Suzy sent across some really helpful information after I asked why it was absolutely painful swimming in cold water and that I needed ways of getting people to recognise the difficulty of the 1,000 swim challenge.

In regards to the cold she came back to me with a website article which explains that in cold water your body needs more energy to keep the muscles warm and to get them working properly in the cold water. This makes absolute sense and I can now understand why swimming 600 lengths at Manchester Aquatic Centre was miles more difficult compared to swimming 500 lengths at Farnworth Leisure Centre…. apart from the distance obviously.

I also sent this to Suzy:

I’ve had real problems getting the awareness of this challenge off the ground and donations coming in. I think it’s difficult for people to realise how hard this challenge is as they have nothing to compare it to or any history of people having done something similar. The London Marathon – for example – is about a 4 hour run burning around 2,500 to 3,500 calories whereas the 1,000 length swim in breaststroke will take over 12 hours and burn up to 8,000 calories. Now I’m not saying the marathon is easy or less difficult – my god I’d hate to enter it! But people appreciate and understand and can compute how difficult it might be resulting in donations – unlike doing 25k in a pool and all the training with it. I need to get the awareness up without trying to sound arrogant and big headed! I’m hoping to get some fund-raising ideas sorted soon to boost the profile. Any thoughts you have on this would be appreciated.”

She sent me some fantastic fact information which I’ve developed into a long graphic which you can see on the right. It basically runs through a mega food/drink Christmas Day and showing how you would go about consuming 8,000 calories.

I’ll post this online towards the time in the hope that it will boost donations. I can also put that doing the Iron Man, running two marathons back to back, cycling 170 miles or rowing 90 miles would also equate to burning around 8,000 calories.