One More Stroke

People often assume that the biggest challenge in marathon swimming is the distance.

It's not.

The real challenge is what happens when the distance, the cold, the exhaustion and the self-doubt all arrive at the same time.

When I crossed the English Channel, I knew it would be long. When I swam around Cape Point, I knew there would be currents. When I became the first person to cross Walker Bay, I knew there were sharks. The challenge is never the fact that these things exist. The challenge is facing them hour after hour when the finish still feels impossibly far away.

At some point in almost every marathon swim, the mind starts negotiating. The shore seems no closer than it did an hour ago. Your shoulders ache. Your stroke rate drops. You begin to wonder whether you really can do what you set out to do. The answer is almost never found by thinking about the entire swim. The Channel is too big. Cape Point is too far. Walker Bay is too intimidating. If you focus on the full distance, it can feel overwhelming. Instead, your world becomes much smaller - you focus on the next feed, the next landmark, the next stroke, and then the next one after that.

Over the years, I've realised that this principle applies far beyond swimming. A few years ago, I found myself immersed in a world I knew almost nothing about: software development, AI, databases, workflows, product design. I had spent decades becoming competent in a handful of areas. Suddenly I was a beginner again.

It was uncomfortable - not because the technology was particularly frightening, but because I wasn't used to not knowing. None of us are. There were many moments when the scale of what I was trying to learn felt overwhelming. The gap between where I was and where I wanted to be seemed enormous. The temptation was to focus on the whole journey - on everything I didn't know, on how far there was still to go. But that approach was no more useful than staring across the English Channel and worrying about France. The only thing that ever worked was to focus on the next step - learn one thing, solve one problem, ask one question, make one improvement.

One more stroke.

The phrase has stayed with me because it captures something universally true. Most worthwhile things will ask more of us than we initially think we can give - building a business, raising a family, leading a team, reinventing a career, learning a new technology, pursuing an ambitious goal. The full distance often looks impossible. Fortunately, we rarely have to swim the full distance all at once. We only ever have to take the next stroke, and then the next one, and then the next.

Looking back, most of the meaningful things in my life have been achieved in exactly that way - not through certainty, confidence or some extraordinary reserve of courage, but through a willingness to keep moving when the finish was still out of sight.

The answer was never in the entire crossing. It was always in one more stroke.