Emma France's Journey to Swimming the English
Channel:
Channel Relay Race
I'm really looking forward to this.
The idea of this relay came from me wanting a 'warm-up' before my channel solo attempt. So I put an email round the club to find out if anyone was interested and I was astounded by the response. So many people expressed an interest that we ended up with 2 teams - a race.
The teams are almost perfectly balanced. The speeds have been based on either race times, time trials or estimates of how fast each person can cover 800m in a pool. The teams are balanced to within a minute over the entire distance of the channel. Clearly, open water swimming is very different to pool swimming, but even so it should be a great race.
The pilots are:
Alison Streeter MBE (pilot for my solo)
Neil Streeter
Team managers are:
Georgia France
Josh France
So we have 2 teams racing; brother and sister pilots racing; and brother & sister team managers racing.
Who's going to win? Who knows!!
We have a great mix of swimmers from really quite fast, to not quite so fast. Only a few have any open water experience. This is going to be a great experience and challenge for all involved.
Four charities look to benefit from this event. For further details see the individuals links for the teams:
Our boats for the day
Our swimmers