensation for about 20 minutes to my hands and torso. It was nothing I hadn’t experienced in training.
The ‘hard yards’ were hours 9-12. I knew that I was in the French shipping lane and the wind was now in the opposite direction to the current creating some choppy waters. I had no clue where I was relative to the French coast but I knew that the first half of the swim had been slower than the last attempt. The choppy waters also meant that I was occasionally involuntarily imbibing more sea water. Doubts were starting to creep in.
At the 12-hour feed, Kevin shouted down to me ‘Ed, you are in French inshore waters and well inside the ZC2 (marker) buoy. Its on……. go for it’. I could see the lighthouse at the Cap Gris Nez and from that moment onwards I knew that I could make it! My mood was now upbeat and the adrenalin was flowing again. I put in a strong hour before the current changed. I then had to swim across the current and into the tide ebbing off the French coast. Progress was slow to the point where I was beginning to wonder if the beaches in the distance were a mirage. They were not getting any closer. In these last nearly four hours, although it was akin to a ‘victory’ swim, I did suffer from cramp and I did have some bloating in my tummy but they were manageable and not swim ending conditions.
Throughout my training, I was never remotely the quickest in the water. I had adopted two mantras: ‘I am built for comfort not for speed’ and ‘I’m a completer not a competer!’ What I had was a technique that was sound. Post swim, I have no structural or repetitive strain injuries which, given that I did approximately 42,000 strokes in total with shoulders that had propped up scrums on the rugby field for 25 years, is something of a minor miracle. Plus, throughout the swim, I maintained a consistent stroke rate of 44 strokes per minute from the first minute to the last. A human metronome!
In those last 3 hours, the crew were reading out messages from the small group of people who were following the swim in real time. At one feed, Kevin shouted out ‘Ed, Fizzy (my daughter in North Carolina) says: You’ve got this Dad! I’m so proud of you.’ Kevin admitted to me later that he felt quite emotional when he saw it and felt he should pass it on to me. I cannot flip back through the WhatsApp thread for the swim without choking up. The roles had reversed. My daughter was being the parent!
My landing created the Fawlty Towers moment that every swim should have. I was directed to the shore at the town of Wissant by the pilot boat which had to stop about 200 metres out. The beaches were now to the south and I had to swim into an area with a boulder wall with waves still breaking over it. Little did I know that there was a set of steps to the left of the wall. I naturally veer to the right when I swim which took me away from the steps. On reaching terra firma, I stood up and promptly tripped over a hidden boulder and cut my foot. I stood up, put my hands in the air, the klaxon sounded to signal that the swim was complete and I began to swim back to the boat.
What I didn’t know was that Steve Stievenart, the number 1 French open water swimmer (whom I know), had appeared on the steps with a number of Wissant locals carrying a Union Jack to welcome me in. The ‘million dollar’ photo of me on the steps of Wissant holding up a Union Jack was there to be had and I was totally oblivious to it. When I got back, the crew’s initial reaction was not to congratulate me but to gently chastise me for leaving Steve in the lurch with his flag. I will be going back (by ferry) to Wissant for that photo and to grab a pebble from the beach as a memento.
To put the swim into context, only about 2,200 people have ever swum the Channel. The oldest was 73 years old, only 6 years older than me, and I am probably in the oldest 15 people in the world ever to complete the swim. Over 10,000 people have climbed Everest.
Many people think that long distance open water swimming is a lonely, boring sport. I am blessed to have three groups of swimming friends at the RAC Club in London, the members of South London Swimming Club at Tooting Lido and the real crazies down in Dover Harbour. Also, the swim itself was a real team effort consisting of my stroke coach, Tracey; my masters coach, Patricia; Kevin Murphy, Kathy Batts and The King’s Swimmers for mentoring me. Catherine, Deborah and Dale in 2020 and 2021 and Kevin, Kathy and Lorraine, a delightful Dover based lady swimmer, in 2022, willingly gave of their time to crew for me, and, of course, my boat pilots Simon Ellis and Maz Critchley. Finally, I must thank my wife, Dale, and my daughter, Fizzy, for being understanding and supportive of my endeavours.
Most people who have completed it say that swimming the Channel changes your life. So far, I don’t see that. I have finally scratched the itch. Those who know me well would know that, had I needed to, I would have gone back for a fourth time.
My time at Emanuel
I matriculated in September 1966 and finally graduated in December 1973 with 3 A levels in Latin, Greek and Ancient History and a place at Jesus College, Oxford.
I played for the 1st XV rugby for four seasons from the Vth form onwards. I went on to play in the rugby varsity match at Twickenham against Cambridge in 1975, ‘76 and ‘77, finally winning at the third attempt. I think that I remain the only rugby blue for either University to emerge from Emanuel.
I later had the privilege of captaining the Old Emanuel 1st XV in the early 1980s when 3 generations of players combined to take the club to the final of the Surrey County Cup where we narrowly lost 12-6 to London Irish and to the National knock out competition where we drew 6-6 with Norwich and were sadly eliminated as the home team.
The school was my sanctuary during many of these years as my home life was dominated by the eventual splitting up of my parents. And, most importantly, I have formed so many friendships through my time at school and playing rugby for the Old Boys that endure today.
