Paul Little swam the entire length of the River Shannon in eight days. 230 kilometres, from Dowra in County Cavan to the jetties behind the Hunt Museum in Limerick City. It is the fastest anyone has recorded for the full route. The previous best was fourteen days.

He is from Easter Snow, a townland halfway between Boyle and Carrick on Shannon, near Cavetown Lake. Primary school in Boyle, secondary in Carrick, and these days he runs Little’s Tree Services with his brother William. When he came in to record with us, it was twenty eight days since he had climbed out of the water in Limerick.

Where it started

The river was there from early on. Paul rowed with Carrick on Shannon Rowing Club right through secondary school, training six or seven days a week, and reckons he will never be as fit again. Triathlon followed in college with Lough Key Triathlon Club, but the swimming end of it rarely went beyond three kilometres.

Other people planted the idea. Three women from the triathlon club swam the length of the Shannon a few years back. A girl in the rowing club rowed it. Paul remembers thinking it might be something he could row or kayak someday, and that swimming it was well beyond him.

Then, two years ago, he spent a week crewing for Liam Cox, who ran the entire coastline of Ireland in 44 days. Paul was in the van behind him for the whole east coast stretch, handing out food and keeping him going. It was the consistency that got him, the way Liam never put a step wrong, day after day.

By the end of that week he had made up his mind. In two years, he would swim the Shannon.

“I wouldn’t consider myself anything special. I am normal. But I think anyone can do amazing things.”

Two years of building

The first thing he had to fix was the finish. The last three or four kilometres into Limerick City are tidal, so the arrival had to be timed for high tide. Paul picked the tide, worked out how many days the swim would take, and counted backwards to find his start date. That was seven or eight months before he got into the water.

The distance came slowly. Winter meant a couple of pool sessions midweek, because in the depths of it he could only manage five hundred metres in the open water. But he kept getting into the lake every weekend anyway, purely to acclimatise. The payoff came in spring: while the rest of the triathlon community was easing into the water and finding it perishing, Paul was already doing six kilometres.

Twelve weeks out, he set a full training plan and did not miss a single swim on it. That included a sixteen kilometre morning on the weekend of the Night and Day festival, after a late one on the Friday and with a trip to Sligo booked for lunchtime. He drove through Carrick at half three in the morning, past groups walking home from the pub and a Garda car outside Lunnie’s, and thought about what he would possibly say if he were stopped.

A ten kilometre swim is considered a marathon swim. Paul was planning to do the equivalent of three marathons a day, for eight days in a row. His longest training swim was twelve hours. After day two of the actual swim, he was into the unknown.

Eight days on the water

Day one was Dowra to Battlebridge, 27 kilometres. In his own head, day one did not count. It was a warm up. And the last day did not count either, because if he made it that far, nothing was stopping him. That left six days to think about, which was the whole trick of it.

The days averaged around thirty kilometres and twelve hours in the water. The longest was Lanesborough to Banagher, 37 kilometres, fifteen and a half hours, starting at six in the morning and finishing at half nine at night, with a single half hour break at Clonmacnoise.

He ate every half hour from a kayak alongside, small and often. Two hundred millilitres of drink, a banana or a bar. There are photographs of him floating in the middle of Lough Derg with a cup of coffee and a sandwich. The one thing that caught him out was the bars themselves, which turned out to be abrasive enough that between them and the constant water his tongue swelled up badly by Lanesborough. They had to pull the sugar out and coat it. For a day or two, eating dinner was a battle.

The shoulder was worse. He had trouble with the right one during training and got it under control in the final weeks, but from day two in Roosky onward, every stroke hurt. Not the pull, which was fine, but the recovery, lifting the arm clear of the water and swinging it forward. Some evenings he could not raise his arm enough to put on a t shirt and had to wear a zip up jacket instead.

The bleakest stretch was the middle, from Athlone down towards Lough Derg. It had been a dry summer and there was far less flow in the river than he had counted on, so those days ran longer than planned. The turn came at Lough Derg. Conditions were perfect, so they pushed on and did an extra sixteen kilometres into the lake rather than the six they had planned. That evening he knew Limerick was going to happen.

“I could hear cheers in my head. I thought I was starting to hallucinate.”

There is no such thing as a solo swim

Paul is firm on that point. On paper it is a solo swim. In practice it took six or seven people most days.

His wife Hazel travelled the whole way, working the logistics as they went and, once the media took off, doing most of the interviews herself, because Paul was in the middle of a lake. His brother William drove the boat, which was sponsored by Silver Line in Banagher, ran the Paul’s Shannon Swim 2025 Facebook page with videos every day, and was found at three in the morning with his head in the engine compartment sorting out electrical problems.

There were two kayakers in the water with him at all times, so one could come in for food while the other stayed out. Roscommon Sub Aqua provided rib cover on Lough Ree, and Aidan Breslin came down from Tarmonbarry Marina to cover Lough Derg. Bernadette Clancy came down three evenings to set up the massage table wherever they had landed. And there were people in cars, driving back and forth, making runs to the shops for things nobody thinks about until they are missing.

There was a fair bit Paul only heard about afterwards. On Lough Ree, William pulled on a wetsuit and hopped in to swim alongside him for a few minutes as a morale boost, leaving Shane to navigate between the green and red markers. It emerged later that Shane is colourblind and had been quietly asking the rest of the boat which was which.

The crowds

He expected support around Carrick, and got it. A crowd to wave him off at Dowra, a big one at Battlebridge that evening, plenty through Carrick. Between Carrick and Jamestown, an eight kilometre stretch with no roads or towns anywhere near it, people scrambled through fields and over fences to stand on the bank.

What he did not expect was that it would keep growing. The further from home he got, the bigger the crowds became. Towns clapping him in. People in Banagher who had waited all evening and were still there in the dark when he arrived at half nine.

Somewhere around day five or six, on a stretch miles from anywhere, he started hearing cheering. He assumed his head was going. It was only when he stopped for food and the kayaker asked whether he could hear the shouting too that it turned out to be real. Word had spread through the boating community, and every cruiser going past was clapping and calling out.

The finish was in the middle of Limerick City, past the castle, just where the Abbey River meets the Shannon, behind the Hunt Museum. He came in on the tide he had picked seven or eight months earlier, not an hour off. TG4 were there, recording for RTÉ as well. And so many people crowded onto the floating jetty that it sank under them and half of them got their feet wet.

“I spent an awful long time putting the swim down in my own head, making it easy. So I didn’t get a big finish.”

Why he did it

The swim was in aid of North West STOP, a voluntary suicide prevention service covering Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo and Donegal, providing counselling and addiction support. Paul chose it because it works directly with people in this part of the country.

When he set the fundraising page up he had to enter a target, so he put down two and a half thousand euro and thought no more about it. It is now close to 28,000 between the online page, cash donations and cheques from local businesses, and money is still coming in. The page is staying open.

On the evening he finished, the family went for a celebration meal in Limerick overlooking the river. When they came outside afterwards, there was a recovery operation underway on the water. The woman was alright. But it landed hard, on a night that was meant to be nothing but good. There is a charity in Limerick that patrols the river at night because it happens that often. They got in touch with Paul afterwards to thank him.

As he says himself, there is nobody who has not been affected in some way, and the more it can be talked about the better.

Since then

Paul and Hazel have a baby son, Conan, who is five months old. He arrived in the middle of the heaviest training, and there was a point when Paul wondered whether to put the whole thing off. He decided the opposite: that he had to do it, and that Conan would be able to look back on it one day. There was time missed, and he is catching up on it now.

There is a house to build, so nothing big is planned. Swimming will be social for a while, enough to stay active and stay in touch with the club. Although, he allows, if somebody else goes for a quicker time in a couple of years, he might have to go again.

You can hear the full conversation with Paul on this week’s episode of Voices of Boyle. The fundraising link and everything else is on the Paul’s Shannon Swim 2025 page on Facebook.

Timestamps

00:00  Welcome and introduction

00:15  Growing up in Easter Snow, between Boyle and Carrick

00:43  Little’s Tree Services

00:57  The swim: 230km down the River Shannon in eight days

01:41  Rowing, triathlon and a lifelong connection with the river

03:02  A short history of swimming the length of the Shannon

04:23  Crewing for Liam Cox and the moment the idea landed

05:43  Planning the finish around the Limerick tide

06:30  Two years of building distance in the water

10:18  A twelve week plan and the sacrifices behind it

12:06  Winter swimming and acclimatisation

13:08  Ireland’s Fittest Farmer at the Ploughing Championships

14:30  Day one at Dowra and the night before

16:07  The previous record and mapping the route

17:55  Nutrition on the water, and trouble with the tongue

20:01  Fifteen and a half hours in the water

21:01  The shoulder injury that started on day two

23:03  Why the finish was not the high people expect

24:55  The bleak middle days

25:20  Lough Derg and the turning point

26:21  Recovery, massage and strange nights of sleep

28:08  The crew, the boat and the kayakers

32:09  Behind the scenes and a colourblind navigator

33:22  Crowds on the banks and cheers from passing cruisers

36:00  Boyle Swim Club and Lough Key Triathlon Club

37:16  The finish in the middle of Limerick City

39:03  TV cameras and a sinking jetty

40:09  Fundraising for North West STOP

44:25  A sobering reminder on the night of the finish

45:21  Life since the swim, family and catching up on time

47:19  Looking back on two years

48:21  What comes next

49:12  Where to follow Paul online

Guest Bio

Paul Little is from Easter Snow, between Boyle and Carrick on Shannon. He runs Little’s Tree Services with his brother William. A member of Lough Key Triathlon Club since 2012 and of Boyle Swim Club, he swam the full length of the River Shannon in August 2025, covering 230 kilometres from Dowra to Limerick City in eight days, the fastest recorded time for the route. The swim raised close to 28,000 euro for North West STOP.