Rather conveniently, I was crossing the bridge at the time and saw him heading in. Luckily for him, wind and tide were both the same way, so he was making good speed.
Your right warton he only swam 143 miles of it, what a cop out
Truly incredible effort, and he deserves massive respect for doing it. But all the hype around it was ‘David Walliams swims the length of the Thames’ and he hasn’t. Just saying. FWIW the Thames is 215 miles long.
Maybe they’re considering the length of the inland Thames rather than the coastal Thames? Cos the coast of Britain extends right up into central London.
Maybe. I dunno. What I do know is that he’s done something that’s a colossal achievement, one I don’t think I could ever replicate, and raised shedloads of money for good causes.
Lewis Pugh did the whole length (including running the stream from the source to where it is swimming depth) down to Southend. He said that it was jolly hard and he’s a very very experienced distance swimmer who’s done loads of big ocean swims. I imagine that means that the whole thing is incredibly hard, so I think you have to have an awful lot of respect for Walliams even for doing the 140 miles of his route.
I dunno – I find that a mile or two of proper cold water is tiring enough, let along back to back days of >10 mile days.
The overflow issues are only in the London end of the Thames.
Not an easy problem to solve as a) there’s limited space to build the infrastructure needed b) whatever is done must be affordable
There is a solution though – the first part of it will be complete by 2015 and will get rid of most of the problem an the second part likely to be constructed in the next 8-10yrs.
