Clare's 365 Day Swim for Food Banks

On Sunday 22nd of July 2022 I started swimming every day. When I started, I‘d planned to swim for the 49 days before a holiday but I got a bit carried away and set myself the challenge of swimming every day for a year to raise money for the Trussell Trust. 

The Trussell Trust is an amazing charity that supports a nationwide network of 1200 food banks in the UK. They also do lots of campaigning work around raising awareness about food poverty. One of their aims is to end the need for food banks in the UK altogether. Within 20 miles of Brighton there are 12 food banks that the Trussell Trust support.

Between 1 April 2022 and 30 September 2022, food banks in the Trussell Trust’s UK-wide network distributed 1.3 million food parcels to people facing hardship – this is an increase of 52% compared to the same period in 2019. Half a million of these parcels were distributed to children. One in five people referred to food banks in the Trussell Trust’s network are in households where someone is working.

I swim between 600m - 1.2km every day. I started swimming every morning in the Saltdean Lido, and on my first day, it took me 51 minutes to swim a kilometre. So far my personal best for a km is 32 minutes and 35 seconds which was on day 273.

I've now swum in more than 20 different swimming pools in the UK, Spain and France to keep swimming every single day. The smaller pool in my cover photo is from our holiday in Spain in September and I had to do 125 laps of this tiny pool every day to stay on track! 

Thanks so much for reading and please donate if you can. Clare xxx