BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team)

BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team)

I’ve been given the great privilege of helping out on the foodie front for BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team), a totally inspirational group of 11-12 year olds who are training to be the youngest ever relay team to cross the English Channel.

Anyone feeling disillusioned with the youth of today should take a look at the BEST website. These kids are phenomenal! 11 year-old Lewis decided that he would like more than anything to swim the English Channel and the idea blossomed from here – his parents took him seriously and established a superb professional team to take this initial idea to a whole new level. This team includes head coach and GB swim team physiotherapist, Penny Porter,  assistant coach, Chris Eynon, who won the 2007 British Long Distance Swimming Association Lake Windermere 17.5km Championships and was part of a successful English Channel relay at the age of 16, plus a highly professional medical and safety team.

The swim across the Channel is planned to take place on 17th August, weather permitting, and will take anything from 12.5 to 15 hours. The 6 children, selected from over 40 hopefuls, each have to swim for an hour at a time in choppy, cold, cold water (15-17 C) with jellyfish, floating debris of a dubious nature, cross channel ferries and possible hypothermia to content with. They will not be wearing wetsuits! – just one hat, goggles, basic swimsuit and grease…. Between each swim they must then wait for 5 hours in a tiny fishing boat until their turn to swim comes around again.

I am still getting my head around what they are going to fuel themselves with in this boat as there will be very minimal cooking facilities on board – perhaps even just a kettle.

I gave the children a talk about nutrition on Saturday. It is going to have to be an important part of the children’s training to eat properly over the next 8 months, and integral to their well-being and ultimately their overall performance – they will be training six days a week, and that’s on top of all their school work, not to mention their school sport and the fact that they will all be going through major growth phases! They will also have several cold water/open water training weekends so that they can acclimatise their bodies to low temperatures. Tough and busy kids!

Not surprisingly for such go-getting kids, they appear to be good eaters and understand the importance of following a balanced training diet. I think that encouraging them to eat well is not going to be fun, rather than an uphill struggle. Even the boy who refuses to eat fruit had a little taste of the strawberry smoothie I whizzed up for them after the talk – I have never seen a kilo of strawberries disappear before my eyes quite so quickly as it did on Saturday!

Click here for the recipe for  Stawberry Mint Vitamin Rush.

For more delicious smoothie recipes, see my book Go Faster Food.