Godmanchester woman plans solo Channel swim using arms alone

Sophie Etheridge has learned to live with chronic pain to resume swimming after an accident in 2011

A woman who finds the touch of water painful is planning a solo English Channel swim powered only by her arms.

Sophie Etheridge, 31, took up the challenge to raise the profile of a Swimming Teachers Association campaign for swimmers with disabilities.

She has had fibromyalgia and complex regional pain syndrome since 2011.

Ms Etheridge, from Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, said "controlling and managing my pain whilst I'm swimming" will be her biggest challenge.

The swimming teacher said: "Everything is painful, sitting here is painful, the wind on my legs or water on my legs, everything is painful constantly."

Out of the water, Ms Etheridge can walk only short distances and relies on aids such as her wheelchair, but that means she feels "automatically judged"

Ms Etheridge been a competitive swimmer since childhood and enjoyed triathlons until she was hit by a car in 2011.

This left her in permanent pain and limited mobility, and being largely dependent on a wheelchair.

She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body, and complex regional pain syndrome, "a poorly understood condition where a person experiences persistent, severe and debilitating pain".

The pain can spread to her whole body and at night she sleeps with a cage over her legs and feet so the duvet does not touch them.

When Ms Etheridge is in the water, "I'm not only equal, I can do things better than other people can"

For the first two or three years after the accident she was "very much in mentality that I shouldn't be doing things because it hurt".

But swimming had always been her "happy place" and she struggled with her mental health because of the loss of her active life.

Ms Etheridge said: "Getting back to open water swimming was a long and extremely painful process."

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At first, she could endure only five minutes with her legs in a pool and "eventually after two months I was able to tolerate the pain enough to actually start swimming".

"It felt amazing. Yes it was painful, but whilst I was swimming I felt free. I was focused on my ability rather than my disability and my whole mindset started to change," she said.

She is unable to use her legs, but has once more become a strong swimmer.

The swimming teacher has qualified as an open water swimming coach

Fed up with being the only person with a disability at open water swim events, Ms Etheridge set up the Adaptive and Disabled Open Water Swimmers group in 2021.

It now has nearly 1,000 members and shows what people with disabilities can do with the right equipment and support, with getting in and out of the water often being the biggest barrier to access.

She also passed the STA Level 2 Open Water Coaching in 2021.

Her solo Channel swim will fundraise to offer free training for teachers to be disabled swimming specialists, and for teachers with disabilities to get into open water coaching.

She has spoken at the Swimming Teachers Association conference about how to make the sport more inclusive

Ms Etheridge's swimming window for the 30-mile (48km) challenge begins on Thursday - and if the weather conditions are right, she will depart from Dover shadowed by her support team in a boat.

She said: "There are a lot of things to think about and for me the big one is controlling and managing my pain while I'm swimming.

"Being in the water hurts, being thrown around by the waves hurts even more. You have huge ferries and tankers going past you and I have been learning how to swim controlling that level of pain - it's as much mental as physical."

To qualify she must get in and out of the water unaided and by the time she arrives in France, her legs will be numb - so she is anticipating "bum-shuffling up the beach".

Ms Etheridge has no illusions about what faces her. "It's not easy, more people have successfully climbed Mount Everest than successfully swum the English Channel."