For those who can’t
George Brill has been a champion fundraiser for Long Covid UK for many years - on 5 September, he swam Lake Windermere, the third in a series of incredible challenges.
George’s fundraiser for Long Covid UK can be found at https://www.justgiving.com/page/george-brill-1. Any donations are gratefully received.
For those who can’t.
I kept my arms turning.
Far slower now, heavy, one after the other. Things were beginning to ache pretty bad—shoulders, lower back, elbows. The seasickness of the last couple of hours was beginning to subside at least; and thank God the water wasn’t cold. I could feel the heat of the sun across my wetsuit, catch glimpses of the shadows of clouds as I turned to breathe, one way and then the other: dark shapes chasing one another across the mountain slopes above the lake.
There are many parallels between endurance sport and Long Covid—the mental game, the suffering, the dance between fight and acceptance, the seeming impossibility of the whole.
Dark water, flashes of light, dark water. It now seemed that long distance swimming magnifies the parallel even more: a forced, closed immediacy and deeply intense internal world punctuated only by flashed glimpses of a brighter, more colourful reality that sits encircling—visible for a second in the moment of breath, and then, just before it comes into focus, gone again, snatched away, helplessly beyond reach. No, right now the sun on the mountains was but a distant imagining, as intangible as if it were an illusion. Right now my reality was only the great green darkness below, the occasional weed reaching up towards me; dead arms, the edge of nausea and a panicky intensity just barely controlled. However well one swims, it is just a matter of time before the unease rises—in the end the water is no place for mankind. Certainly my comfort and control had just about run out.
Smiling faces and outstretched hands reaching from the boat feed station to pour jelly babies into my fist. I lay on my back kicking as I struggled to chew them down, fighting the headwinds that conspired to blow me back the way I’d come. I could almost see the finish, a kilometre or two further on. My watch buzzed 4 hours as I rolled back to my front to resume swimming. I retched at the cloying sweetness and switched my focus to trying to keep the mounting nausea under control. I was beginning to hate this lake.
Ullswater was the second of three. Coniston, a month earlier, had been a breeze. I’d swum it fast, pushing hard from the midway point to finish the eight and a bit kilometres with energy to spare. Ullswater had been a different beast. A gentle headwind and persistent chop had washed away my naive self-confidence to little more than desperate stubbornness as I resigned myself to a very different and deeply unpleasant experience even before halfway. Turns out that 12 km is far, far harder than 8 km.
Despite this, however, there is also one major difference between endurance swimming and Long Covid. And that is control. The agency of engagement. For five years I endured: a blighted inertia where to fight was to lose ground, to try was to condemn oneself. But now, here, finally I could fight.
I dug in, forcing my shoulders to turn faster—dig, pull, glide and kick. I tightened my core, felt the momentum rebuild and the flow of water across my sides intensify. A kilometre remaining; twenty minutes left to hurt. The hurt became craving, with each level of pain calling for more—the itch that the scratch only inflames. And with it, emotion. I pulled harder and harder, planned prudence and the sensibilities of self-preservation lost to the waters, tears flowing freely now—the grief; the joy; the anger and despair; a desperate, uncontrollable need to push harder, hurt more. It is here, in the limits of exhaustion that one meets the deeper self—uninhibited and honest, wearing loud all its pains and all its joys, past and present. Unmasked.
500m. Harder and harder. I screamed into the water, tears filled my goggles. Because I was given a second chance. Because I can still fight, even if it at times it might be slow and miserable and hard beyond imagination. For there exists another version of myself that didn’t make it back: a shadow of the grey half-life I might have lived. That ghost is what drives me, is alongside me always. I owe it to that ghost and every other person that can no longer rise and fight. To give anything less than my absolute all is to scorn them and the most precious gift of all: freedom.
Shapes rushed past below me. Pebbles, mud, weeds. I sighted ahead and saw the beach rising from the water, hundreds of people flanking the inflatable arch before me. As the ground brushed my fingers I paused, slowly swinging my feet in beneath me to stand, stumbling and falling back into the water as legs adapted to verticality once again. Through the arch and past the crowds.
I feel nothing. Numb. The grief and joy is gone. An edge of anxiety and despair replaces it—the final claws of the illness, hanging on even now. That too will pass in time, I am certain. For beneath it I feel now the inexhaustible well of energy and fire unleashed once again, bubbling through the murk that slowly dissipates as memory becomes ever more distant; the cup of dirty liquid that yields inevitably to the flow of pure, clear water; fast at first, then slower and slower. But in the bottom, some pebbles will always remain. They will always be with me. A part of me is glad for that.
I have other worries now. Normal person worries. It is remarkable how fast the all-consuming terror and pain of those years pass from feeling to fact, clouding to dull in memory and relevance. But somewhere deeper it will always remain. That is why I do this. In the pain and immediacy of endurance I can feel again the barest of its edge, mingled in some exquisite, twisted miscreation with the euphoria of the very freedom and fire it denied me for so long. I do it to remember, to honour, to respect.
I write now a month and half after Ullswater. On the 5th September, I step into the water to swim the final lake, Windermere. If I’m honest, I am terrified. Windermere is another 6 km longer still than Ullswater; likely colder, wavier and windier. I haven’t done much training since. Even after my arms eventually recovered from Ullswater, I’d lost all motivation to get back in the water, and amid a PhD submission, job applications and various trips, life got in the way. I try to take a moment to remind myself how incredible it is even be able to say that: life got in the way. In any case, arriving undertrained and unprepared is perhaps more appropriate, more real. I want to suffer—to remember, to pay respect. I owe it to the ghost.