ISLAND HOPPING

Multisport is often seen as fast and furious, but could a gentler pace be equally as challenging? With many kms of swimming alternated with scenic walks and cake, the Scilly Swim Challenge promised just that...

- HELEN WEBSTER

The sandwiches are good.

Slightly mushy from being in my backpack all morning, but none the worse for it. Avocado, olives and salad in some kind of wholegrain bread. I've got crisps too, plus cake. I look at the sea, wiggle my toes in the sand and decide that life is pretty good right now. You wouldn't think I'm slap bang in the middle of the kind of event that would make many triathletes shudder.

We often joke in triathlon about people 'having a picnic' in transition as a way of saying they're taking too long, but it crosses my mind that this is the first time I've actually had a picnic in transition... So what's going on? Well, I'm in the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall for the annual Scilly Swim Challenge. In its 10th anniversary year, a friend who works for organisers SwimQuest invited me along to experience multisport at a different pace.

The timing is perfect for me too, as with a knee (dodgy meniscus) and back problem (dodgy discus) ruling out cycling and running in the same year, I've been doing a lot of swim training, to the point where my family have started joking that I'm trying to reverse evolution and return to the primordial soup. Rude.

ISLAND LIFE

Put simply, the Scilly Swim is a series of swims that link the islands of Scilly in a rough circle, with walks over the islands in between to break them up. The swims range from just under 1km to 6km, with the walks all being around 2-3km. The distances are manageable, but they soon add up over the one or two days you can spend completing them, leaving you with a total of around 15km of swimming (told you most triathletes wouldn't like it).