【英语听和读】沼泽潜行

 Callum: Hello, I’m Callum Robertson and this is Entertainment. Next Monday, August

27th
, in Britain is a national holiday or what we call a bank holiday and several
thousand people will be heading off to a small village in Wales which is
hosting the World Bog 1 Snorkelling 3 Championships.
What is this sport Bog Snorkelling? I hear you ask. Well first you have to know
what a bog is. A bog is an area of land in the countryside which is always soft
and wet. When you walk through it your feet might get stuck and it makes a
squelching 4 noise. The particular bog in question is what's known as a peat bog.
So that's a bog. And what about the snorkelling part? Well normally
snorkelling is what you do on holiday, in the warm blue sea. Swimming with
your head underwater breathing through a plastic tube called a snorkel 2.
Bog Snorkelling then is a combination of those two things. And to learn more
about it I spoke 5 to one of the organisers and founders 6 of the World Bog
Snorkelling Championships, Gordon Green.
Gordon Green
What we’ve done is we’ve dug a trench 7 in the peat bog so that it fills with a nice dirty water.
Callum: Gordon says that they dig a trench in the bog. A trench is a kind of an oblong
hole. And when they dig this trench in the bog it fills up with dirty water which
the competitors, the people taking part in the competition have to swim through.
Listen again, this time listen out for how long the trench is and how far the 
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competitors have to swim. Gordon uses the traditional measurement of a yard.
A yard is about .9 of a metre, so nearly a metre.
Gordon Green
What we’ve done is we’ve dug a trench in the peat bog so that it fills with a nice dirty water
and the trench is 60 yards long and the competitors have to swim two lengths of this bog so
they’re swimming 120 yards.
Callum: The trench is 60 yards long and the competitors have to swim two lengths,
that's 120 yards which is about 110 metres. Gordon goes on to explain more
about the rules.
Gordon Green
Bog snorkelling is a sport where you have to breathe, through a snorkel, you can use flippers
and the majority do use flippers, but you have to breathe through a snorkel and you’re not
allowed to do a crawl or a breast stroke, you have to keep your arms straight in front of you or
do a dog paddle.
Callum: The competitors aren't allowed to use any traditional swimming strokes, like
front crawl or breast stroke though they can use what we call a doggy paddle, a
way of swimming using your arms like a dog uses its legs when swimming.
They have to breathe through a snorkel and they can wear flippers, or fins 8, on
their feet.
 Swimming is now not the only bog snorkelling event. If you want to you can
also try Mountain Bike Bog Snorkelling. I asked Gordon to describe that.
Gordon Green
We’ve dug a deeper trench and we have to have a special bike. What we do is fill the frame
full of lead, put water in the tyres instead of air. We’ve got lead weights on the bike and the
person that’s riding it has to wear a lead belt round his waist or her waist and also lead in a 
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rucksack so we’ve got the correct buoyancy so that when you cycle under the water you can
actually do that and breathe through your snorkel. They have to then cycle underwater and it’s
like cycling in treacle 9, it’s very hard work and that’s become a very popular event as well.
Callum: So the trench for the Mountain Bike event is deeper and the contestants 10 ride a
special bike with lots of weight. They have to cycle through the bog,
underwater, again, breathing through the snorkel!
I then asked Gordon how it started, where did the idea come from to get people
to swim through dirty water in a field and how long has it been going.
Gordon Green
Well it started like all these things do late a night in a pub when we’d all been drinking and
we were wanting to raise some money for a charity at the time and someone said that they
didn’t have anything in their garden but a bog and then someone else said well let’s swim in it
and that’s how it came along.
When was this?
That was some 18 years ago now, so we’ve been running it a long time.
Callum: Gordon says it started 18 years ago with a plan after a night drinking in the pub!
But it is all in for a good cause. The money that they get from the competition,
you have to pay to enter and pay to go and watch, goes to support a charity.