Alex has been a competitive swimmer since she was 9, with increasing success including county medals before the pandemic. Just as her club (Hounslow Jets) got back to full training in September 2021, Alex caught COVID. Within a few days she went from being an extremely fit teenager to being admitted to hospital requiring oxygen. She was transferred to St Mary’s PICU where the entire team were amazing - doctors, nurses, physios and everyone on the unit supporting her (and us) through a traumatic period. Every handover included information on what was important to her - mainly swimming. The entire time she was concerned with the impact on her sport and determined to get back to competing as soon as possible.

She resigned herself to the fact that the 21/22 season wasn’t going to go to plan. However with remarkable awe-inspiring determination, she was back to full training by December 2021 and became Middlesex County Champion over 1500m in January 2022, just 4 months after her admission to PICU.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who helped her. Last year she, her friends and team mates organized a 12 hour endurance swim in order to raise money for both COSMIC and CATS.

This year she is taking on a new challenge - swimming across the English Channel - not alone we’d hasten to add (she’s not that mad!) but as part of a five/six person relay team organised by COSMIC with the aim of raising even more funds to support their amazing work.

As we’ve already discovered this morning, open-water swimming is a very different ballgame to pool swimming (12c water and in the channel she’s concerned about jellyfish, eels and sharks), so any donations you can spare to help with the motivation would be gratefully received!

Thank you for reading this