Thanks for taking the time to visit my Great North Swim 2009 JustGiving page.

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate - I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

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Early in 2009, my middle son asked if I wanted to join him in a challenge to take place in September 2009.

The challenge is to swim one mile in Lake Windermere in the (which I'm hoping is an out and back route!).

Being a regular swimmer, runner and cyclist that sounded like a different but fairly easy challenge, so ....

.... I agreed, entered and bought the mandatory wetsuit.

My swim session is at 1:30pm on Sunday 13th September 2009.

Then .... a few weeks ago on my first open water swimming session in a wetsuit I made a dramatic discovery .....

..... my main swim stroke has always been breast-stroke but in a wetsuit the extra buoyancy makes your legs float, so all you kick is fresh air and not water. Problem!

So, my (not now so easy) challenge is to learn to swim front-crawl for 1500m rather than the max 50m that I normally do, so that I can finish the swim in my target time of 45 minutes.

At this point the conversion to front-crawl is proving very hard work but I will persist and do my best to complete the challenge.

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Furthermore, given that I haven't supported a charity for a sporting event that I've entered for many years, it seemed appropriate to "raise the stakes" by asking for people to sponsor me to complete this event.

The charity I have chosen to benefit from this challenge is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI)

I think that they are one of the forgetten charities but who one day could save any one of our lifes whether sailing, cruising, ferrying, swimming (e.g. across Lake Windermere) or simply messing about on beaches (as demonstrated recently when the RNLI rescued 40 people from a collapsed sandbank in Tenby, Wales - just 20 miles from where I took my first wetsuit swim).

Visit their website for more information on how your donation could be spent

So please dig deep and donate now.

Note that all your donations will go straight to the RNLI - I am paying all my own expenses for this event.