What do B. Tarkington, W. Faulkner, J. Updike and C. Whitehead have in common, besides being American writers? Do not ask Chat GPT or Google, just read along a bit further, OK? Photo by Laurin Steffens on Unsplash They all won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Twice. I have been thinking for years about a…
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#5 The swim that never was
Dear all, Almost a month has passed since the swim that never was. And you might wonder what happened there. Well, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Swim was interrupted shortly after it started. I swam more or less 2.5K in very challenging conditions, before it got canceled. In 35 years of history it had never happened, which…
#4 On the advantages of a buddy
A short update The temperatures are finally going down after the hottest weeks ever recorded on planet earth. Maybe they are now going down a bit too much for my taste, at least in Switzerland. The lake temperatures hit a comfy 25 a couple of weeks ago, while they now stagnate around the 21ish Celsius.…
#3 Train Mind and Body
How fit do you need to be to spend 8-plus hours in open waters? And how much mental strength is necessary to overcome the challenges that very likely arise in the process? These two questions have been accompanying me in the last 7 months, i.e. from the moment I knew I had been selected to…
# 2 Food (for thought)
First of all a disclaimer/introduction regarding the Dutch organization I collect money for.It is called Swim to Fight cancer, was established by passionate swimmers in 2014 out of a simple idea: swimming in a city, in the canals, where participants and teams collect as many donations as possible for cancer research. You can find here…
#1 Train the endurance to cold waters
Swimming in cold waters is one of the most exciting things I can imagine. For my body but also for my brain. Exciting in Dutch is spannend, which can also have a sort of scary connotation. And in this sense I believe that it fits very well what I feel when swimming out there.
#0 I have a simple plan. Introduce the work I do and raise money. By swimming 27K in one day
The plan is simple and twofold: tell you something more about who I am and what I do and raise money for cancer research.By providing you with insights about the kind of preparation I do to swim a very long distance and the kind of work I do, I want to collect at least 2023 euros by the…
What trust helps achieving
(in sport as in life) I love volleyball. I had forgotten that I do.Since Covid-19 I started watching live games on the laptop ( long live VolleyballWorld.tv ).Last week the Italian National Team won the FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Championship for the 4th time, the first time in 24 years. They won in Poland, against…
10.463.000 meters
10.463 km in less than 5 months. This is the amount of Dutch roads I drove through since the beginning of 2022, the year of the Russian assault to Ukraine. (…) What did I do to make time pass by? And what did I learn in the process? Link to my post on Medium