Because it’s not called “English Strait”
Maybe that’s the wiggly motion you have to with your arm to get it through la manche.
They probably did swim “straight” but it took them a really long time and this was the tidal flow during her swim, ergo they went straight but the water they were in moved back and forth.
Since there are more than two full periods, it took more than 12h?! Wow I’m usually dead after 12 min swimming
And I bet that actively going straight would require extra energy and be slower than getting carried by the current
Correct
Tbh I think this is a perfect example of “there are no stupid questions”
Person didn’t know or didn’t think about currents, bet you he still got roasted though
How can I shit myself without shitting myself.
She had to go around all the minefields we laid to keep the French out.
Do you still have the galleons filled with gunpowder or is the isle ripe for Spanish invasion?
The Spanish couldn’t possibly get in as we’re behind a red locked door and the red keycard is safe in Gibraltar.
The curious thing is that from her perspective, she was only swimming straight the whole time, and only expending energy going straight. It was the ‘gifted’ energy of the tide that caused the oscillation (from our perspective).
Just struck me as interesting to think that from her point of view she was swimming as straight and as efficiently as was possible.
You could imagine a coordinate system in which she took the shortest path, yet the projection in our system doesn’t look like a straight line
Non-euclidian swimming, my favorite
It likely was the most efficient energy-wise, why waste energy going against the current when it’ll undo itself anyways.
An aquadesic line, if you will
I fucking hate the way Facebook changed how the site works so that clicking on an image no longer puts it in your browser history. Earlier today I saw a post where the swimmer whose track was shown in this specific image responded to the comments. It was actually quite an amusing interaction and I wish I could go back and share it here.
But also: the swimmer was a she, not a he.
edit:
wait I found it:
Sophie’s link: https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/2023/01/18/2023-channel-swim-introduction/
Text transcription
A series of Facebook comments.
Claire Fletcher: He didn’t make it. Is he ok or he still swimming? [attached is a close-up of the path, showing that it ends some distance away from the coastline]
Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher I did make it, the GPS transponder was on my pilot boat but the beach was too shallow for it to come in close enough so instead my pilot launched the small RIB boat to accompany me to shore 🙂
Melissa Dupree Haws: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete wow! The real swimmer here! I’m so amazed at this feat of athleticism.
Claire Fletcher: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete omg the actual swimmer is here AND a she not a he! That’s amazing! What made you want to do it? Was it a personal goal or for charity? Full respect to you by the way, well done!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Robert Mothersole: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete so while you’re here, if you dont mind me asking…Why didn’t you go straight ?
Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Robert Mothersole I did, in the English Channel the tides move up and down rather than across so you get 6 hours up, then 6 hours down. I swam on a Spring tide, which is a bigger tide to start with and I’m not a super fast swimmer (around 2 min 15 per 100m). So i was pushed up the channel for 6 hours, then down the channel for 6 hours twice…so i was swimming forwards but going sideways, if that makes sense?
Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher its a long story…it was a personal, life changing goal, it raised money for charity and that money went to training swimming teachers to become specialist disability swimming teachers. If you want to know more then I write a blog and during the year of my channel training I documented my training each month. This is the first one explaining about me/how I got to where I was at the time - https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/…/2023-channel…/ If you scroll through my other blog posts I wrote multiple blogs about my actual swim too 🙂
Claire Fletcher: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete that’s truly amazing! Well done you! Should be very proud of yourself! I am going to binge read your blogs now with a cuppa lol
Robert Mothersole: Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete it does make sense, it’s a bit different from the local swimming baths, thanks for your answer and congratulations on swimming the Channel. Brilliant achievement 👍
Sophie Etheridge - Adaptive Athlete: Claire Fletcher hope you enjoyed them and your cuppa!
Can someone explain the “I did it for charity” angle? I never understood why would someone do a sporty thing, that they clearly wanted to do and would probably do anyway, motivate me or anyone else to donate money to a charity. To be honest it always felt quite performative and self serving to me.
Think of it the other way around, doing extreme athletic feats (even for fun) is a great way to attract attention, and using that momentum to attract sponsors for charity is a nice extra to do some good
Also, there was this hilarious comment under the original image:
In case you are interested, facebook now opens links in a site of thier’s, but it contains an embedded window of the site you were linked to. This means that facebook can follow any other links you follow while on that site. It has the site effect of you not visiting that site but instead facebook’s “hidden window” shows in the history.
It has no practical reason to exist other than allowing them to gather more data.
Some mobile browsers might have an add-in to auto-break you out of the window.
I’m not actually sure what you mean, but if I’m understanding it correctly, uhh, what? No they don’t. If you click an external link on Facebook they send you to it with a redirect, so they know you went to that site, but they don’t know of any further links you might click.
But anyway, that’s not relevant to this here, because it was a photo shared on Facebook, not an external link.
Ah sorry, I was slightly off, they used their own embedded browser in the app. So your external browser does not save the history as it was not used.
Yea didn’t realise it was just an image, I was responding to the “doesn’t show in history” comment.
Oh right. Yeah I haven’t had the Facebook app installed on my phone in like a decade.
But yeah, clicking on an image on the Facebook website doesn’t actually add it to your browser history, because Facebook tries to act like an SPA, a decision they made seemingly specifically to frustrate the user. Because in addition to not adding clicked images to your browser history, they also will refresh the page if you tab away and come back after a minute or two.
If I understand what they’re saying (I’m not quite sure either), Facebook basically does a Man in the Middle Attack when you click a link that allows them to see what you click on after leaving their page?
On the one hand, it sounds crazy, but on the other it doesn’t sound outside the realm of possibility based on other things they supposedly do like create shadow accounts of people you and other people know/talk about to build a data profile on them and people they may know so that if they create an account, Facebook already knows what people are in their area and likely in their social circles (and the stuff that they actually do right out in the open where it’s obvious).
Still irrelevant to the issue anyway, but weird to think about. More to the point at hand, I wonder if your issue is caused by Facebook opening the picture in some kind of container instead of the actual page/link itself, like how Reddit opens images on the Reddit page when you try to open them directly - it won’t let you view the image as a source file if you try to open it from a search engine.
“They’re replacing the internet with something else” is literal. It’s harder and harder to find what you want because you’re not allowed to have what you want anymore. You’re allowed to work hard till you die and hope Big Tech shares its merciful bounty with you. You can’t spell “social media” without “soma.”
Why are you using Facebook?
That was Sophie’s choice.
I’m still in it for niche hobby groups. Unfortunately the kind of information I’m looking for is hard to come by elsewhere. Even Reddit was not as good a source of community knowledge for these activities.
Why are you being judgy about what websites someone uses?
because they’re using a website that is complicit in making the world a lot worse? not sure how this is a strange concept on lemmy
Imma go on a limb here and guess it’s because they want to.
That only creates additional, trickier questions.
Facebook has lots of interesting groups for hobbies and other interests. Yes, you can find groups like that outside of Facebook but they’re often much smaller and less active (unless you go to Reddit).
hobbies that fund Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian bunker
Hawaiian bunker hobbies!
Who knows. Maybe one day Zuck will be chilling in his bunker and the next Krakatoa will erupt underneath him!
AND a she not a he! That’s amazing!
It would be more amazing if it were a he, not a she; all the best long-distance swimmers are women. Women have a significant advantage at this level.
Eh, not really. It’s more that at this level the difference in performance between men and women closes significantly, with some ultra swim records being held by women. For the English Channel specifically, the current record for speed of crossing is held by a man. So it’s not particularly amazing that it was a woman (though it is amazing that it was a physically disabled woman!), but neither would it have been amazing had it been a man.
There’s a sports scientist, I’ve forgotten her name but she wrote a book called Women are Not Small Men. In her book she says that long distance swimming is one sport that women actually outperform men in.
Edit: her name is Stacy Sims
thanks for finding the source, pretty interesting!
For roughly six hours the tide will take the swimmer ‘up’ the Channel, and then as the tide changes direction, the following six hours will take the swimmer ‘down’ the Channel. This up and down movement of the water is relentless and unavoidable.
When traversing the English Channel, the boat pilot pays respect to the aformentioned tides when heading for France, which means the tidal affect will be perpendicular to the direction of the swimmer. It is incredibly rare for a swimmer to ever be swimming with or against the tide.
The moon’s position relative to the earth and sun changes, creating different strengths of tide. The smaller tides are called neap tides, and the bigger ones are spring tides. Historically, swimmers have made their attempts on neap tides, as the belief is that this reduces the effect of wind against tide. It also reduces the risk of the swimmer missing the land target of Cap Gris Nez in France.
So she was swimming for roughly 18 hours? I’m impressed and terrified.
29 hours and 4 minutes actually.
https://sophie-adaptive-athlete.com/2023/09/25/sta-channel-swim-2023-part-4/
Savage feat of endurance. I wonder how many calories that burns.
All of them
At high intensity about 14k.
Damn, you can cross the English Channel on roughly 28 Belgian waffles?
Depends on how well you lash them together. They’re bound to get soggy though.
No man is an island, but if you lash enough dead bodies together, they make a pretty good raft.
Lol.
I have no source but I recall seeing a before and after picture. The before was fat. The after was skinny.
A quick google shows people estimating 500-750 kcal/hour when swimming the English Channel. And another big range, but it looks like ~15 hours is a decent estimate for a one-way crossing, so that’s ~7,000-11,000 kcal, which assuming 3500kcal/lb of fat, that’s 2-3 lbs.
This is all ignoring the fact that most of the energy burned is actually glycogen and food consumed during the swim, not fat reserves.
Here’s another question: how far did she swim?
Do you count the distance her body travelled relative to the land? Or do you only count the distance she travelled relative to the water, and it was the water that was moving.
If you count the distance relative to the land, she’ll have been measured to have travelled much farther and with a much faster average speed.
Tide comes in, tide goes out. You can’t explain that.
…when you remember that the moon influences Earthly rainfall…
Achshually… no I can’t. Something about the moon idk I’m not a sciontwist.
Oh shoot, i just realized i am, but i didnt have my oil changed in the last 60,000 miles, so im probably not gonna be of much more use getting you to the moon.
Because he’s swimming the English Channel and not the English Strait, duh.
Wait, I’m dumb. Is it water currents or map projection, or what?
It’s the tidal current throwing the swimmer around. They swam along the same heading the entire time.
It’s just really hard to follow google maps navigation when there’s no roads and some big waves.
edit: ffs :)
No, there were probably waves.
+1 for pedantry.
I’ve edited my comment to add an Oxford comma, because I know everyone likes those.
That’s not an Oxford comma. Oxford commas (also known as serial commas) are for lists that contain more than three terms.
You should just replace the “and waves” with “but there are waves” or something like that.
“waves and no road”
Now it’s worse.
“Waves and no road” is what you’re looking for.
I’d like to know what map projection bends a straight line into that
I said I was dumb.
Me too, but now I want that wavy map projection
Perhaps even losing orientation
Unless they’re a heaving idiot looking to be arrested and sectioned under the mental health act, they swim next to a support boat, who give them directions and are in communication with other vessels. The Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world.
I think the path would be more erratic if that was the case
Her sexual orientation has no effect on swimming skill, sir!
when i was young and stupid i used to swim to an island only 1 Km from the beach (-11.80574, -77.18933), and had to stop to recheck my direction, often i was way off course. the English channel is going to be way harder, better have a good compass, or be mindful of the time of the day and the position of the sun
When I was young (also stupid) we were on holiday at Punta Verudela, Pula, (44.8348180, 13.8373873) and one day, that island in the distance (44.8312627, 13.8398307) looked too cool to not swim too it, and me, my dad and my brother decided to try and make it there. It looked pretty close, but I never swam so long in my life. Because we took our sweet time and had a pretty chill tempo, after about an hour, we made it! on our side it was all sheer and sharp cliffs though, so although the island was still cool and enticing, we had no idea if it was even possible to get up there somewhere, or how long it would take to swim around. Playing it safe, we swam back in about the same tempo and took another hour of relaxed swimming. Probably helped that the Mediterranean sea isn’t as tidally active. Checking it now, the swimming distance seems around 440m (we approximated 1Km back then :) ) I wasn’t scared at any point and just having fun, but thinking back now, so many things could have gone wrong. I think I would be a lot more afraid to try that again, without knowing what I’m getting myself into.
I was excited that you provided the coords. Thanks!
Support boat
support boat sucks then
She went straight, the tide carried her back and forth as mentioned in other comments
my comment was about navigation, the reply said “support boat”, which can only be interpreted as it supplied navigation, but it either didn’t, so the reply was wrong, or sucked at it
Is it the tides?
Like that bloke said to Caesar. Beware the tides of march.
Should have just gone in April.
Can’t explain that
yes
Sure looks like it to me
Swimming against the current, I assume.
Being parabolic, it looks like some significant drift current.
I think you mean “sinusoidal”.
Don’t say that, you have so much to live for.
Nah don’t worry, he’s just being hyperbolic
Not to get off too far on this tangent, but I hope OP comes back and cosines your statement.
