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Phil Rush, a well-known New Zealand swimmer, discusses his swimming career and his attraction to lime green clothing. He emphasizes the importance of pool training for building speed. He also talks about his successful swims, including a triple English Channel crossing. Phil shares that he started swimming at a young age and had the opportunity to swim Cook Strait at the age of 13. He talks about his training methods, which focused on building endurance and speed in the pool. Phil mentions his professional swimming career, where he competed in races around the world and earned good money. He highlights his success in cold water swims and his ability to maintain pace while others struggled with hypothermia. Phil believes that training in a pool is crucial for measuring pace and improving performance. He concludes by discussing the support he provides to other swimmers and his goal of helping them achieve their goals. Welcome to the CleverDix Podcast. In this episode, we talk to Phil Rush. Phil is a well-known New Zealand swimmer, especially if anybody's had anything to do with the Cook Strait. We talk about his swimming career, including being a professional and leading up to his Triple English Channel Crossing. He covers his belief that we need to do pool training to build really good pace, and also about his attraction to lime green clothing. We cover helping swimmers to achieve their goals and the support that he provides, and also some really memorable swims. We enjoyed talking to Phil. I hope you enjoy this too. Okay, welcome everybody to another CleverDix Podcast. This time, we have the honor of talking to the amazing Phil Rush, all the way from Wellington. Welcome to CleverDix Podcast, Phil. G'day guys, Russ. It's a pleasure to be here. Great, great. So Phil has got fame and fortune, or at least fame all the way around the world. I don't know if you've got any fortune left. If anything like the ice swimming, I'm the treasurer because there's no treasure. So we'll see how we go. But yeah, we're just kind of hoping that you could share with us some of your experiences, both in your swimming and you helping other people swimming throughout your years. Yeah, no, that'd be great. I've spent most of my life with open water swimming, and we were learning back in the early days. And now, it sort of seems we're successful because the process works. Yep. So Phil, I'm going to take a step back, if you don't mind. Obviously, anybody in New Zealand, specifically swimmers, but I guess most people will know who you are. But for those who don't know who you are, do you want to give us a bit of a background? Obviously, you're the Kiwi version of Mark Spitz, right? Six pack, little red speeder, budgie smuggler, green speeder. You've done some epic swims, including some local, like Topo, I guess the start of what is now the Topo Crown. You've done English Channel, you've done a Topo English Channel crossing. But perhaps, where did that all start? How old were you when you started swimming and where was it? I'm originally from Dunedin, and I swam under Duncan Lang, who many people know, and that's where I started. We were at the age of 15. There used to be a national championship in a pond in Whanganui, and it was three miles. I was a good trainer. I'm not a talented swimmer, but I love training and I love pushing myself to limits that other people wouldn't do in the pool. I went to the trials for the Commonwealth Games, that sort of level. But in those days it was only seven lanes in the pool and I was always eighth or ninth, so you never quite made the final. But I could swim and keep going and going and going. That's probably the understatement of the day. Yeah, but the good thing about it was I was from Dunedin. It's no Hawaii down there, so I was good in the cold. The water and the conditions in the winter leave a little bit to be desired in Dunedin. But that sort of set me going, and Duncan put me to these three-mile championships, which I won three years in a row. Then at the age of 13 and a half, I think, I was able to swim Cook Strait, had the opportunity to swim Cook Strait. How did that come about? We used to have a National Championship of American Swimming. So a gentleman, Barry Devonport, he was the first person to swim Cook Strait, he set it all up. And we'd go to small towns like Wakatani and swim from Whale Island back in, and all those sorts of places. We'd do five swims a year. It was sponsored by Air New Zealand. We were like rock stars. And we'd go around, and that's where it started for me, really. That first year in 1979, I think it was, 1979, we had the world amateur marathon swimming champion out here, a guy, Mohamed Mazeri from Egypt. And so they thought it would be good for us to swim Cook Strait together and do it in the fellowship of swimming Cook Strait and all that sort of thing. They got us on the boat, they drove us around. Of course, he got as sick as a dog going around there. As soon as we hit the water, there was no bloody fellowship left, I was gone. And my first claim to fame was beating, we used to call him Misery Gus, but Mohamed Mazeri. And at that time, he was world amateur champion. So I was very fortunate to beat him across Cook Strait. And the rest really from there just started to grow and grow and grow. Once again, the cold water didn't bother us. And you know, cold in the end was what I was good at. That's what I was known for. Things grew from there. We did the first double of Cook Strait. And then we did the first double of Lake Taupo. And as the years marched on, I shifted to Wellington to look for sponsorship. And I swam under a gentleman called Tony Keenan, who coached Rebecca Parrott as well, who obviously is a very well known distance swimmer. And we started going on the American circuit. I was one of the first professional swimmers in New Zealand when we used to go on like the professional golf circuit. We'd start in Atlantic City, swim around Atlantic City, and then go up through the Great Lakes. And you know, the Americans off the swim program would be on there and the top 20 in the world would be racing. And you know, that was good money in those early days, 100 US an hour. And that was good coin. And if you won, you know, there was 10K in it for you for winners. And you know, one of the late swims, which was cold, which suited me, you know, we were up to $25,000 first prize. And you know, all of a sudden, we were getting this great money involved in the sport. And we were true professionals in the word, professional swimmers. And there was some great racing, but the towns would shut when you went to the towns through Canada and Atlantic City was, but the casinos all sponsored a swimmer. And that was a great lifestyle. And we did that for about seven or eight years. So you've got kids in the States running around each of those little towns has got a little running around? Yeah, they've all got green shirts on. Nice. So yeah, so then, you know, also it was, you know, as a young guy, you know, that sort of money was unbelievable to be winning. You know, I was taken two years in a row in one of the events and picked up 17,500 US. And then, you know, I was lucky enough to run while doing the Prime Minister at the time, he valued the New Zealand dollar by 20%. So quite a bit of money in the end. Very cool. Legend has it that you do the bulk of your training or used to do the bulk of your training in a swimming pool as opposed to the ocean. Is that correct? Yeah, correct. There was never any need to swim in the sea. I don't believe I was comfortable confident in the sea. What I was lacking was speed. So I, there was no need to go out and while I was around in those days we didn't have a watch, you know, we used candles to time things back in those days. But they didn't have all these fancy watches that told you what place you were swimming. You know, there's only one way to get speed and that's in a swimming pool and that's using that clock at the end of the pool. And that is still my philosophy to this day. As long as you're confident in the sea, that is the proviso. I was confident in the sea. I didn't, the cold didn't bother me. As I say, I was from Dunedin and the cold didn't bother me. So I didn't have to really acclimatise too much. You know, I left school to become a dustman. During the winter we'd be running around with shorts and a singlet on and it'd be snowing and that sort of thing. So that was all sort of just different sorts of training as well that we used. So we'd get picked up outside the pool. I'd be running up and down the streets. They'd tie the back of my half of the step up so I had to run these old chaps that we were all working together. So they felt they had more training. They were training me better than Duncan Lang at those days. So, but it all helped to build the endurance. It's all about building quality endurance at speed. And that is probably why we were so successful because, and you know, my speed compared to the Americans was nothing. They were sub-15 minute, 1500 guys. And in a lake that is 20 degrees, there's no way I could keep up with them. But as soon as that dropped to 16 degrees, they'd be in hospital with hypothermia and I'd be laughing and waving them away past. So that's where my forte was cold water, long distance. And as we got on, the distances got longer and longer and longer, which just becomes a bloody mental, you know, become a mental case in the end of it. But being able to train your mind and still swim at pace, that is what I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to get Caitlin to do. Young Caitlin O'Reilly is that, you know, I'm trying to get her to relax so much, but we're still going at three and a half, four Ks. I was lucky enough, my crew pace was four and a half Ks an hour and through the night and then in the morning, you know, we could step it up to five. And, you know, that's why we, that's also because you're dealing with tides like in the English Channel, you can do a lot more work with the tide to help the swimmer. So you're not fighting and grinding it out to get to the end. But once again, there's only one, you can't do that sort of training in the sea. It's just, it's not natural. You've got to have a measured distance that you can train at so that you know what pace you're going and how fast you're going. So context, the average person today to swim Lake Taupo as an example, so Matt, you're the expert, is it Taupo or Taupo? Well, it depends. It depends. I mean, you South Africans probably have got a funny way. Yopti Hawkins. Yeah. But, well, I think I probably don't have the proper tongue to be able to talk properly. I just call it Taupo. Okay, got you. So the average sort of marathon swimmer these days takes what, 14, 14 and a half hours to cross Lake Taupo? Yeah, I would, I don't think, it's been a long while. Anna Marshall swam it 11 and a half hours. I was lucky enough to do it in just over 10. But generally now we're talking from 12 and a half to 18. Now, I say that, but it's about achieving the goal, isn't it? I want to stress the point though. So call it 14 on average. You did a double in how much? 23.15, I think. Okay. And you're still going to claim that you don't have the speed? I don't have the speed to win the 1500 or the Olympics. Okay, okay. And then that's, once again, it's a matter of building endurance, holding speed for long periods of time and shutting your mind. It doesn't hurt. You can't let it hurt. As soon as you start hurting, that pace drops off, the confidence goes and the speed goes. Got you. How did you get Caitlin over her fear of swimming in the dark? There was a lot of, and I can still hear it now when I think back on it, when she swam Cook Strait, you know, she was green as that grass outside. She turned up, I phoned her, she turned up, she had a mother on board, and she had John Gatfield, who was also very young at swimming, in the early days, and he came out and coached her. As soon as it started getting dark, she started swimming faster and faster, and then it went pitch black, and all I could hear was whimpering and crying, and getting to the end. When we got to the end, we had these very large glow sticks that I held out, and it was almost like a cuddly blanket, and I was just about holding it on her head, and she hit that rock, she leapt off the rock in one bound into the IRB, grabbed us, and we're on our way home. She did a fantastic job for someone who I didn't know at the time was scared of the dark. Yeah. And we're in Cook Strait, and it's like in the middle of the night, it's like pulling your head into a black rubbish bag. There's no street lights, there's no other light apart from what we've got there. So, getting back to that, what we did, we tried to build into some more swimming in the dark, which was difficult. It was difficult, and we had a few problems in the early days, I've got to say. It wasn't easy, but we've mastered it now through the help of different people, and I think even Caitlin will say, we had a big day in Molokai just last year, and we started at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I felt she coped with it very, very well, and very professionally. So, we're over that side of those things. A lot of people don't like it. I think if I could swim without having daylight, I would do it all the time, because it shucks around you, it shucks everything down. You're not lifting your head to see how far you've gone, because you can't see anything. So, and then you're in this sort of blackened room, and what we used to do was just have, but nobody was talking at night, so that distraction didn't stimulate you. You need to be unstimulated, but you still need to be swimming, you need to be holding good strokes. If there was something wrong, yes, we'd have conversation, but prior to that, you just get on and chip through it, chip through it. It's like sleeping at home at night, but you're swimming, and you just get on with it, and just shut your mind off. You're not looking at anything, you're not seeing anything, but you're still swimming, and you're getting over it, and you're not worried about, because sure as hell, as soon as daylight comes, you're looking up to see what's around, what you've missed, who's out there, what's going on. So, with Caitlin, sorry, getting back to that, it was a whole lot of things that we did. Maturity, we've got to remember, Caitlin was 14, 15 when she first swam with me, and cooked straight, and now, you know, we're 20, and we've done a lot, she's done a lot of good swims, a lot of hard swims. 13 when she swam with you, Phil. Yeah, no, it's been, it has been a while, she's been a pain in my arse. Yes, yes. Now, we can relate to a degree, but to change tact a little bit, because I know you love speaking about everybody else, but we want to speak about you. When you did the English triple, was that the first time it had been done, or had a triple been done before? No, it had been done before by a gentleman called John Erickson. He was 38 hours, nearly 39 hours in the English Channel. So, how it came about was that we decided that, and everybody said, unless you're from the English Channel, you're not a marathon swimmer. Unless you climb Mount Everest, you're not a climber. It may not be the most difficult thing to do, but unless you've done it, we turn up there, a couple of Kiwis from the sticks, and said, oh, we're here to swim the English Channel three ways. And, of course, you can imagine, what the hell are you guys doing here? But, you know, there's no way. You never did a single fire today? No, no, no. No, we were going there. Remember, we'd swum Cook Strait double. We'd done Lake Taupo double. So, I'd swum up to about 24 hours non-stop at that point. We'd just come off, and we'd go and swim the circuit, which you'd come off, and you're as fit as fit as buggery. So, by the time I hit the UK, I'm fit and I'm rearing to go. So, once we got there, the first year, we broke the double crossing record by an hour. And then, all of a sudden, they thought, ah, maybe these bloody two Kiwis aren't chumps after all. We started to get a bit of a weirdness out there of that, wow, you know, they're not talking shit, really. They're bloody getting on with it. So, from there, it became a weather thing, and we got a good pilot. And once again, it's a team. I always say we. And I think you'll find that I don't ever say, oh, I did this, I did that. It's a team. So, you know, my job was to do the swimming. I had the hard part of it. My coach's job was to keep me alive and keep me going. And the skipper's job was to get us across the English Channel in as quick a time as possible. Well, two years out, two years prior, he said to me, he said, oh, you're not bad, are you? You know, and we felt quite good about ourselves. And then he said, well, if we can swim at this pace, you'll be able to swim the first lap in world record time. The second lap in world record time, we'll break every record on the English Channel on the day. And I was sort of looking at him thinking, what, are you bloody drinking over there, ten and six or something? Too many pints of it. But, you know, as I've told this story before, we were within five minutes of each time that he gave me three years later. And we were lucky enough to be the second to ever do it. We broke every record on the channel and broke the triple crossing by 10 hours, 20 minutes. So, and made the front page of the London Times. So, you know, that was a good day at the office. Not bad for a little dude from Dunedin, eh? That's exactly right. And I've, you know, I've always, I've always said it and a lot of people that I've coached and helped have always said, you know, I have one regret in my swimming career. I've had a very good swimming and coaching career, but I have one regret. And my coach has passed away since then, Tony Keenan, he's passed away since. We sat on the beach on the third lap and we just had an amazing 28 hours. It was absolutely amazing. He says to me, he said, oh, how far back can you swim? And I'll be, about 10 minutes on shore. There was one French photographer there, click, click, clicking flat out. And there was nobody else on the beach. He said, I'm going for a walk. When I come back, tell me. Walked down the beach and came back. He said, well, what do you think? I said, I can go halfway. I said, I know I can go halfway. Now, the situation with that is, threw a towel over me. It was all over. We were buddy, you know, the accolades were there. Talking to the prime minister, you know, telegram from the queen and all that, all that sort of stuff. But, and it's a big but, Tony, he was a great man, but he should have bloody got me by the scruff of the neck, threw me back in and said, well, let's get to halfway with some further than anybody else. Because sure as hell, if I got to halfway, I would have got to the other end. But I didn't. And that's one regret that I have in life. So, you know, and my swimming career as well. But so anybody that I'm, we're doing doubles or multiple swims, we will be trying. And people know, Caitlin knows that I will take her to places that she probably shouldn't be. But we try, try, push on, push on, push on until we know that there is no such thing as being able to finish. So we'll, we'll take it to right to the end. Well, here's the question. You mentioned that you got a telegram from the queen. So does she know what your obsession with lime green was? Well, if you notice, she used to. And she used to wear a lot of lime green coats and hats. So, you know, she obviously wanted to follow the, my obsession with lime green. My obsession with lime green, you don't want to look in the drawers or my wardrobe. I'll tell you that. I'll go to a side issue. There was one day I was traveling to Auckland for a swim meet and I looked in the mirror. I had a lime green shirt on. I had lime green all over my shorts. I had lime green shoes and I was pulling the lime green, bloody trolley bag. I took one look in the mirror and thought, you bloody weirdo. I thought you were going to say, now there's a good looking man. But the reason I started wearing lime green was when I was coaching Cara Baker and she was in the 10K and in the early days when Kane and that used to come with us, we'd go to these international events. Well, black and white, the New Zealand colors is pretty bloody drab, isn't it? And you can't see them on the feeding pontoon. So next year we turned up, coach had a nice lime green shirt on with everything, with New Zealand fur on it and white. And we changed that color. And they could see me. They could see me on the feeding pontoon. And one look up, there's the green shirt. The next couple of years after that, everybody started wearing bright colors on the feeding pontoon. And since then, I'm sorting help for the lime green obsession because everything I've got is just about lime green. But that's how it all started. What I was thinking, of all the swims that you've done, you said that not doing the quadruple was a regret. But what's the most memorable swim that you've done? The naked swim around Birkenhead. Yeah, it might be close. I think Cook Strait's pretty special. I enjoy lake swimming a lot more. You know, I was lucky enough to do a sea swim in a place called Pespivieh. It's right out of New Brunswick, right out on the coast. And they used to have the top ten swimmers of the year would go out and race there. We got there this year, and all the Americans there, they feed you amazing food at this hotel. Ten swimmers. The prize money wasn't that good, but they feed you this amazing food. Anyway, we got there, and the water temperature was six degrees. And the swim is about an eight-hour swim, if I remember rightly. And you did a mile at the start. Anyway, young guys, all the Americans before they got to the 400-meter mark was in hospital with hypothermia. And then there was six of us left, and off we went across this piece of water. And a couple of hours into it, a few more dropped out, and the left were three, six degrees. Anyway, these other two were old campaigners, and my coach was an English PT instructor. So, Tony, and anyway, the radio started going backwards and forwards. I didn't know at the time. And the Egyptian and the Mexican were trying to cut a deal. So we all hop out at once, and we divide the prize money three ways, from first through to third, and we become joint winners. Anyway, Tony wasn't having a bar of that. He said, no, no, no, we're all good. We're all good. We'll just carry on. We're going to get to the finish. Well, so I'm freezing the tits off out there. Anyway, the other two ended up in hospital with hypothermia. We carried on swimming. Then Tony rang up the organiser. He said, well, there's no need to put Philip through this for another bloody three hours. We might as well be the winner. And they agreed. So we ended up winning by going half an hour longer than anybody else. The others ended up in hospital with bloody second and third prize money. So that would probably be one of my more memorable swims. But anything you do, completing it is what it's about. The English Channel, obviously, because it's got the name. But, you know, I've been very, very lucky to swim and to, you know, coach a lot of swimmers to do these swims as well. So that kind of leads me on to the next one. You've done an awful lot of supporting of other swimmers. Have you got a memorable swim for something that you didn't do but you were looking after somebody else? Well, we've branched out into Fobos Strait. And, you know, we've taken swimmers across there. And, you know, there's been some great times going across there. I went there for a summer and sat there. And anybody that knows Invercargill or Bluff that well, you know, the weather there is less than bloody desirable. The water temperature is less than desirable. And the fish on the bottom are less than desirable. But I've been getting a real reward. And I don't know whether it's because it's new. Between Mike Cochran and myself, we sort of, whoever's available to go down there and take the swims. But it's just something different. And it's very raw. And we're learning every time we go out there. And, you know, we've got some good people helping us down there. But, I mean, it's good. It's still very fresh. I think we might be up to 10 or 12, 14 swims. It's under 20 anyway. But I'm finding that really rewarding. I always find Taupo rewarding because it's just that little bit longer than anything else. And it's just you are having to apply yourself. Whether you're a good or bad swimmer, you're having to apply your mind. And that's what I find. You know, at times you've got to give them a kick in the bum. Other times, depending on the person, you've just got to control them across the line to get them there. And I find that really rewarding. Might not be the fastest swimmer, but somebody who's done the work, they might not swim particularly fast, but I have to work to get them there. I'm guessing that, you know, when you're helping swimmers across, it's not just sort of arriving on the day with your boat and a rescue boat. There's a whole bunch of preparation that you help them with before they even kind of get into the major swim. Do you want to just talk us through sort of what's all involved in helping people and doing some, you know, most of the people are just doing it, you know, for themselves. But what's involved in supporting guys? Listen, what I like to do is if all you've got to do is worry about your swimming, then you're halfway there. A lot of people like doing the organizing, and I want to do this, and I'm going to do this. I want to eat this. I want to do that. You know, it's all a learning curve. But if we can eliminate that and go from the, right, we need to be eating this. You've got this variation of food to eat. You know, you might not like it, but look, that's giving us what we need. That's the straight course. And, you know, I'm not saying what we do is right. It works. What we do, it works. So I get involved, you know, I'll put an expectation of how far I want you to swim distance-wise, and depending on what event it is or whether it's your first event, whether you've done them before, et cetera, et cetera. Then we work on what we're going to do on the day, the eating, what time we're going to start, you know. But if all you've got to worry about is training and swimming at pace, finding a good pace, then we're halfway there. You can dedicate yourself to training, whether it's in the sea, the lake, or the pool, combination of all of the above, and then we can put the rest around you to make sure you're safe, to make sure you've got the fastest course to get across. You know, that would be for Lake Taupo. Crook Strait, you know, it's a prick of a piece of water, really. There's just so many variables that are going on. I mean, people that spend time in Wellington realise it's a bloody windy hole and we get a lot of wind, but when we get a beautiful day, it's amazing. And also, we've got to get the tide right on that day without wind and the swimmer being able to swim. We put a speed limit in Crook Strait. I don't really like taking anybody less than 3km an hour for obvious reasons. You just don't get out from the shore. Phil, what did you old legends do for nutrition back in the 80s? We were supposed to eat. That's what I'm asking. No, in the early days, I mean, I had a bit of a problem. I was a coach in chocolate, being a young kid, coach in chocolate, and what you'd have was these almighty highs, and then when you got to the bottom of the barrel, you used to have some almighty lows. And then we started looking for, you know, you walk into a health food shop or a sports nutrition shop these days and you have got shelves of stuff, shelves of stuff. And we used to use a thing called Sustagen or ConPlan. Now what they use that for is keeping all the old people alive and home, so there must be some good in it. And it's on the shelf. I recommended to a guy, John Hancocks, recently, he was having trouble with all these new foods, and I said, right, why don't we try this? Well, he bloody thrung bloody buckets of this ConPlan going over, and he said he never had any level drops in the energy or anything like that, and it worked, and it still works. These new modern drinks, and when we've had trouble with them, the flavours or they're too strong, and they just, you've got to keep it simple. You've got to keep that feeding simple so that you're not putting too many different flavours in so that it upsets your stomach, and, you know, next minute you're spewing your heart out and you've got to start again. And I'm a very much carbohydrate and electrolyte. What's, you know, you might enjoy a bit of whatever. You know, I had a young lady last year that we had the sausages going on the barbecue, as you guys know. Well, she ate us out of sausages, meat patties, and hot cross buns. She got there. It worked for her, right? So, but once again, it's like you've got to put the good fuel in the motor. All the time, and you can sacrament it. Speaking about that barbecue on your boat, when Jim and I came and assisted that friend of ours for her Taupo crossing, you and I had a little moment in the sort of lower deck of your boat. I don't know if you recall, but it went something like this. I came downstairs. You said to me, Duncan, something's been weighing really heavy on my heart for years, and I need to tell somebody about it. And I said, well, sure, Phil, you know, talk to me. Let's get this out. And you confessed to me that day that you were a Springbok rugby supporter. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a bullshitter too. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. At least the jersey's green. Yeah, as close as it's going to get. Hey, in your opinion, did Diane and I do a legitimate swim from Cuba to Florida? In the early days, I commented quite a lot on that, and I believe you cannot claim an unassisted swim. I'll put it this way. She was claiming an unassisted swim, okay? You cannot claim an unassisted swim when people are helping you put on your stinger suit by putting you on the side of the boat and put the stinger suit on. You cannot claim an unassisted swim when you've lost half the bloody records. No. But all she had to do, and also, you know, with the cages and things like that getting dragged along at certain paces. Yeah. If she'd claim an assisted swim to go that distance, I don't know whether there would have been any difference. Yes, the record books would have said she had an assisted swim. Do not try and claim something that you haven't done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's very much a – and that is the sticking point with it all. You know, I mean, the documentary that was on it, you know, the documentary was – it was well put together. But it still left a lot of facts out, didn't it? I think it did. As a swimmer watching it, like you say, it's a good watch, but there's definitely pieces missing from my perspective. Yeah. But still a good watch. Still an amazing swim nonetheless, right? And also – oh, no, no, no, totally. But also it's got a lot of people looking at it. The – open water swimming these days is the marathon running of the 80s, and the sport is getting bigger, and people are trying to challenge themselves. You know, swimming doesn't cause hip replacements that, you know, everybody's going through these days. They used to run marathons. Yeah. You know, and it's – yeah, and there's – well, not as much, not as much because there's not a lot of jarring and things like that. But I think that the sport is growing in such a way, you know, they've got this Ocean 7 and all these sorts of things, and it's – I'm not saying it's good for the sport, but it's getting a lot of people involved and different levels involved, and maybe some people are betting above, you know, what they should be trying to achieve at times, but people are giving it a go. Yeah. Do you reckon anybody will get to do a five-way in this channel? You can never say never. I think, you know, if you weigh up the quadruple English channel swim, you know, she suffered. I've had her in – I knew there would be one person that could do that. I had her in cook straight, and she did 15 hours, hopped out of the water, sat on the back of the boat, and we talked all the way back on how she was going to do the English channel four ways. So, you know, she was a special person. I think, you know, I'm making it sort of relative. So if, for example, I did two eight-hour crossings on average for the first and second lap. The third lap in a sea tidal condition, you know, we were 12 and a half hours the third lap. The next lap would have been back into a lower set of tides, so we possibly would have been nine hours. And, you know, it's just a matter of being able to stay in there. But you cannot stay in there and swim a three Ks an hour because you're going to be out there for weeks. If you can swim at pace, you could do it. That's crazy to even think about it. But once again, there's so many variables. There's so many variables. We had a dead calm day, like a bath, for the 28 hours and another 10 hours after that. So it was on to do. Remembering you have got to get calm weather, which we waited in the UK summers. You don't get it. You don't get it. It took us three summers to get the day. So I did nine or 10 crossings to get the three, if that makes sense. Each time, Tony would always make me swim one way, stop, out. The weather turned to shit. It wasn't happening. Or if we came one and a half, we'd finish two and then hop out and call it a day. So there's so many variables. You've got to get the skipper that knows what he's doing. You've got to get the swimmer that can swim and keep going and going and going. And, you know, you've got to get that tide. And the tide in the English Channel isn't out of control, but it needs to be managed. And that comes back to the skipper, the team you put together, and getting the good weather. Got you. Where's your happy place, folk? Oh, I enjoy Wellington. I enjoy my work. I'm a firefighter, and I really enjoy my work. That will be coming to an end in the next few years. And, you know, I enjoy being involved in swimming and helping. You know, my best goal was having a swimmer that's not that great, getting them trained up, and getting them across. You know, because I always use Lake Taupo as a starting point for somebody, because there's no real tide there, apart from going down the river, as you gentlemen know. And, you see, if you didn't have professional help, you wouldn't have gone there. But, you know, getting somebody that's possibly not the best swimmer, that's had problems or whatever, and just turning them around so they actually achieve that swim, because it's not easy. The last thing from my side, Phil, and then we'll let you off to enjoy the rest of your day. But I want to know two things. One, can you wee and swim at the same time, or do you need to stop? And, secondly, what do you reckon is currently the toughest marathon swim in the world? Oh, okay, okay. Well, it's just a matter of training. You know, I will give you an example. All you need to do, relax the lower part of your body, make sure that you're not kicking too hard, and just think of warm, running water. An example being, I did that in a pool in America one day when I was training, flat out, and they had that bloody dye in it. And it's sitting behind me. But anyway, the hardest open water swim in the world, as I say, we've been around with Caitlin around the rest. And my day, there was the English Channel. That was it. You were there. I did swims in New Zealand. We did the circuit. You know, this Ocean 7 wasn't there. You know, if you start to look at it, we did the English Channel last year in the Irish Sea. Well, everybody goes on about the Irish Sea and about how bloody cold it is, blah, blah, blah. We turned up there last year. The water temperature was 16 to 17 and a half degrees, and Caitlin hasn't been touched yet by a jellyfish, anywhere in the world. So I reckon they're full of shit over there, but it's one of the toughest swimmers in the world. But anyway, that's the Irish. Catalina, there's not a lot of tide. It's just a straight swim. English Channel, I would class that as number. It's second to easiest. Straight to Gibraltar is the easiest. Then we start looking. There's been trouble in Japan. You know, the swim in Japan, they're very honorable people. You've got to treat them with respect, but also you've got to know what you're doing, and your swimmer's got to be able to swim at pace. And if you do put all of that together, you have success. It's when you don't swim fast. And, you know, you've got to remember, tide flows through there at about five and a half Ks an hour. So you've got to make sure you're planning things. The Japanese swim and I'm thinking Cook Strait are similar. And then you've got Molokai, which a lot of people get across easily. It's got these cookie cutter sharks that do what they say. They're like a little cookie cutter that come out and just take a piece of flesh out of you. The fishermen when they're catching fish, you know, come out and they've got these corners going out of the fish. You know, you've got to do a lot of it in the night. You're not allowed to have lights because that attracts the sharks. There's also jellyfish there because of the heat. At this stage, I'm thinking that could be the hardest. There's three really, Japan, Molokai and Cook Strait. The rest of them are pretty simple. That's cool, Phil. So just to sort of get to sort of wrapping it up, the sort of swimming scene or the organised swimming scene seems to have changed in New Zealand quite significantly over the last couple of years. There's certainly a lot more rules and regulations for people like yourself to get your head around. What do you see as the future of organised swims in New Zealand? I'm thinking of like the big events where you've got lots of people going out on a race, but also the solo swims where people are just trying to prove something to themselves. How do you see that progressing in New Zealand? That's a good question. I'm a little bit biased on it. Obviously, the organised races, it's all about safety. I'm sorry, and anybody that talks to me realises there's no half pies on safety. I lost somebody in Cook Strait two years ago now, and it wasn't through anything we did, but the gentleman had an embolism very, very, very close from the finish. Now we have been classed as an adventure tourism operator, and there's certain rules and regulations that go with that. We are now at a cost, so to say, to become an adventure tourism operator and to be able to take swimmers more than 400, I don't think it's 400 or 200 metres offshore in a race situation. Safety's always been my priority. Hence, you go overseas, you've got a big fishing boat, and you swim beside that. Now, it happened in the English Channel last year. A fireman bounced up and down. He was a 40-year-old raising money and went down. They found him in Belgium. A month later, gone. Now, there's a couple of reasons why we use inflatables beside the swimmer. One is because you're actually at their eye level and you can communicate well with them. Two, if something happens, and you guys have seen how close we are, we can actually grab that swimmer at any moment and exit them from the water, whether we're doing CPR on them or whatever or just getting them out because they're hypothermic, et cetera, et cetera. A big boat is very useful. Yes, it's got hot water, it's got beds, it's got everything that we need, but a large fishing boat turning around to save somebody is next to impossible because that person is gone by the time they turn around. Especially at night, great safety. We need to have a combination of both. None of the other swimmers around the world have an inflatable, and they will get themselves in trouble. They have done. We've lost. In the English Channel, I think they might have had about five or six deaths, and the body never occasionally comes back. I mean, the worst part of it is that somebody dies due to whatever, but if you can't bring them home, that is unacceptable. I'm sorry, that is unacceptable. And safety is important. Yes, there's rules and regulations now. We're all abiding by them, but safety, safety, safety. So do you think we're going to see a reduced number of swimmers organised, especially kind of the sort of big events? Well, I mean, people want to go and do events. They want to feel safe, and we had a death in Taupo. We've had three or four in the epic, and it was about two months later, I thought, geez, we haven't heard anything, and so I rang the police in Taupo, and he used this analogy. He said, Philip, if we were going to charge you with whatever, bad event management, whatever it is, he said you wouldn't have been allowed to leave Taupo on the day. He said, I'll use this scenario. He said, you've got qualified people. You've got plenty of boats on the water to be able to help people. If, for example, you were running a cycling race, and this is an exact analogy, and it did happen in Christchurch. You're running a cycling race. You've got the main road into Taupo. There's a very large roundabout. If you didn't have anybody with a stop-go sign or have it rained off and somebody got killed, you will be charged. Be assured of that because you have not tried the best of your ability to offer road safety to make the event safe. So as long as the organisers of events have plenty of water safety on the water, whether it's board paddlers, whether it's boats, to be able to support the number of swimmers in the water, I think the events can only be better. Individually, you know, we're doing our best to try and I always work one large boat, one IRB, one swimmer. And we have five or six staff there to be able to help. So when I first met you, or not when I first met you, when I first heard of you, you were a very scary, grumpy, quite notorious little old man, right? And since I've got to know you, you are just a cuddly dude that wants to do good for swimming and I am absolutely honoured to know you. Thank you very much. No, thank you. Thank you for talking to us on CleverDex and all the best for the future. And yeah, we'll chat again in a couple of years, yeah? Good job. I'll just finish off by saying go Boca! Yeah, oh no, I can't, I can't, you know. We'll be back, we'll be back, we'll be back. Oh, it's been awesome talking to you, Phil. Thank you so much. It was great having that chat with Phil. We'll be back soon with more new content. So until then, cheerio.
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