How to Swim the World by Lou Abercrombie

5th June 2021

In my book Fig Swims the World, the main character sets herself the daunting challenge of swimming the world in a frustrated attempt to get her controlling mother, Mubla, off her back. But it’s also the mother of all resolutions since Fig can’t actually swim.  What follows then is a story about how she learns to swim, her journey round the world while evading her mother and about the people she meets along the way.

The book was a real joy to write as it combined my love of open water swimming with a passion for travel and seeing the world.  It enabled me to dream of all those idyllic locations where I’d like to swim while also tapping into the many places I’ve already been.

Early on I decided to keep the locations vague, because I wanted to be able to play around with the swimming events. Some of them I made up, but many are based on actual open water swims, which I have either done or are on my Bucket List.  This meant that I could play around with them, giving them different names, distances and locations. For example, the first swim Fig completes is based on a combination of a swim I did around Burgh Island in Devon merged together with a swim I haven’t yet managed (cancelled thanks to bad weather) which is under the arch at Durdle Door in Dorset.

Another of the swims is based on the TrygFonden Christiansborg Rundt Copenhagen Swim which I completed in 2017 and which while I swam it, I had ideas for Fig going round my head. I also saw participants with mermaid tails swimming the course, which is what gave me the idea for the Old Mare Mermaids.

And then there’s the Cross Continental event which is based on the Bosphorous Swim – a stretch in Turkey between Europe and Asia.  It’s a swim made famous by Lord Byron and which is what got me into open water swimming in the first place.

In the book, there are twenty swims in total, of which half of them were based on ones I already knew about.  I then had to come up with the rest. A simple Google search will bring up a vast array of possibilities around the world.  Not surprising I suppose, given 71% of the Earth is water-covered! So, to minimise my options, I had Fig set herself certain criteria in planning her itinerary.  These included swimming on every continent bar Antarctica, fitting the swims into twelve months and taking a logical route round the world to minimise flying.

I started by using the swims I knew about as a skeleton for the year and then slotted in the researched and made-up ones to help with location and plot. For example, I knew that I wanted Fig to spend Christmas in Australia (Land of Koalas in the book), so I found out about a series of annual swims that take place a week apart, which I used as a starting point.

Writing the book soon became a labour of love as I began to realise just how much research was needed. By having her travel so much it meant that I was going to have to work out the nitty gritty details of how she would do it.  In practice, I had to plan an actual round the world trip, without ever getting to do it – sob!

My first step was printing out a map of the world and marking on it roughly where I wanted the swims to be. If you look closely, you can see my numbers as I worked out which event Fig would do, where and in which order.

I then found an amazing travel website to help me – www.rome2rio.com – on which you can type any two locations and it will come up with all the different ways to travel between them along with costs and travel time. And because Fig is scared of flying and I needed her to spend a lot of time travelling in order to cut down on accommodation costs, I chose the routes that mainly involved buses, trains or boats.  What made this more complicated was that I made up all the place names and so had to remember which place they were actually meant to be!

Throughout the adventure, Fig constantly updates her travel itinerary, crossing off the swims that she’s done while recording her travel data, from mode of transport to number of journeys taken to time spent and distance covered.  I had to make this as authentic as possible and ended up with a massive Excel spreadsheet so that I could keep tabs on all of it!

I think my favourite swim that Fig does is the one that she doesn’t plan.  The Time Traveller is based on an actual event and is now firmly on my Bucket List. Swimming between Finland and Sweden, you start just after midnight by the light of the Nordic summer and if you can complete it in less than 55 minutes, you do in fact get to travel back in time as you cross not only the Arctic Circle but also the time zone between the two countries.  How cool is that?!

Lou Abercrombie

Lou Abercrombie left Durham University with a First Class Maths degree before getting a job in television in London and later working as a photographer. She later moved to Bath, where she now lives with her children and husband. Fig Swims the World is her debut novel and is inspired by her love of wild swimming. For more information visit Lou’s website at louabercrombie.com, or you can catch her on twitter @LadyGrimdark.

Listen to Lou read the first chapter of Fig Swims the World here!

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