It’s all going swimmingly for Vassos Alexander

Sometimes the dreams that get away make the best books, as Simon Griffiths finds out from sports presenter Vassos Alexander during a swim in the Thames

Vassos Alexander had a simple plan: swim the English Channel and write a book celebrating his triumph.

Minor spoiler alert. He didn’t manage to swim across the English Channel. But he did write a book. Not the book he had promised his publisher but, in his assessment, a better one.

You might know Vassos as a sports presenter on Virgin Radio. You may have read his running books. I read his Don’t Stop Me Now: 26.2 Tales of a Runner’s Obsession long before I met him for the first time.

His new book, Swimmingly: Adventures in Water, is the result of Vassos not swimming the English Channel. It chronicles his journey into swimming, starting from childhood memories in Greece, where he associated swimming with freedom and adventure, to rediscovering the joy and challenge of outdoor swimming during the pandemic.

In Swimmingly, the Channel serves as a MacGuffin – something that drives the plot forwards, is essential to the protagonist, but turns out to have little relevance to the book’s core themes. Instead, it’s the journey that matters and the self-discovery, friendships and adventures that it enables.

I met Vassos for a swim in the Thames near Teddington Lock. It’s a spot he’s familiar with as he restarted his connection with swimming here during the pandemic and now occasionally swims with the local Bluetits group. It’s immediately clear that he’s evangelically passionate about swimming outdoors, in all its forms.

“I love it,” he says, with huge emphasis on the word love. “Yes, I’m a runner, but I’m equally a swimmer now. I find myself swimming more and more. It’s just lovely. It’s life affirming. You’re right there, in nature. Right in nature. And you come out feeling reborn. Every time. As you can tell, I’m a bit besotted.”

He tells me that he’s become especially attached to cold water swimming. So much so, in fact, that he feels melancholic for winter when spring rolls around. He’s even installed an ice bath in his garden so he can continue getting his cold water fix in the summer.

Out of time

We then spoke about the strangeness of his experience of time on long distance swims. For Vassos, the first 20 minutes or so of a long swim are a struggle and seem to take for ever.

“They’re horrific,” he says. “But then something happens in your brain. You sort of become at one with your stroke, the water, the feel of the water over your skin, and then hours can go by in what feels like seconds.

“It’s sensory deprivation. You can’t see. You can’t hear. It’s just, your stroke and your breath. I lose myself. It’s like magic.”

Respect

Vassos confesses that he didn’t give the English Channel the respect it deserves and put on the weight he needed to. As an accomplished endurance athlete he believed his mental strength and staying power would carry him through.

He says, “I thought I could haphazard my way through the Channel, as I do with the rest of my life. But it turns out, with the Channel, you can’t.”

All through training, and writing the book in parallel, his assumption was that it would end with him standing on a beach in France, arms raised in triumph.

Instead, he says the book has turned into a celebration of swimming and the many swimmers he spoke or swam with on his swimming journey.

“And it’s better for it,” he says.

A leisurely dip

For our swim, I wasn’t sure if Vassos wanted to pound out a training session or enjoy a leisurely dip and chat. His swimming costume choice of baggy beach shorts suggested the latter, but then he pulled out a pair of serious looking googles and a swimming cap, and I started worrying he wanted to get a few miles in. “They’re for the photos,” he explained, when he saw my apprehension.

It turned out it was his second swim of the day and he’d also been in the gym for a workout. I was also just back from the pool. We swam a few minutes of head down front crawl, just to prove we could, and then, by mutual unspoken agreement, switched to head-up breaststroke. We pottered and chatted for around 20 minutes, then went for a cup of tea. It was one of the most pleasant interviews I’ve ever done.

Vassos Alexander’s new book ‘Swimmingly: Adventures in Water’ is published by Bloomsbury