OWM: So what's your actual history with swimming then?
GRANT: A big motivator was that I got onto a blog by an Irish swimmer who had done a lot of cold water and open water swimming called the Lone Swimmer. I kept reading his blog and it was really inspiring. He would swim in different locations and in cold water and just wrote a lot about distance swimming with all these amazing people, so I started googling for what I could do and discovered the muscles[Open Water Swim Group] and that's how I learnt to swim in the ocean basically. I had done nippers before when I was a kid and was a surfer and a spear fisherman, but I was never a swimmer really.
OWM: Preparing for the English Channel Crossing, what would a standard weeks training be?
GRANT: A standard week would be five to eight swims, the furthest I got to was 36kms in a week but I would be building distance all the time. I would have swam more if I physically could have because I mentally wanted to.
I went to the physio once a week, I had a massage every week from the sports masseuse and went to Pilates twice a week. I did stretching almost every night and used a foam roller.
OWM: Say for example 36kms in a week, how many hours do you think that actually would take you?
GRANT: That's a good question. The actual swimming time would be 12 or 15 hours of swimming. Then there is the driving, getting in and out of the pool and stuff around that and it pretty much ends up like a job really.
OWM: Were there any big changes to what you're eating and your diet going into the Channel Swim?
GRANT: So I went to a nutritionist who specializes in endurance sports. Her name's
Steph Lowe and she's awesome. As much reading and knowledge as I could pick up
about low carb high fat diet, I still wasn't getting it right. My weight dropped from 112kg to 97kg and I wanted to get it back to about 105kg to 108kg. So we progressively added more carbohydrates to my diet. So that was a big change and fasted training was huge for me as all my training was in a fasted state.
OWM: So with removing sugar from your diet, was that out of choice or were you having a bad reaction to the sugar?
Open Water/Autumn, 2016 13
Successful swimmers have a tradition of writing their names on the wall of the Whitehorse Pub and having a celebratory ale.
"While I was quite numb after completing the swim, when I was at the pub with my family, partner Lisa who supported me so much, my little boy Francis who was so proud of me, Coach Chloe (my heroine), her husband Paul (an Channel soloist), and a couple other great swimmers, this is when I got really emotional. I now felt like a proper Channel soloist and in the company of all these amazing swimmers."