The Swimmer: running and swimming through London

Lining up for the first plunge of the day at Highgate Men's pond

In The Swimmer, John Cheever's celebrated 1964 short story, Neddy Merrill decides to swim home via a dozen or so of his neighbours’ pools. Of course, to link this chain of water, he has to run across lawns, through woods and down busy roads.

Inspired by Neddy’s watery journey, two south Londoners, Will Watt and Jonathan Cowie, came up with the idea of The Swimmer, a relaxed half-marathon that takes in a number of London’s finest parks and open-air pools. Starting in Hampstead in north London, the route heads down through the centre, crosses the Thames and ends up “back home” at Brockwell lido, near Brixton.

Running across the Heath

After months of admiring it from afar, I finally signed up for the October Swimmer. It’s a brilliant event and I’ve written up the day – or rather early morning – for the Guardian’s running blog: The perfect joy of swimming and running through London.  

Continuing the theme of transplanting great sporting feats to the streets of London,  someone has also invented a London version of the Bob Graham Round. Heights of Madness is a run that takes in all the inner London boroughs - 41 miles, 12 summits in an amazing six hours. Now if they combined this with the Swimmer...

Fell running

The sport of fell-running rarely makes the news unless there's some sort of 'disaster' to report such as the 2008 OMM - The Original Mountain Marathon*. Joss, the recent biography of Joss Naylor, generally considered Britain's greatest fell runner, received scant attention in the mainstream press, while great endurance races such as the Fellsman (61 miles over rugged moorland in under 24 hours) are almost totally ignored.

Over the years though, there have been a number of profiles and features that give a glimpse of just what amazing feats of stamina participants of the sport perform. The most famous race, albeit against the clock, is the Bob Graham Round in the English Lake District. Named after a Keswick guest-house proprietor, on June 13 1932, Graham climbed 42 peaks, 28,500 feet of ascent and covering a distance of 74 miles, in less that 24 hours. The following picture appeared the day after:

Chris Brasher, former Observer sports editor and founder of the London Marathon, took part in an attempt in August 1977:

One of the runners accompanying Brasher was Charlie Ramsay who, in July 1978, made the first circuit of the Scottish Lochaber mountains (24 Munros - mountains over 3,000 feet) in a single day - subsequently called Ramsay's Round. Read more about this amazing feat on Charlie's site.

* For a detailed explanation of how the media had problems reporting this, see Robin Askwith's report in the Independent.