MAKING A SPLASH

Chris Thompson waited until he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to enter his first open water race – the Low Country Splash

Four-and-a-half years ago, the London Olympics inspired me to start swimming again.

I’d always had lessons as a child, but got fed up because I couldn’t conquer freestyle. Starting again 25 years later, I spent two years training with Fiona Ford’s squad in Richmond and became quite competent, though I never actually got so far as to enter any races. So when my family and I left London and moved to the hotter and sunnier climes of Charleston, South Carolina, I decided that I really needed to put this right.

Luckily, Charleston has the perfect event: a 2.4-mile current-assisted swim, known rather disarmingly as the Low Country Splash. This race has been going in one form or another since the 1990s, moving onto the current course in 2001. And what a course it is! With Charleston being in the “Low Country”, there isn’t the mountainous natural scenery you’d find on the West Coast, for example, as everything is rather flat. But the man-made scenery is really something: the start is just down river from an enormous container port, then you head under the Cooper River bridge to finish just past the USS Yorktown, a WWII aircraft carrier now turned into a floating museum. Just to back up a bit – yes, a container port and an aircraft carrier: Charleston is a working port city, one of the busiest ports in the USA. As for the Cooper River bridge: this is not just any old bridge – it’s actually the second-longest suspension bridge in the US, way longer than, for example, the Golden Gate bridge.