March blind swimmer Simon Wilkes clocks up over three miles in charity swim for Arthur Rank Hospice
Blind ‘merman’ from March was champion swimmer at Jesus Green Lido for Arthur Rank Hospice’s ‘The Big Shiver’.
Simon Wilkes was just one of 26 swimmers who took part in The Big Shiver to raise funds for the hospice at Jesus Green Lido in Cambridge.
The 39 year old who was born with no eyes, joined 25 other Team Arthur heroes to swim up and down
Europe’s longest unheated outdoor pool in temperatures of just 15 degrees C.
Arthur Rank Hospice’s community fundraisers teamed up with Better, who operate Jesus Green Lido to host their first ever outdoor swim challenge – The Big Shiver - the day before the pool opened to the public for the summer season.
At 91.4 metres the lido is nearly four times the length of an average swimming pool.
Each of the participants had their own reasons for wanting to take part in The Big Shiver for Simon though, who swam for the entire three hours of the challenge clocking up 58 lengths or 3.29 miles, the event was a wonderful opportunity to indulge his love of outdoor swimming, unassisted:
He said: “I really love open water swimming so much. It gives me such a sense of freedom and liberation. I can move in three dimensions and go under the water as well as I’m not having to always to worry about the cane in front in of me, because I’m not going to fall. It also gets me closer to wildlife and nature; being totally blind that’s not so easy.
“I stick to outdoor swimming specifically: the indoor pools are quite often full of noise and echoes, so I can’t use my hearing, but with open water swimming you can use sound navigation. Usually it’s a case of anywhere I can get to: a river; lake; the sea; a big enough pond; a lido. With lidos I usually pick a rainy, over-cast day: there’s less people then as all the fair-weather swimmers are put off.
“I do swim outdoors regularly in my swimming pond but it’s not as long as I’d like and it’s hard to do any distance. Quite often I do what I call a ‘dawn-chorus swim’: I slip into the pond and can hear the birds singing. In winter, I break the ice. When you do it on a regular basis you get used to the cold. I’ve had so many great experiences with open water swimming in my time: I swam with the seals off the Isles of Scilly and with a sea lion last year in Combe Martin, Devon. Often though with outdoor swimming you need to stick to a specific course and I need a guide. As of yet, I haven’t found anywhere I can get to, where I can swim independently.”
He adds of his experience at The Big Shiver: “I’ll definitely be signing up again next year. The people were great and the distance that I did seemed to impress a lot of them.
"I felt absolutely super afterwards; like I’d had a really good work out. I felt invigorated and pumped up as I often do after a really decent swim and had the perfect meal for a merman that evening: monkfish and prawns.”
You can find out more about Arthur Rank Hospice’s upcoming swimming challenges at arhc.org.uk/swim.asp including The Gold Swim Challenge, which runs throughout 2018.
