Going Ultra

By Kate Rew 11 Sep 2024

In summer 2024 alpkiteer Kate Rew jumped from swimming 10km to 24km. She explains the mindset switch that enabled her to do it.

Kate Rew and Cameron Alexander on a beach snack stop

I have a thing about rivers, they are where my love of swimming started, and river swimming - that feeling of flow, being in freshwater and moving through the landscape with it - is still my favourite swimming to do. When I saw an event called the Downhill Swim, a long swim through remote forest in Finland, it was like experiencing love at first sight: drone shots revealed a dark clear river snaking through boreal forest, with sandy beaches on the inner bends of constant meanders.

'There are reindeer on the beaches,' said a friend who had swum it. Reindeer on the beaches, just outside the arctic circle? Water so pure you could drink it? I was in. But how to go from being a 10km swimmer to a 24km swimmer?

I had just 2 months to go from very middling form (I pool swim for 30 minutes a few times a week over winter, do a bit of cycling and yoga, nothing super). I set my heart on the 12km – 24km seemed an impossible ask – and began. Here are the 3 things that worked for me:

Write a plan. I generally just swim more often and longer for a 10km but this event take place at the start of summer, and was a stretch, so that approach wasn’t going to work. A friend wrote a plan for me: three swims a week, one long one (growing every week till it neared the 12km), one 30 minute cold sprint swim (no wetsuit, in a spring-fed pond a few degrees colder than other water around) and one mid distance. We worked out the best days of the week. Family life is very busy so it’s easy to put off exercise, but once I had a plan, for this short period training I was weaponised: ‘I have to do my swim….’. Other things fell away, swimming time won. I felt accountable – and could relax knowing if I did what it said, all was good, so that saved hours of fruitless worry. When possible I cycled to the lake and pond rather than drove to get my body used to longer combined stretches of activity, and loved that extra time outside, early morning pedalling past high hedgerows as the sun came up, catching the start of summer.
Ask for help, around whatever is blocking you. I had a few issues to hurdle: I’d never found a costume that didn’t rub at these distances, tree pollen at the lake gave me vicious hayfever which stopped me sleeping, and mentally, I loathed the idea of ‘having to swim’ a certain distance. So I put that put there on social media and other peoples solutions came back. An ironman said the training is the event, that’s what people don’t realise, it’s almost the whole thing, so just enjoy it – which put those reluctant shivering Wednesday mornings in the springfed pond in a great new perspective. A long distance swimmer said he does 2 hour swim regularly just to keep that mental space open for himself, while a friend said she feels like she enters a different mental zone after 2-3 hours. That made me curious, what would it feel like, so I stopped saying “I have to swim 5/6/7/8km or 10 laps’, which only made me think about how far was left to go before it was over. And set time boundaries instead: ‘I’m going to the lake to swim for 2 hours’. That felt like a treat. I relaxed into it.
Make a leap. Finns – the happiest nation in the world for the sixth year in the row - love nature and time outside like we aspire to: the average Finn has 13 different outside hobbies, and Finns I’ve met seem to just go outside, and stay outside, and that’s the whole plan for the day. There is an element of seeing what unfolds, rather than going outside to do something, then going back in. When I arrived in Lapland I went for a long swim in the event river and it was surprisingly warm, and very beautiful: the untouched forest and deep sandy cliffs whipping past us as the current carried us downhill, the view underwater clear and giving a sense of progress. Even in my silvertip I can get cold but the fact it was 17-19 degrees and sunny was a game changer – I knew temperature wise I would make it. So having spent 2 months bellyaching that we’d never be fit enough to swim 12km and arriving as a bag of nerves, I turned to my swim buddy and said, ‘what if we just treated it like a day out, a long stroll in water, how bad can it be?’. So that’s what we did: we signed up for the 24km, stopped thinking of the distance, and just enjoyed the journey. Which took us 5 hours 20, and ended in a sauna. Feeling very happy, and completely victorious.

The Downhill Swim is an annual event that takes place in Oulanka National Park in Finland. The event day in 2025 will be on July 19, 2025, and registration will open on October 1, 2024, at 6:00 PM Finnish time (5 PM CET).

https://downhillswim.fi/home/