I was reflecting on this when i was 3 hours into my (hopefully) 8 hour swim yesterday and thinking that although my motives had changed, 17 years down the line i am still relating sharks to swimming pools.

This swim was born out of one of my usual enthusiastic and optimistic (not to mention outlandish) statements; that i would do an 8 hour swim to raise awarness for European Shark Week, whose main push for 2010 is to strengthen the finning ban, and to raise money for a local Scottish shark charity to go towards tagging studies (Scottish Shark Tagging Program), and so after 3 weeks of not particularly serious training squeezed around work i jumped in!

I have to say i found the mental side of things more of a challenge than the physical – yes after 3 hours i was cold and yes after 6 hours i thought my arms were going to pop out of my shoulder sockets but that can be pushed through a lot easier than the “oh wow i’ve still got 6 hours to go…” or the “half an hour must have gone by… what? only 10 minutes?! that clock can’t be right?!!” , of course i had initially said i would aim for 8 hours but my collapse before. However for those of you who know me should know by now that it would be 8 hours or nothing! I did it, i swam for 8 hours, i covered 12 miles and i burnt over 4000 calories. Its true i enjoyed the physical challenge as much as i enjoyed raising awareness and collecting money for the European Shark Week and the SSTP!

I think i have raised close to £400 although will post an update to this once everything has been collected and totalled up! I will also post up my training and nutrition schedule for those of you who are interested…

I hope i have made a small bit of difference by doing the swim, on Wednesday night i watched SharkWater for the umpteenth time to fuel my mind and make me go for it on the swim even more so, shark finning is a horrendous practice and utterly wasteful, sharks are caught, hauled up on board the fishing vessels their fins are sliced off and then their bodies are thrown back overboard leaving the shark to either drown or bleed to death, its a huge problem to overcome on so many different levels from the people who go out and actually fin the sharks, to the consumers of the (chicken/pork flavoured) “shark fin” soup, to the shark finning mafia driving the finning operations. But basic laws are in place, these need to be strengthened, tightened and policed to close loop holes and rid this practice in its entirety.

Its a large undertaking but it’s no good just reflecting on how awfull a situation is, stand up, take action, be heard and change things for the better!

Well thats my opinion anyway……