We arrived in Pully on Thursday to temperatures above 30 degrees.

Jesper, Nicole and I were on the Nomad package, which meant arranging our own accommodation. We were staying at a friend’s place around 2 kilometres from the event base in Ouchy, although that did not fully describe the journey.

Nothing is flat in this part of the world.

By 15:00, the three of us were down at registration, reunited with familiar swimmers and beginning the transition from normal life into the UltraSwim bubble.

I was due to lead an “Are You Ultra Ready?” talk with the event ambassador, Susie Moonan. I know Susie from the Stockholm swimming and swimrun community. She is an extraordinary swimmer and an even better person. UltraSwim could not have chosen a more appropriate ambassador.

A delayed flight meant she was still travelling. So I was on my own.

Several swimmers were worried because they had never covered anything close to the distances ahead of us. We were about to swim 33.3 kilometres over four days, including a stage of more than 12 kilometres, and some had never completed a continuous swim remotely that long.

My message was simple.

If you are here, uninjured and looking forward to the event, then you are Ultra Ready.

The instinct to match a race distance in training comes partly from running culture. Running is load-bearing. Bones, tendons and ligaments need to be prepared for prolonged impact, which gives the long run a particular importance.

Swimming is different.

That does not mean endurance is irrelevant, or that you can fake your way through 33.3 kilometres. You still need fitness, shoulder resilience and many hours of swimming behind you. But the central challenge is not necessarily proving in training that you can survive the full distance.

It is developing an effective stroke and continuing to reproduce it when the distance becomes long.

There is a cardiovascular component, obviously. But the deeper challenge is mental: remaining connected to the movement rather than gradually losing it over several hours.

I gave the swimmers three words.

Relax. Range. Rhythm.

Relaxation starts before entering the water. Know the course. Pack the bag the night before. Be on time. Do not manufacture stress on land and expect it to disappear when the swim begins.

Then start easily and allow the stroke to settle. It is difficult to maintain good movement when you are fighting the water, your breathing or your own anxiety.

Range means continuing to travel with each stroke. Not pausing or gliding passively, but resisting the tendency for everything to become shorter as fatigue accumulates.

Rhythm means keeping some energy in the movement. During a long swim, it is easy for the stroke rate to fall until every stroke becomes slow and heavy.

The soundtrack can help.

During a 22-kilometre swim, I once had Ed Sheeran’s I See Fire stuck in my head. It is a perfectly good song, but not ideal swimming music.

I recommended Beyoncé instead. Single Ladies is a personal favourite.

I was there as an affiliated coach, but I was also about to enter the same lake, carry the same tow float and cover the same course as everyone else. I did not feel any particular conflict between the two roles. I was not there to demonstrate that I had mastered UltraSwim.

I was happy to be part of the team. Perhaps a domestique in cycling terms.

Or, as I would begin to think over the following days, a caddy in golf.

What I did not know on Thursday afternoon was how often I would need my own advice.

Relax. Range. Rhythm.

The first day contained two swims.

We started with 5.6 kilometres from Plage de Villeneuve, past Château de Chillon and into Montreux. After a break and a bus transfer, we swam another 5.1 kilometres from Rivaz to Cully.

A total of 10.7 kilometres was never going to be a walk in the park.

But readers of my recent [Swimming and Hill Running] newsletter will know the mindset I brought with me. I was not planning to race every gap, cling to every passing pair of feet or turn the event into a four-day test of competitive aggression.

I was there to swim-hike.

That did not mean swimming slowly. It meant managing the effort, appreciating the course and allowing the experience to be larger than my position in the field.

The first swim delivered immediately. Fresh water, mountains rising from the shoreline, Château de Chillon appearing beside us and Montreux waiting in the distance.

During the break, I watched swimmers continuing to arrive.

It is easy to be impressed by the speed of the leaders, but there is another kind of resilience further back. The same course exposes slower swimmers to the water for much longer.

Their hills are steeper.

Montreux was a good place to reset before beginning again.

On the second swim, beneath the Lavaux vineyards, I spent less energy bridging gaps and trying to hang onto drafts. I paced myself, led other swimmers and became more aware of what was happening around me.

Removing the expectation to compete did not leave me disengaged. It left me with more mental energy for the lake and for other people.

Somewhere during those first two stages, I started thinking about golf.

The UltraSwim field came from 20 countries. The average age was 51, there were more women than men, and nearly 40 per cent had completed a previous 33.3 event.

Looking at the swimmers around me, there was no obvious UltraSwim type.

The leading group contained a mixture of ages and body shapes. It did not resemble the front of an ultramarathon or a Haute Route cycling stage, where you can often make a reasonable guess about who will be fast before the race begins.

You cannot reliably identify a great golfer by looking at them.

The same is true of a swimmer.

Their superpower is not defined solely by the normal endurance metrics. It is the ability to coordinate and repeat an effective stroke, then do it again and again as the conditions change.

UltraSwim began to feel less like a stage race and more like championship golf.

Four days, with the quality of your swing making all the difference.

Golf requires a coordinated movement to be repeated with precision, but the repetition is never exact. The lie changes. The wind changes. The distance changes. The golfer must preserve the essential movement while adapting to the shot in front of them.

Swimming is similar.

The stroke needs to remain stable while adapting to chop, current, drafting, visibility, fatigue and the movements of the people around you.

Not every effective swimming stroke looks beautiful. I could see technical flaws in swimmers moving at the same speed as me, but their strokes were clearly effective in getting them towards the next flag.

My own swimming can feel a little like my golf game. I can play several holes well, then spend the next few hacking around in the rough. In the lake, I could swim a fast 500 metres followed by a slow one while believing I was producing exactly the same movement.

That is not automatically a fitness problem.

It might be a coordination problem, an attention problem or an adaptability problem.

The difference between the two 500-metre sections may be less about the size of the engine and more about the quality of the swing.

At the end of Friday, we returned from Cully aboard a lake steamer built in 1914. The machinery was exposed and still working, carrying us across the water more than a century later.

A piece of the lake’s history continuing to function in our digital society.

There was something appropriate about that.

Swimming is an traditional solution too.

The original plan placed the 12.6-kilometre lake crossing on Sunday, from Lausanne to Évian.

An incoming weather system forced the organisers to change both the day and the direction. We would swim on Saturday, from Évian in France back to Lausanne in Switzerland.

The reversal was a safety decision. If the weather deteriorated, evacuating swimmers and returning everyone to the event base in Lausanne would be easier.

It also meant stacking the two biggest days together.

We had completed 10.7 kilometres on Friday. Now we would wake up and swim more than 12 kilometres across the lake.

The evening before, Emma, Allan and I decided that we would do it together.

Emma is part of my Bromma swimming and Envol swimrun communities. Allan is the 19-year-old son of her brother, Oskar, and before the event he had never completed more than three kilometres in a single swim.

That could have been a reason to worry.

Instead, it gave the crossing a purpose.

The lake was flat when we began.

We had two excellent SUP paddlers accompanying us, which made navigation much easier. I could sight on them rather than constantly lifting my head to search for the next marker.

Underneath the calm surface, however, there was a strong current. Whenever we stopped to feed, I could feel us being pushed backwards towards France.

The organisation of the crossing was extraordinary.

Lac Léman reaches around 300 metres deep in the middle, so conventional anchored course buoys were not possible. Instead, the organisers used GPS-controlled motorised markers to hold position across the lake. The wider safety operation included kayaks, SUPs, powerboats and live GPS tracking of swimmers and support assets.

From the water, the solution was simple.

Swim to the next mark.

Then do it again.

We could see Switzerland across the lake. It did not look impossibly distant, but the shore also did not appear to move any closer. For hours it remained a fixed strip on the horizon.

Only during the final couple of kilometres did Lausanne begin to feel like a real place rather than a backdrop.

I spent much of the crossing leading the draft. Several times, Emma encouraged Allan and me to swim ahead without her.

We did not.

We adapted the pace to the group.

There is satisfaction in swimming fast, but there is another kind of satisfaction in helping a group move towards a shared objective. After several hours in the water, it becomes increasingly easy to question why beating the person beside you is particularly important.

This gave us a different reason to continue.

I had no real low point during the crossing. It was a long time in the water, more than five hours, but the external purpose made it feel easier.

The process was manageable.

Mark to mark.

Relax. Range. Rhythm.

My watch recorded 12,356 metres, almost the perfect line. Much of the credit belongs to our two SUP paddlers, who must have read the current superbly.

We had crossed an international border by swimming, and we had done it together.

Before the event, I thought of my role as something like a cycling domestique.

The golf analogy perhaps makes caddy even better.

A good caddy does not hit the shot, but helps another person manage the course. They read the conditions, control the emotional temperature and keep attention on the next useful action.

During the crossing, I was still completing my own swim. But my focus was no longer limited to the fastest possible version of my own performance.

I was helping to set a pace, hold a line and keep the group together.

This did not make the swim less meaningful.

It made it more meaningful.

On Sunday, we returned to the original third stage: 5.9 kilometres from Cully to Pully Plage.

The back of the event had been broken. We had completed the first day’s double and the full lake crossing. All that remained were two relatively short swims.

But “relatively short” is doing a lot of work after more than 23 kilometres.

Accumulated fatigue cannot be taken for granted.

For many swimmers, Cully to Pully felt long. For me, it passed almost immediately. I think the difference was mental. The crossing had not beaten me up, and I was not carrying it as a burden into the next day.

Interestingly, my greatest muscular soreness had come after Friday’s opening stages. By Sunday, everything felt good.

During the latter part of the swim, I began picking up positions.

The same happened during Monday’s final 4.1-kilometre stage from Ouchy to Parc Guisan.

The opening laps were a roller coaster. Chop made sighting difficult, but also made the swimming exciting. During the final kilometre, the water calmed and I began passing several swimmers on the way to the finish.

I did not suddenly switch into racing mode.

I just kept it smooth.

Perhaps the absence of competitive stress allowed me to maintain the better stroke. Instead of trying harder to catch people, I continued swimming well and happened to move through the field.

That is a useful distinction.

At the finish, we were met by smiles and champagne.

A difficult combination to improve upon.

My first UltraSwim, in Montenegro in 2023, remains my best performance in terms of ranking.

It was also the most stressful.

This was my fourth event in four consecutive years: Montenegro in 2023, Montenegro again in 2024, Skopelos in 2025 and now Switzerland in 2026.

By Switzerland, my mindset had changed.

I was confident that I could finish. I was never competing for the podium, so why spend four days becoming emotionally invested in beating people whose names I might not even know for a slightly higher position on the list.

Golf has a handicap system that allows players of very different levels to share a meaningful competitive experience. There is no real equivalent in endurance sport. The clock is absolute. A faster swimmer is a faster swimmer.

But UltraSwim creates something socially similar.

You do not need to be a scratch golfer to enjoy a round, and you do not need to be an UltraSwim podium contender to get the full experience from the event.

The organisation recognises the leaders, but the community does not behave as though only the leaders are doing something worthwhile. Everyone is playing the same course, even if it takes some of us much longer to reach the clubhouse.

This time, I experienced each swim more as a celebration of movement and community than as a performance test.

I still cared about swimming well.

I just stopped using other people and the clock as the primary measure of whether I was doing it.

Sweden had an exceptional event.

Susie Moonan won overall. Jesper finished second overall and was the leading man. Åsa finished fifth overall and third among the non-wetsuit women.

Places are not the only way to judge this kind of event, but those performances deserve recognition.

They are also interesting because Sweden is not an obvious long-distance open-water powerhouse. Our lakes are closed by ice or uncomfortably cold for much of the year. These are not swimmers raised in a year-round ocean culture.

Channel swimming has never been central to the Swedish swimming psyche. The consolidated Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation and Channel Swimming Association solo records support seven Swedish swimmers across eight successful solo crossings since Sally Bauer first crossed in 1939.

Susie plans to attempt the crossing in July 2027. A successful swim would make her the eighth Swedish solo Channel swimmer.

Water creates a strange hierarchy.

The body that looks strongest on land does not necessarily move fastest through it. Age reveals surprisingly little. Conventional ideas about athletic appearance become less useful.

Everyone still has to solve the same problems: balance, breathing, rhythm, navigation, relaxation and the private mental task of continuing to stroke.

Perhaps this is one reason the UltraSwim community feels so inclusive.

Water equalises without pretending we are equal.

Another highlight was Sunday evening at the Olympic Museum.

The museum itself was excellent, and sharing dinner there with the swimmers made the evening special. But the part that stayed with me was the presentation from Léman Hope.

The organisation uses five-day sailing trips on Lac Léman to help young people recovering from cancer rebuild confidence after treatment. During the evening, one family shared their story with us.

It was incredibly moving.

I do not want to draw a false comparison between a voluntary swimming event and cancer. There is no comparison.

We chose our discomfort. We could stop. We were supported, celebrated and safe.

But the evening did make me think about the role of difficulty.

There is a Mozambican saying that I like and goes something like:

In lives where hardship and effort are increasingly engineered away, I think choosing to do difficult things matters to our mental health. Not because suffering is automatically noble, but because effort reconnects us with attention, agency and gratitude.

It reminds us that we are alive and capable of acting.

For young people whose bodies and lives have been controlled by illness and treatment, sailing provides a setting in which confidence and independence can begin to return.

Our swim was not their struggle.

But perhaps both experiences reveal something about what happens when people are given the chance to discover that they can still move forward.

Emma, Jesper, Åsa and I have now completed the same four UltraSwim events.

Liza and Nicole joined us in Skopelos and became part of the gang.

What keeps bringing us back?

I am not completely sure.

The locations are spectacular. The organisation and safety measures are exceptional. A multi-day, point-to-point swimming event is enormously complicated, and Switzerland added international borders, public transport, changing weather and a full lake crossing to the normal challenges.

Yet from the swimmer’s perspective, it felt almost effortless.

For a few days, the international swimmers’ bubble becomes its own little world. You eat, swim, recover, talk about swimming and prepare to swim again. Normal life becomes temporarily distant.

But I think the water itself is part of the answer.

It is a special medium that creates a different set of challenges and a different way of relating to people. It allows competition without requiring rivalry. It rewards skill without caring much about appearance.

Each time I complete an UltraSwim, I get something different from it.

The first gave me my best ranking.

The fourth may have given me my best experience.

Captain Webb is associated with the phrase:

After four UltraSwims, I think I understand it slightly differently.

The difficulty is not simply what makes the experience great.

The difficulty makes us pay attention: to the stroke, to the person swimming on our feet, to the shore that refuses to come closer, and to the fact that we get to be there at all.

And that, more than the ranking, may be why I keep coming back.