Completing My Blogger Charity Swim #ASC17

I told you a little while ago that I was joining with a team of fellow bloggers to complete a Channel swim relay challenge to help raise money and awareness for Aspire charity.

Aspire are a national charity who raise money for those affected by Spinal Cord Injuries.

Every 8 hours, someone is paralysed by Spinal Cord Injury and currently there is no cure. Aspire provide help and support to those affected as well as their families.

Individuals affected will lose muscle and sensory control and the vast majority become full time wheelchair users for the rest of their lives. Historically, the majority of spinal cord injuries have been sustained by those aged 21 to 30, with nearly three quarters of newly injured people being male, although increasingly it is affecting older people too.

Through its projects and programmes, Aspire offers practical support to the 40,000 people living with a spinal cord injury in the UK so that they can lead fulfilled and independent lives in their homes, with their families, in work places and in leisure time.

I am not the strongest of swimmers at all, I can swim a length of the pool but then have to stop before completing another, for me swimming 160 lengths in one go would have been impossible.

160 lengths is 2.4 miles, each of the 10 bloggers on my relay team all swam the same amount over the course of their relay time. Some completed it in one go or in just a few.

It is really unimportant how long it took each of us to complete, what matters is that we all did complete.

Combined we have now swam the equivalent of swimming the channel and that is an amazing achievement.

After taking the children to school I took myself off to my local pool, I had planned to finish over the course of just 4-5 sessions however it proved far more difficult than I first thought.

I’d not factored in the pool closing for private lessons during my swim or closing of a section of the pool due to aqua aerobic classes, nor the fact that I was far unfitter than I want to be so had to stop lots of times.

In the end it took me 10 sessions in the pool to finish up.

I am really glad I pushed myself and fulfilled this challenge, although it may not be one I am ready to rush back and do again soon.

It was hard going for me, I won’t pretend otherwise. Emmy really embraced the challenge too and tried her hardest to swim as far as she could too. She managed to swim for a mile over the course of 6 swimming sessions and I am so proud of her.