At seven in the morning, on a Saturday in August, I was one of around 100 swimmers stood staring into the distance from the beach at the northern end of Vidöstern, a lake in central southern Sweden. A brisk breeze was stirring the surface and heavy, grey clouds threatened rain. If you looked very carefully, you could just about make out the first two of the 22 large yellow buoys that marked out the route. The other 20, and the rest of the swim, were beyond the horizon.
When the starting hooter sounded, there wasn’t the usual frantic dash into the water, more of a determined wade – and we had to keep wading for about 50 to 75m before finding water deep enough to swim in. I didn’t mind. I knew there was plenty of swimming to come – a little more than 21km of it in fact.