Showing posts with label Donal Buckley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donal Buckley. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
The cave of light and The cave of birds
Open water swimmer Sam Krohn created this moving film of my friend Donal Buckley aka LoneSwimmer swimming the caves of Irelands Copper Coast.
If you you feel stressed... relax, unwind and enjoy this lovely film.
It's 18 minutes long but well worth watching.
I trust Donal and Sam wont mind me sharing. All credit to them for creating this.
Monday, 14 November 2011
Guest Post ..Donal Buckley (Today is The Channel)
Contradictorily, I'm not a great person for motivational aphorisms, but at the same time I love reading and have a large collection of quotations I like. Many relate to the sea or swimming somehow, and I have a few that I've used a few times on my site.
With the English Channel or any other epic marathon swim, you will be asked "why". Many times this question is asked in a "what is wrong with you that you need to do this kind thing" way. There is rarely an answer that works for those particular people.
We all have both similar, and different answers though. I eventually found an answer that worked for 99% of people. That 99% of people are those who don't do what we do, and the other 1% are endurance athletes, who will not even ask the question, because they already understand. I don't need to ask you why you might be thinking of a marathon swim. You don't need my reasons. So my simple answer became a quotation:
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.- Socrates
After all, who is going to argue with Socrates?
But that wasn't my motivation.
Another that I use, and have used in advising people about the English Channel is:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Usually incorrectly attributed to Goethe by W.H Murray. You can feel something in those words. You can feel the urge to sprinkle fairy dust over your life, to step outside.
But the English Channel is not just about dreams, it's far more about grind. About swimming day in and day out, on frosty mornings and when you are sore, hungry and tired, and have lost the love of swimming you had.
And on those days, when there was just me, when the rest of the Magnificent Seven were all training down in Cork, when I had no-one to swim with, when my local pool was treating me like dirt, I needed something else. I really did need motivational help. So on my training log and inside my locker I wrote:
This Is the Channel.
Today. Every day. Every metre. Every stroke. And it helped. The reminder was always there. Everyday when I opened the locker and when I entered my metres into the spreadsheet. It is still there on my ongoing training logs. It became part of my swimming ethos. I began to value the bad days more, to enjoy the good days.
And when I was done with the Channel, I fell back on another quotation, written by Philip Larkin and used incorrectly by me, but to me the only way I can really describe the English Channel and my own feelings about it.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
With the English Channel or any other epic marathon swim, you will be asked "why". Many times this question is asked in a "what is wrong with you that you need to do this kind thing" way. There is rarely an answer that works for those particular people.
We all have both similar, and different answers though. I eventually found an answer that worked for 99% of people. That 99% of people are those who don't do what we do, and the other 1% are endurance athletes, who will not even ask the question, because they already understand. I don't need to ask you why you might be thinking of a marathon swim. You don't need my reasons. So my simple answer became a quotation:
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.- Socrates
After all, who is going to argue with Socrates?
But that wasn't my motivation.
Another that I use, and have used in advising people about the English Channel is:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Usually incorrectly attributed to Goethe by W.H Murray. You can feel something in those words. You can feel the urge to sprinkle fairy dust over your life, to step outside.
But the English Channel is not just about dreams, it's far more about grind. About swimming day in and day out, on frosty mornings and when you are sore, hungry and tired, and have lost the love of swimming you had.
And on those days, when there was just me, when the rest of the Magnificent Seven were all training down in Cork, when I had no-one to swim with, when my local pool was treating me like dirt, I needed something else. I really did need motivational help. So on my training log and inside my locker I wrote:
This Is the Channel.
Today. Every day. Every metre. Every stroke. And it helped. The reminder was always there. Everyday when I opened the locker and when I entered my metres into the spreadsheet. It is still there on my ongoing training logs. It became part of my swimming ethos. I began to value the bad days more, to enjoy the good days.
And when I was done with the Channel, I fell back on another quotation, written by Philip Larkin and used incorrectly by me, but to me the only way I can really describe the English Channel and my own feelings about it.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Loneswimmer
Some will know, some will not know.... who is The Loneswimmer ......do You...?
if you don't and you are a Channel Swim aspirant (like me) then you should find out...but to save you the effort I will let the cat out of the bag.... Donal Buckley (practical joker extra-ordinaire) is a Channel Swimmer, having made an epic swim to France in August 2010...he writes on an almost daily basis at loneswimmer.com and has a wealth of news data discussion going at any one time, a brief look through his older posts provide mountains of informative reading for the dark nights now that the clocks have lost the hour.
Like lots of successful Channel swimmers DB has continued to swim and inspires me to pull my finger out from time to time..Last year after my first 1WW (one way windermere) I more or less stopped the open water swimming til the following April.
This year the plan is to drop the sessions back but attempt to maintain some acclimatisation and remind myself of the conditions that await in the Straits of Dover, as DB recently wrote something along the lines of..."Why do you think you can swim The Channel if you only train in lakes and pools"
DB is maintaining his 60 minutes swims as the temperature drops in the waters surrounding the beloved Emerald Isle and I am following suit..together with the re- introduction of pool/interval sessions..hopefully Donal will spot this post and write something here by way of a guest post..
So..training continues..the water a Seaton Carew is now 53f 11.6c, the air temperature is dropping but we are sticking at it, today was a great swim with Joe Hunter, the target remains 60 minutes and no less until we get below 50f 10c...it hurts like hell getting in and its so funny when we shake and giggle afterwards but you feel great all day once its done...you should try it...it wont kill you......well I don't think so anyway !
oh...if you hadn't noticed the blog now has an easy domain name..its now just www.markswims.com
if you don't and you are a Channel Swim aspirant (like me) then you should find out...but to save you the effort I will let the cat out of the bag.... Donal Buckley (practical joker extra-ordinaire) is a Channel Swimmer, having made an epic swim to France in August 2010...he writes on an almost daily basis at loneswimmer.com and has a wealth of news data discussion going at any one time, a brief look through his older posts provide mountains of informative reading for the dark nights now that the clocks have lost the hour.
Like lots of successful Channel swimmers DB has continued to swim and inspires me to pull my finger out from time to time..Last year after my first 1WW (one way windermere) I more or less stopped the open water swimming til the following April.
This year the plan is to drop the sessions back but attempt to maintain some acclimatisation and remind myself of the conditions that await in the Straits of Dover, as DB recently wrote something along the lines of..."Why do you think you can swim The Channel if you only train in lakes and pools"
DB is maintaining his 60 minutes swims as the temperature drops in the waters surrounding the beloved Emerald Isle and I am following suit..together with the re- introduction of pool/interval sessions..hopefully Donal will spot this post and write something here by way of a guest post..
So..training continues..the water a Seaton Carew is now 53f 11.6c, the air temperature is dropping but we are sticking at it, today was a great swim with Joe Hunter, the target remains 60 minutes and no less until we get below 50f 10c...it hurts like hell getting in and its so funny when we shake and giggle afterwards but you feel great all day once its done...you should try it...it wont kill you......well I don't think so anyway !
oh...if you hadn't noticed the blog now has an easy domain name..its now just www.markswims.com
Monday, 6 June 2011
How we FEEL cold water
The following post appears with the permission of Donal Buckley
When you enter cold water you feel a few different sensations. I talked about habituation and gasp reflex, peripheral vaso-constriction and mammalian dive reflex before, and I’m sure I will again. But I neglected to talk about one of the most obvious effects, the feeling across your skin.Depending on your experience the feeling may be severe enough that you can’t tell exactly to which sensation it is analogous. It might feel like fire or ice or boiling water or acid or lime, or as you’d imagine them.
Those are thermoreceptors, only one of the four main types of touch receptors (extraceptors) in the skin. There are also pain receptors (nocireceptors). Ah, yes, there’s a difference.
Anyway, the main sensory input from cold water comes from the thermoreceptors. Thermoreceptors are of two types, sensing both heat and cold. And … there are about four times as many cold receptors as heat receptors. And, the maximum density of cold receptors is where?
Oh yeah, you swimmers know – there are more in the face and ears! Yes, the bits that hurt the most, and go cold the quickest.
In The Nervous System in Action, author Michael Mann says “in estimating skin temperature, people are quite accurate in the region of normal body temperature, 37 ºC to 38 ºC, but they consistently overestimate higher and underestimate lower temperatures.” Interesting. I think after a certain time cold water swimmers develop a really good internal estimation system for cold. If Lisa or Rob tell me the water is 8 ºC, I believe them. Partly because of their experience, partly because of mine.
Mann further says “starting at 28 ºC, the temperature has to be raised by about 1 ºC [ ... ] to elicit a sensation of warmth or lowered by 0.15 ºC to elicit a sensation of cold.”
That’s probably a surprise for many of us. I certainly thought I could detect a heat change (to warmer water) of maybe half a degree once I was swimming and cooled down. Of course unlike measuring temperatures before and after swimming, I’ve never had a way of checking this.
He makes a significant point that these changes are contingent based on whatever the acclimation temperature is “When the temperature of the skin is changed rapidly, the sensation evoked depends not only on the amount and direction of change, but also upon the temperature from which it is changed, the acclimation temperature.”
And Mann has a nice experiment: “To convince yourself that these observations are accurate, try the following experiment: Fill three bowls with water: one lukewarm, one cold and one warm. Put the left hand in cold water, the right in warm water for a while and then place both in the lukewarm water. A clear sensation of warmth will occur in the left hand and a sensation of cold in the right. An important conclusion from Figure 5-8 is that the same temperature can feel either warm or cold depending upon stimulus conditions, i.e., the acclimation temperature”.
(You could do that with just three glasses of water and hold them instead).
Heat receptors start to perceive heat above 30 ºC. and continue to perceive heat until the maximum receptor stimulation which occurs at 45 ºC. Over 45 ºC, pain receptors take over to avoid (Stop! Heat! Burn!) damaging the skin and body.
Cold receptors only start to perceive cold below 35 °C. Normal core body temperature is 37 °C. So you start to feel cold pretty quickly. And there is obviously a five degree cross-over where both hot and cold receptors are operating. I guess it is partly the balance of these two that help indicate level of comfort.
Drum roll. At five degrees C. cold receptors no longer operate. Unlike with heat, the pain receptors don’t come into operation. So … you start to go numb, end of pain.
When you enter cold water you feel a few different sensations. I talked about habituation and gasp reflex, peripheral vaso-constriction and mammalian dive reflex before, and I’m sure I will again. But I neglected to talk about one of the most obvious effects, the feeling across your skin.Depending on your experience the feeling may be severe enough that you can’t tell exactly to which sensation it is analogous. It might feel like fire or ice or boiling water or acid or lime, or as you’d imagine them.
Those are thermoreceptors, only one of the four main types of touch receptors (extraceptors) in the skin. There are also pain receptors (nocireceptors). Ah, yes, there’s a difference.
There are apparently about 50 touch receptors per square centimetre of skin. One square centimetre is equal to 2.4710538147 x 10-8 acres in American money! (Engineer humour again).
Anyway, the main sensory input from cold water comes from the thermoreceptors. Thermoreceptors are of two types, sensing both heat and cold. And … there are about four times as many cold receptors as heat receptors. And, the maximum density of cold receptors is where?
Oh yeah, you swimmers know – there are more in the face and ears! Yes, the bits that hurt the most, and go cold the quickest.
In The Nervous System in Action, author Michael Mann says “in estimating skin temperature, people are quite accurate in the region of normal body temperature, 37 ºC to 38 ºC, but they consistently overestimate higher and underestimate lower temperatures.” Interesting. I think after a certain time cold water swimmers develop a really good internal estimation system for cold. If Lisa or Rob tell me the water is 8 ºC, I believe them. Partly because of their experience, partly because of mine.
Mann further says “starting at 28 ºC, the temperature has to be raised by about 1 ºC [ ... ] to elicit a sensation of warmth or lowered by 0.15 ºC to elicit a sensation of cold.”
That’s probably a surprise for many of us. I certainly thought I could detect a heat change (to warmer water) of maybe half a degree once I was swimming and cooled down. Of course unlike measuring temperatures before and after swimming, I’ve never had a way of checking this.
He makes a significant point that these changes are contingent based on whatever the acclimation temperature is “When the temperature of the skin is changed rapidly, the sensation evoked depends not only on the amount and direction of change, but also upon the temperature from which it is changed, the acclimation temperature.”
And Mann has a nice experiment: “To convince yourself that these observations are accurate, try the following experiment: Fill three bowls with water: one lukewarm, one cold and one warm. Put the left hand in cold water, the right in warm water for a while and then place both in the lukewarm water. A clear sensation of warmth will occur in the left hand and a sensation of cold in the right. An important conclusion from Figure 5-8 is that the same temperature can feel either warm or cold depending upon stimulus conditions, i.e., the acclimation temperature”.
(You could do that with just three glasses of water and hold them instead).
Heat receptors start to perceive heat above 30 ºC. and continue to perceive heat until the maximum receptor stimulation which occurs at 45 ºC. Over 45 ºC, pain receptors take over to avoid (Stop! Heat! Burn!) damaging the skin and body.
Cold receptors only start to perceive cold below 35 °C. Normal core body temperature is 37 °C. So you start to feel cold pretty quickly. And there is obviously a five degree cross-over where both hot and cold receptors are operating. I guess it is partly the balance of these two that help indicate level of comfort.
Drum roll. At five degrees C. cold receptors no longer operate. Unlike with heat, the pain receptors don’t come into operation. So … you start to go numb, end of pain.
Monday, 9 May 2011
After effects and "Magic Cups" !
I remember sitting with Sarah Tunnicliffe before the 24 mile swim, she asked how I felt about the coming event and was I nervous/excited, I explained I was looking forward to it, that it was all part of the journey to bigger things with my only concern being injury in particular aggravating rotar cuff problems purely from over use.
Other than the cold, some mild soreness and fatigue, my body seemed to be holding up under the strain, (the mind is a different story!) only when I returned home did I feel and comment about some discomfort in the right forearm/wrist, as well as the disturbing creaking sounds of crepitus, Further examination diagnosed me with INTERSECTION SYNDROME this is a brief explanation of the condition:
The pain from intersection syndrome is usually felt on the top of the forearm, about three inches above the wrist. At this spot, two muscles that connect to the thumb cross over (or intersect) the two underlying wrist tendons (tendons connect muscles to bones). The two muscles that cross over the wrist tendons control the thumb. They are the extensor pollicis brevis and the abductor pollicis longus. These two muscles start on the forearm, cross over the two wrist tendons, and connect on the back part of the thumb. When these muscles work, they pull the thumb out and back.
The extensor carpi radialis brevis and the extensor carpi radialis longus muscles run lengthwise along the back of the forearm. The tendons of these two muscles attach on the back of the hand. The action of these two wrist tendons pulls the wrist back, into extension. Most of the tendons around the wrist are covered with a thin tissue called tenosynovium. Tenosynovium is very slippery. It allows tendons to glide against one another and the surrounding muscles, fat, and skin with very little friction.
If you overuse the wrist extensor tendons, the slippery tenosynovial lining may become inflamed from the constant rubbing against the two thumb muscles. As the tenosynovium becomes more irritated and inflamed, it swells and thickens. You feel pain when you move your wrist because the swollen tendons are rubbing against the thumb muscles.
As a result of this ailment I am taking NSAIDs, pain killers and wearing a brace in an attempt to keep the wrist in alignment, that together with ICE ICE BABY and Donal Buckley's "magic cups" hopefully this is a short term problem I can overcome soon enough.
The injury has prevented any swimming in full however yesterday I could bear it no longer and accompanied Joe Hunter to Ellerton Lake, he was doing three hours in his Channel build up which made me very envious (and impressed) I needed to get back into the water so as not to loose all of my acclimatisation so took the decision to kick with fins for an hour. It was mighty boring but a must if I am to be serious about the looming events, that said I did see the lake in a whole new dimension. Afterwards I hung around to feed and encourage Joe as he eased to the three hour point. Well done Joe.
Other than the cold, some mild soreness and fatigue, my body seemed to be holding up under the strain, (the mind is a different story!) only when I returned home did I feel and comment about some discomfort in the right forearm/wrist, as well as the disturbing creaking sounds of crepitus, Further examination diagnosed me with INTERSECTION SYNDROME this is a brief explanation of the condition:
The pain from intersection syndrome is usually felt on the top of the forearm, about three inches above the wrist. At this spot, two muscles that connect to the thumb cross over (or intersect) the two underlying wrist tendons (tendons connect muscles to bones). The two muscles that cross over the wrist tendons control the thumb. They are the extensor pollicis brevis and the abductor pollicis longus. These two muscles start on the forearm, cross over the two wrist tendons, and connect on the back part of the thumb. When these muscles work, they pull the thumb out and back.
The extensor carpi radialis brevis and the extensor carpi radialis longus muscles run lengthwise along the back of the forearm. The tendons of these two muscles attach on the back of the hand. The action of these two wrist tendons pulls the wrist back, into extension. Most of the tendons around the wrist are covered with a thin tissue called tenosynovium. Tenosynovium is very slippery. It allows tendons to glide against one another and the surrounding muscles, fat, and skin with very little friction.
If you overuse the wrist extensor tendons, the slippery tenosynovial lining may become inflamed from the constant rubbing against the two thumb muscles. As the tenosynovium becomes more irritated and inflamed, it swells and thickens. You feel pain when you move your wrist because the swollen tendons are rubbing against the thumb muscles.
The magic ice cup above, keep it moving over the relevant area, hands are warm and insulated by the styrene, direct application unlike the regular bag of frozen peas, cheap and reliable. See Donals page for more details.
The injury has prevented any swimming in full however yesterday I could bear it no longer and accompanied Joe Hunter to Ellerton Lake, he was doing three hours in his Channel build up which made me very envious (and impressed) I needed to get back into the water so as not to loose all of my acclimatisation so took the decision to kick with fins for an hour. It was mighty boring but a must if I am to be serious about the looming events, that said I did see the lake in a whole new dimension. Afterwards I hung around to feed and encourage Joe as he eased to the three hour point. Well done Joe.
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