Swimmingpod

Before the pandemic, some friends in Metz, a mid-sized city in France, near Strasbourg, were looking for somewhere to swim outdoors. The Moselle River flows through Metz, on its way to the North German wine country, before joining with the Rhine at Koblenz. This seemed the right place to make a new swimming place, in the Moselle River in and around Metz. Sibylle van der Walt was one of this group...

Dr Romy Martinez is a Paraguayan singer, researcher, and ethnomusicologist, with two award-winning albums with the Purahéi Trio, including Songs by the Riverbanks , inspired by river landscapes and cultural exchange between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. She received the 2025 Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation Research Grant for Guaranía in Translation , promoting Paraguayan music in Europe. She is...

Laura Reineke is triple crown swimmer from Henley, UK, completing the Santa Catalina channel swim, the English Channel and the 20 Bridges swim of Manhattan Island. Locally, she is a Henley Mermaid, a group that swims for socialjustice, and founder of Friends of the Thames. She is Sue Ryder Woman of Achievement 2016. In this podcast I am with her in Henley, Oxfordshire, to discuss her swimming achi...

Simon Griffiths is the author of  Swim Wild and Free: A PracticalGuide to Swimming Outdoors 365 Days a Year , and founder of  Outdoor Swimmer magazine . He is a life-long swimmer, swims year-round in the Thames and regularly takes part in open water and pool races. His swimming adventures havetaken him around the world. He was part of the team that created the STA Open Water Swimming Coaching qual...

Toby Robinson is an international swimmer, representing England at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and Great Britain at the Paris Olympic Games 2024. He is passionate about swimming, especially in open water. He is a staunch advocate and campaigner for clean open water in the UK, especially the River Thames in London. In September 2025, he was a key participant in a Thames relay swim from the source...

Swimmingpod celebrates its 5th birthday, with guests Helen Edwards, Tom Kearney, Anette Frisch, Charlotte Sawyer, Tess Bird, Vera Prokopieva, and Carl Tysom. 65 episodes, covering styles and cultures of swimming in the outdoors and open water. Swimming heroes and everyday swimmers, politics and ecology of open watee. Swimming in health, disease and disability. Water and poetry, prose, music, visua...

Sian Richardson is founder of the Bluetits Chill Swimmers, a social enterprise that has gone global. In this episode of Swimmingpod, Sian talks about how she got into winter swimming events and about Bluetits in Tallinn and at Lake Bled.

James Bethell is a Lord of the British realm. A former Health Minister and member of the House of Lords. He is a passionate open water swimmer, whose passion has extended to bring open water swimming back to the River Thames in London. In this episode of Swimmingpod, Lord Bethell, James Bethell, talks about his open water passion, and a vision for a swimmable River Thames.

A warm June, 2025; a similarly warm June 2020, but in very different circumstances, both times greeting the solstice sun with a swim. Five years since the pandemic, Stanley Ulijaszekreflects in this podcast on summer solstice swimming and other rituals attached to this time of year at Oxford, both then, and now.

Daniel Allen-Hörnfeldt and Elvira Lundgren swim in Umea, Sweden. A place known for its magnificent wilderness, green and blue spaces, and swimming and winter swimmingscene. They run a very successful local winter bathing place called Umeakallbad. This is their story.

In this episode of Swimmingpod, Stanley Ulijaszek is with cake and pastry specialist Susanna Bowers, swimming at the London Fields and Brockwell Lidos , and eating cake and pastries at Pophams Bakery, Maya’s Bakehouse, and the lido cafe at Brockwell. In doing so, they explore the intimate connection between swimming and cake in London, a city of lidos and bakeries. They read from the Lido Guide, b...

Swimming and cake is a natural combination for many outdoor swimmers. In this episode of Swimmingpod, food expert Susanna Bowers joins Stanley Ulijaszek in Oxford to explore both. They swim at Port Meadow from the Dodo Tree; and later from the Tolkien Bench in the University Park, close by Parsons Pleasure and what was once Dames Delight. Cake is eaten before swimming, then at St Cross College aft...

I never expected to suffer from leptospirosis, although I know that it is a risk. A comment I sometimes hear from passers-by while swimming in the river is “you know you can get Weil’s Disease, don’t you?” My internal response, never spoken, is “Yes, but…” it is so rare that it is hardly on my swimmer’s radar. In retrospect I am surprised by how it took me by surprise when I got it, even though I...

Amelie Schlemmer swims in Vienna. She is co-founder of SVDK – Swimmverein Donaukanal – the Donaukanal (Danube Canal) Swimming Club. This was founded in 2020 by four students of the Social Design program at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, as an artistic practice. It soon turned into an open, non-profit cultural association with the ambition of revitalizing urban swimming culture along the D...

The volcanic Lake Bullen Merri is in Victoria, Australia, cloverleafed in shape. A little over two and a half kilometers across. Swimming here, Stanley Ulijaszek was struck by its deep history, and the history of the aboriginal Djargurd Wurrung peoples here, who were resettled in the late nineteenth century. There is a distressing swimming story here, involving the female leader of these people, Q...

Mike Lapworth was the inspiration for my 65 swims at the age of 65 years. He had swum 50 swims at the age of 50 years. Hywel Davies I have swum with across the years, having met while swimming the length of the non-tidal River Thames (in stretches, not all in one go). We original met, Mikeand I, at the Thames at Port Meadow, Oxford, at a pre-pandemic Dodo (pre-Christmas) swim, where Hywel also swa...

Kara Mayer’s mission is to make river swimming around NewYork City safe and free. With her development of + POOL, a water-filtering floating pool for safe recreation in urban waters, she has ignited a series of policy changes that will open up access to the rivers for all New Yorkers. Thisis being trialled in the Summer of 2025, and the implications of her work for outdoor urban bathing are huge,...

Why we swim can often be political, and swimmer Grace Wright-Arora has completed research on pollution, activism and alternative water knowledges among users of the River Avon, near Bristol. Central to this work is understanding why people swim in the Avon, despite knowing of the often high risks of exposure to pollution and even infection there. This podcast is about her swimming experiences, how...

Hot town, summer in the city, and a meeting like no other. For an urban swimmer, to have a bathing platform outside the conference venue, starting on Day 1, World Bathing Day, 22nd June, with a jump into the very clean waters of the Rijnhaven, Rotterdam, is a perfect start to two days of deliberation and information sharing. Around 200 people representing organisations from around the world assemb...

Luke Belfield is a force, undertaking feats of running and swimming which would tax any mortal. As someone who developed arthritis in childhood, with some remissionand then resumption in early adult life, he could have accepted the ruling of the ancient Greek three sisters of fate. But he didn’t. Very successfully, he has been weaving his own destiny with the thread that he has been given, by, in...

Tony Forbes and Col Ritchie are regulars at the annual Pierto Pub ocean swim in Lorne, Victoria. This can be a fierce race, when swimming can be a contact sport. Notwithstanding this, this fearsome duo amount nearly a century and a half of life experience between them, and swimming enough Pier toPubs leads to the honour of receiving a shark bait award, two or more if you live long enough and/or yo...

Sarah Quinn taught me to say ‘You never regret a swim’ and Ihave been saying it now for decades. And I don’t and nor does she and nor does Amenah McDonald. Sarah and Amenah have a beautiful connection through the ocean atOcean Grove, Australia. Amenah plans her week around how the surf is going to be, while Sarah reads the water every morning on the way to dropping her kids off at school. Both liv...

Stanley Ulijaszek offers some reflections about swimming in Victoria in Australia on the coast at Queenscliffe. On a beautifulbeach, long and stretching towards a point to the left and another to theright, at Point Lonsdale. A swim with a Hopper-esque sailboat sailing in gentlebut business-like fashion, in front of the lighthouse that signals the pointwhere Australia lost a Prime Minister to the w...

There is a lot of good swimming to be had in the Bristolregion, with several vibrant and active outdoor swimming scenes in the region - in the city itself, but also in the nearby River Avon, in the River Brue, in the Avon estuary, and in the sea at sand point. If you can go a mile or ten out of Bristol there is a lot of choice - at Weston Super Mare there are several lido beaches to choose. River...

Charlotte Sawyer is a documentary film maker and photographer who captures cinematic stories that cross cultures and boundaries. She has worked in conflict zones and places vulnerable to climate change, notably Iraq, Ethiopia and Nigeria. Aggie Nyagari is a Kenyan film and TV director, who brings the diversity of her life experiences into her work. Charlotte and Aggie both live, swim and work in B...