Army
Army Swimmers In Action In Aldershot
The 2016 Army Swimming Championships have taken place, and as always, proved to be a hotly-contested affair.
Several members of the Army swimming team were in action, looking to find form ahead of high-profile competitions later in the season.
The meeting in Aldershot also featured members of the United Kingdom Invictus Games swimming squad, who were invited to race for the first time in the event's history.
Lance Corporal Kath Baker has been a member of the Army swimming squad for several seasons, though she was modest about her own successes in the sport so far:
"There's been a lot of hard work behind the scenes with our coach Gary, Rob Healey, and Nathan Pearce... They all put a lot of work in to get us this far."
Elsewhere, James Gibson has made a welcome return to the water. He'd taken a break from swimming to focus on commissioning from Sandhurst, but now he's back, and is keen to represent his new unit in the sport after switching from Intelligence to the Engineers.
Also taking to the pool were a small team from the Invictus Games - amongst them 6ft 7in, 33-year-old team captain David Wiseman.
A former Yorkshire Regiment infantryman, Wiseman took a bullet in Afghanistan that's still lodged in his chest, and went on to write a memoir about military experience called 'Helmand To The Himalayas'. He told Forces TV:
"Sport is an incredible and powerful catalyst for recovery, and recovery doesn't just stop once you start feeling better. It's a life-long process, particularly for some of our most seriously wounded, injured, and sick personnel and veterans. So, by continuing to be involved in sport, it really impacts the physical, the social, and the psychological impact of those injuries."
The next competition in the Army diary is the Inter Corps Championships, which take place in December.
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