'Fitness nut' sets sights on English Channel

Tomorrow Casey Glover will be ploughing through the murky water of the Whanganui River in a bid to defend his 3km Bridge-to-Bridge swim crown.
It's a race he looks forward to, even if it is pretty small fish when compared to the whale of a challenge he has set himself in a couple of years.
 Glover, 23, of Wellington, plans to  swim the English Channel and smash the record set in 2007 by Bulgarian Petar Stoychev of 6 hours 57 minutes and 50 seconds.
What inspires him to chase that triumph?
No particular reason, he says. Just because it's there.
He's never been to England to see the channel for himself but knows plenty about it. His coach, Philip Rush, crossed it three times in his heyday.
The success rate of channel attempts is only 50 per cent, but Glover is undeterred. After all, he has already swum Cook Strait in record time, the 26-kilometre distance taking him four hours 37 minutes 56 seconds.
"It (the English Channel) will be tough, but some people have told me the Cook Strait swim is tougher because the currents are much stronger," he says.
Any plans to lower his Cook Strait record?
None. Been there, done that, says Glover, whose fulltime job is to teach adults how to swim.
Besides, by clocking up 60km in the pool each week, he regularly swims the length of Cook Strait twice anyway.
Glover, who learned to swim at the age of 5 and was competing in the pool two years later,  says he's a "fitness nut". Apart from his Cook Strait and Whanganui triumphs, he has won the annual  Kapiti Island-Paraparaumu race five times.
One success was achieved despite a nasty encounter with a shark. "I yelled out to my support crew that there was a shark directly beneath me but they said just keep swimming faster.
"The shark popped up its head and then took off."
Glover, who won his Whanganui crown in 2008 - the event wasn't held last year because of the Masters games - praises the organisers of the event. "It's done and promoted very well and it's good to see your mayor getting behind it. Swimming needs a bigger profile, and I'm doing my bit to boost that profile."