On November 3rd, 2018, a Twin Otter ski plane left Lou Rudd alone on the far-reaching expanse of the Ronne Ice Shelf…

We’re in the grips of a wild swimming revolution. Swimming has long been one of the most popular participation sports in the UK, which is great, but it does mean local lidos and pools are often overcrowded…

Captain Lou Rudd is trudging into Antarctica’s heartland, confronted with an isolation that few of us could ever imagine. He is in the thick of something no one has ever done, alone in a frozen landscape untouched by human influence…

Nothing beats that rush of finding a new place to bathe outdoors. It’s the stuff of wild swimming dreams: you scramble through a screen of bushes like a countryside Columbus. Then suddenly a private waterfall appears, tumbling through fingers of mist into a clear pool edged by rocks…

Early last year, foreign news journalist and qualified swim teacher, Becky Horsbrugh, travelled to Bangladesh to provide assistance for a drowning prevention scheme. She’d recently been introduced to a harrowing fact, that 50 children die a day from drowning in Bangladesh…

Often, I think, the first obstacle relates to personal perception: am I the kind of swimmer who could do something like this? Could I swim across this lake? Could I make it down this river? Can I complete this crossing? The mind baulks at new and untested possibilities…