Here I sit, a little over five weeks away from the swim [whoa– I just had to check the calendar to see how many weeks it is before typing that, and found myself exclaiming, “Jesus, is it only 5 weeks?!”], and I’ve got my share of doubts.

Here’s where I stand: I’ve absorbed tons of advice, I feel really good about my training, I trust the crew that will be on the boat with me, I know my experience with endurance events will help carry the day and generally speaking, I’m progressing toward the swim with a really good attitude.

Here’s the big doubt though: What if I seem to have the bases covered, but there’s some thread of failed preparation in everything I’ve read, experienced and been told that somehow I’m not seeing?

For example, what if I haven’t really properly trained for cold water acclimatization? Sure, I’ve been swimming in the Atlantic as much as I can, I did my 6H test at the right temps and I took a dip in Puget Sound, which I triangulated to be about the same temp as Dover. So I know what 60 degree water feels like, and it certainly seems tolerable. But have I really steeled myself lately for extended periods of time in cold waters? The water in Scituate has been relatively warm lately. My last couple long swims were in the pool. I saw a video of a girl who completed a crossing despite pool-only training, but she had a typical Channel swimmer’s body and she was from Saskatchewan…surely that northern exposure upbringing afforded her some sort of innate tolerance to cold, right?

Is 20/20 hindsight going to reveal how there was a general sense of preparedness, yet one or two key pieces of the puzzle were actually missing? Or perhaps more precisely: It’s not that the required piece of the puzzle will be missing, but that it’s misshapen or too small to fill the solution hole it’s meant to complete.

No training is perfect, and everyone approaches an event like this from a different perspective and set of experiences so it’s hard to lay out an exact checklist that everyone can follow. Still, the question haunts me: Will I have done enough?

It doesn’t help that I just saw two discussion items in a couple of Channel forums. One was that veteran Channel swimmer Peter Jurzynski will be sharing his experience tonight (in London, too bad I can’t make it), and that he’s completed 14 crossings on 20 attempts. That’s only a 70% success rate! I believe weather played a big part in some of his failed attempts, but it could in mine as well, in terms of making the conditions tougher than I’ve what trained for. The other was that a couple of older British Channel-swimming lifers (or so it seems) are now determined to do the crossing as a two-man relay, despite years of failed solo attempts each. What gives?! They seem pretty locked into the Channel community, and the note they wrote about their plan was hilariously self-deprecating, but still…if these guys have had trouble all these years while being clued into every trick in the book, what chance do I have?

The hardest things in life, I’ve found, is when things are hard in ways you don’t expect. What am I not expecting?

As the date approaches and I put the final touches on my prep, I know overall I’m going to adopt a positive can-do attitude (hell, without it, you’re sunk before you start), and won’t be in a goofy, Up With People kind of way. It’ll be grounded in what I listed above– I’ve put in my time, I’ve trained to the best of my ability, I’ve got a great support team, I’m uncomfortably fat and I’ve gathered and put to use as much info about the swim as can be expected. Whatever anybody else did to train is irrelevant. This is my swim, and I’m going to do it, Full stop (well, once I land on French shores).