Bradley heads for the Channel

<p>So now that he’s run 135 miles through the desert, pulled a sled through 100 miles of Alaskan wilderness in the dead of winter and ridden a bicycle 3,000 miles across America, sure, why not, Bill Bradley says, might as well swim the English Channel.</p><p>After that, sometime next year, Bradley said he is thinking about crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat.</p><p>And after that, who knows? Maybe Santa Rosa’s Bradley will carry a snowboard to the summit of Mt. Everest and then snowboard down the Himalayan mountain.</p><p>But first, priorities being priorities, Bradley was to jump into the English Channel from Dover, England at 4:30 this morning (Santa Rosa time), with 50-degree water, jellyfish, supertankers and at least 21 miles of open ocean between him and the coast of France. That sounds a bit nasty with this added caveat.</p><p>“I get seasick,” he said.</p><p>That’s like having a skydiver suddenly proclaiming he has a fear of heights. </p><p>Or Kanye West suddenly fearing criticism. </p><p>Ah, but this is Bill Bradley we’re talking about here, who truly has very little fears, like being called crazy. In fact, he rather treats it like a compliment. </p><p>“I’m building on my reputation of being really crazy,” said Bradley, 49, Tuesday from Britain on his mobile phone, and with that statement he laughs like it was the best joke he ever heard. Of course, swimming the English Channel is no joke. At their last posting, The Channel Swimming Association, the official governing body of the sport, authenticated 801 swimmers to have made the crossing. </p><p>Of every 10 swimmers who attempt The Channel, one makes it, claimed CSA officials on their website. The first crossing was in 1875. </p><p>If there is anything worthy of a laugh about swimming the English Channel it’s this: The CSA people have issued strict regulations of what a swimmer may wear. Nothing will be over the shoulders or the arm, extend past the groin. It’s called, hold your applause on this one, The Swimming Costume. </p><p>It’s not just the 50-degree water temperature, or the seas that can swell high enough to take the swimmer as high as the pilot boat that escorts him, or the idea that the English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world, with an average of 600 ships traversing it daily.</p><p>Those are all noteworthy in their own right but open ocean swimming offers a unique dilemma.</p><p>Unlike nearly every other form a competition, an open ocean swimmer can’t get off the bike, stop paddling, stop running or climbing if feeling exhausted. In fact, a Channel swimmer is allowed no physical contact with either boat or fellow human. He or she can only tread water and that’s recommended for only brief seconds because the ocean current, not to mention the waves, will move the swimmer off course. Bradley is planning to be off course. </p><p>“I have been told that in the best of conditions,” he said, “the 21-mile swim becomes at least a 25-mile swim.”</p><p>So Bradley, or any other human dolphin who attempts the Channel, will have to be on the move between seven hours and 27 hours, the quickest time versus the slowest time. Does that seem daunting?</p><p>Only when you phrase it like this – every 30 minutes or so Bradley will bob like a cork in the open ocean as he receives 300 calories by cutting a corner of a plastic bag extended to him, and then squeezing the bag until either all the energy goo or chocolate pudding is expended, either into Bradley himself or the open ocean. </p><p>Gosh, sure sounds like fun. </p><p>Actually, it is, because Bill Bradley is that rare human being who finds it necessary to stare complete and utter exhaustion in the face and then to waddle on past. It’s almost as if exhaustion is his friend, that if he doesn’t meet it during a physical challenge, he feels he stiffed his friend. Bradley has no fears of that at the English Channel. </p><p>“The toughest part of the swim is the currents off the French coast,” Bradley said. “One guy got to within a half-mile of France but got caught in an eddy. For two hours he tried to swim out of the eddy but couldn’t. He was pulled from the water a half-mile from shore.”</p><p>Bradley said he has 1,100 people following him on his twitter account (keywords: Epic Bill Bradley), as they learned among other things you can’t just show up and swim the English Channel. A swimmer must verify to CSA, by an independent witness, that he is capable of swimming the Channel by having completed two 6-hour swims in open ocean. Bradley did that, around San Francisco Bay, although he became violently sick to his stomach both times.</p><p>“The first guy who did this back in 1875 did the breastroke across the Channel,” Bradley said. “The crawl wasn’t known yet. Can you believe that? Doing the breaststroke across the English Channel? Now that’s crazy.”</p><p>And with that Bill Bradley stopped talking for a second. I could well imagine what he was thinking: Gosh, why didn’t I think of that?</p><p>For more on North Bay sports go to Bob Padecky's blog at padecky.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com</p>