Marathon Swim Stories meets SwimOut Podcast

The very first time that I listened to the SwimOut podcast, I found myself wanting to talk to the creators. The production quality and swimming themes that they cover are amazing! Fortunately, they were just an email away.. and graciously took time out of their day to share their stories.

In this episode, Hunter Charlton and Vicki Carter transport me to Dover Harbor. I could envision the pubs and searching for a pasta shop, the queue waiting to grease up. And the swimmers going around and around, lap after lap in the harbor, then hitting up the ice cream van. As Hunter called them, “the most eccentric people” – never quite embracing the marathon swimming scene. Vicki on the other hand has her sights set on the Triple Crown.

I hope you enjoy Hunter and Vicki’s stories, and be sure to check out the SwimOut podcast!

In their own words:

Vicki Carter:

Vicki started swimming as a child because her father wanted to be able to take his daughters sailing. Sensibly he saw swimming as a prerequisite, but then spent 10 years watching them swim! Sadly little sailing happened. He tried to get me to do Synchro at one point as he thought it would be more interesting to watch! I was an average swimmer, competing for my club and school but nothing special although I did love swimming and being in a club.

I parked swimming through my late teens and twenties but returned to it as a way to keep fit and meet friends in my early thirties. I joined Out To Swim the LGBT+ swimming club and again loved being part of a swimming team and going to competitions. My 4 x 200 free relay team did once break a world record in our age group at The Gay Games in Cologne (it was after the suits debacle). We held it for a day or two. Apart from that I sometimes nabbed the odd medal.

Having dabbled in Theatre, I started work in 1990 for the BBC World Service, at the time exclusively radio. I was working mainly on foreign-language news programmes and did a great deal of work in Africa and the Middle East traveling to Egypt multiple times and Sudan for some work during the Darfur crisis. I also worked on a national radio station where I won a SONY award for producing Euromix, a youth programme. 

In 1999 I got pregnant with another swimmer via insemination but my son was still born in 2000. This led to quite a few years of turmoil.

I began to emerge from this personal crisis in 2006 when I found Swimtrek and went on my first swimming holiday and discovered that I was quite good at long distance swimming. After the end of my Swimtrek I asked the guide John Cunningham-Rolls  “Can I swim the Channel?” and he said “Yes” 

On my return from the holiday I found a relay team and completed the relay with a team called “Bridgets Boys” – I was a late addition! 

I did some long swims and then trained for a solo the following year but got “weathered out” and did not go.

I left the BBC in 2007 and emerged as a swimming teacher initially working with local children but then beginning to work more with adults. In 2011 I won the UK Amateur Swimming Association Teacher of the Year for my work with adults and in 2012 I was part of the Olympic Torch relay.

I married my wife in 2015

In 2018 I once again commenced training for the Channel and met Hunter Charlton at the beginning of 2019 when he joined Out To Swim. We swam together, mostly at Dover, and were each other’s support crew for the actual Channel swims.

We both swam the channel in 2019. Eddie, my pilot, said “Well that only took you 11 years 14 hours and 40 minutes”. Rather wonderfully, Hunter also did the exact same time as me.

Hunter and I continued to swim and talk and began to ponder doing a podcast – we finally decided to make a start at a Jazz gig!

We launched the first episode of SwimOut on 29th May 2020 during lockdown. Hunter’s journalism background, including an interest in radio, and my background in radio, made us a perfect pair.

The podcast is thematic and we have covered themes including Ice, Wellness, and the English Channel. Guests include Jaimie Monahan, Sarah Thomas, Anna-Carin Nordin and a feature on Charlie “the Tuna” Chapman. 

We are just starting Series 2 and have 9 episodes in total.

Making the Podcast joins my two main passions, radio and swimming, and I love creating them.

Hunter Charlton:

I remember looking out across grey, unpleasant, murky sea on the England-France P&O ferry back in 2016, asking myself why would anyone ever contemplate swimming across this ‘ditch’ of water. I flicked my cigarette butt in and thought nothing of it for another 3 years. 

My relationship with exercise has never been static. When I was diagnosed with HIV in 2013, I embarked on a crazy health drive. Running and surfing became a way of taking control of my life again and feeling (excuse the pun) positive about my body. I’d find myself binging on exercise, addicted to endorphins. In that time I ran 3 marathons, many half marathons and countless hours surfing grotty waves in the Bristol Channel. 

A few years later I found myself in an unexpected and very different crisis. Through a combination of break-up, job loss and a collision while on my bike I became depressed and directionless. In a similar vein to my dissolute 19 year old self coping with an HIV diagnosis, I used exercise (swimming this time around) as a way of channelling that pain and distress. I will never forget the moment I mentally committed to swimming the English Channel. I was lying in a bath covered in cuts, bruises and missing a tooth – I’d been hit by van in London. In that moment, having never swum further than a kilometre, having never met a channel swimmer and knowing nothing of the peculiar wonders of this sport, I promised myself I’d attempt the crossing …