Five women to swim length of Lake Ontario in relay
Just after 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning, five women will stand barefoot at the edge of a lakeside dock, the land behind them and open water beyond their outstretched arms.
One by one, with the sun high in the sky and a crowd cheering from the park, they will dive into Lake Ontario and kick off a marathon swim that has never been attempted before.
This is the start line as they envision it.
The goal is to cross the lake end to end, from Kingston to Burlington, in an epic 305-kilometre relay that will see them swim against the current and against the wind because they would rather head toward home than away from it. The swim will take at least five days and four nights.
"So many people have said, 'You guys are nuts. You guys are crazy,' " says Nicole Mallette, one of the five swimmers. "We know what we're up against."
The traditional way to swim across Lake Ontario is north-south, or south-north, from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto — a roughly 52-kilometre journey accomplished by 47 people in the past six decades.
In an era where there are many records to break but few left to set, this swim is uncharted territory. If the team is successful, they will be the first people ever to cross Lake Ontario lengthwise. Marilyn Bell, of course, was the first to make the south-north solo swim in 1954.
The members of the relay team, ranging in age from 18 to 61, all know the thrill and agony of the long-distance solo swim. Four have crossed Lake Ontario the traditional way and one the English Channel.
The water and the weather have bent and betrayed some of them in the past. This is their chance to make peace with the lake. To have fun. To pull through as a team.
"There is no not making it," Mallette says. "That is not in our vocabulary."
When 16-year-old Marilyn Bell proposed a solo swim across Lake Ontario in 1954, few believed it could be done by a human, let alone a woman.
Bell swam from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto in 20 hours and 55 minutes. Her detractors were flabbergasted.
Since then, there have been 57 successful crossings. There are now records for the fastest female, fastest male, oldest female, oldest male, youngest male, youngest female, first two-way and the all-butterfly.
When Annaleise Carr of Walsh, Ont. crossed last year at age 14 — 14 and 158 days, to be precise (the solo swim people keep track) — she became the youngest person ever, male or female. Several swimmers have done it more than once, so there is an unofficial record for the most crossings. Many more have tried and failed.
Most of the successful swimmers have been women, many of them motivated by the Marilyn Bell story. And that is why, when Nicole Mallette and Colleen Shields started talking about putting together a relay team to do a lengthwise swim, they decided it should be an all-female group. They chose to use the swim to raise money — a whopping $300,000 is the goal — for the Because I am a Girl project, a global gender equality, anti-poverty and girls' rights initiative. They had reached about $5,000 by Friday evening.
The idea of crossing the lake end to end had been floating around in the marathon swimming community for a couple of years, but no one had turned the what-if into a plan. After chatting about it with friends one day, Mallette, a 47-year-old event planner with a go-go-go personality, began to obsess. Once the swim was in her head, she could not get it out. She thought about it for three weeks straight, and then she called Shields.
"What do you think?" Mallette asked her friend.
The pair had known each other for many years; when Mallette crossed Lake Ontario in 1997, Shields was her swim master and coach. She was the one who got Mallette back into swimming after a 10-year hiatus.
Shields was floored. "I'm in," she said immediately.
At 61, Shields is the most experienced member of the team. She crossed from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto for the first time in 1990 and currently holds the Lake Ontario swim record for oldest female, a title she took after her second crossing in 2006, when she was 54.
"Why anybody wants that record is beyond me," she says.
Shields has taken more than 15 swimmers across the lake.In marathon swimming lingo, to take someone across the lake means to be their swim master, a certified supervisor of long-distance solo swims.
When it comes to her own swims, Lake Ontario has brought Shields a lot of heartbreak these past few years. She has made four attempts to cross since her successful 2006 swim, but hasn't made it. A few times, she was pulled out less than five kilometres from the shore owing to bad weather and exhaustion.
"Mother nature hasn't been very kind to me," she says.
It's not a record she's after this time, though she would break her own "oldest female" title. Shields is just looking for personal closure. "I opened up a can of worms, and now I have to close it. So I will be going again," she says, wearily. "But not this year."
This is relay year, which means a break from the gruelling solo journey. It will be tough in its own way, but perhaps a bit of fun.
After they committed to form a team and plan the swim, Mallette and Shields brainstormed and came up with names of three young women they thought might be interested in joining them.
Shields had been a swim master for marathoners Samantha Whiteside, 23, and Rebekah Boscariol, 18, on their successful crossings in 2006 and 2011, respectively, and she admired their technique and spirit. Whiteside was swift and methodical; Boscariol weathered terrible conditions and kept going even when her crew thought she should stop.
Mona Sharari, 18, was a pacer for Boscariol's crossing.The young women, both students at Dalhousie University, swam together with the Markham Aquatic Club. While Sharari hasn't done a Lake Ontario solo swim, she is the only member of the team to have crossed the English Channel, a long-time goal the teen checked off her bucket list last September.
Mallette and Shields asked all three young women to be part of the team. The responses were unhesitating: Yes. Yes. Yes.
The planning is 'nuts'
The planning started in October with Mallette at the helm. It has been a challenge, to say the least.
Among the things to worry about: permits, insurance, volunteers, sponsors, media, social media, schedules, timing, meals, drinks, boats, fuel, land crew, lake crew, health and safety, accommodations, first aid, emergency plans.
"I'm a wedding co-ordinator, and I would rather do a wedding for 1,000 people right now than do this again," Mallette says, laughing. "It's nuts!"
But she can't wait to get in the water.
The women will swim the first kilometre of the relay together, from the marina at Confederation Park in Kingston into the open water. All five will wear matching charcoal and pink-strapped swim suits with pink bathing caps that advertise their motto: "Because Girls Can." They will each swim in two-hour shifts, night and day, and cover about 61 kilometres each.
With them for the journey will be more than 20 crew members, including three coaches, eight volunteers in four sailboats, four volunteers in two or three zodiacs, one kayaker, a paramedic, two photographers and one videographer.
Five of the swimmers' family members will follow the flotilla by land with extra supplies, including 528 pre-cooked frozen meals prepared for the entire crew and donated by Liaison College Hamilton, which Mallette co-owns with her parents.
The team has chosen to swim in an order based on the year they completed their first long-distance solo swims, which happens to be the same order as their age. Shields, the eldest and most experienced member of the team, will be the first to swim alone.
After Shields' first two hours have passed, Mallette will dive into the lake behind her friend, spend a few minutes warming up and then tap Shields' feet and take over. When Mallette's time is up, Whiteside will dive in, warm up, tap and take over. Then Boscariol, Sharari, and on and on until they reach Burlington.
"I'm excited to be part of something that has never been done before," Boscariol says.
After each two-hour turn, they will break for eight hours, although "break" does not equal rest.
"Just because we have eight hours off doesn't mean we get to sleep for eight hours," Mallette says.
They will have crew duties, such as helping prepare meals and retrieve supplies from the shore. They will be responsible for supporting the other swimmers, night and day. When it is time to rest, they will crawl into sleeping bags on one of the boats, wherever they can find space. The conditions for sleeping won't be ideal, and within days they could be battling sleep deprivation, as well as mental and physical exhaustion.
There are many things that can jeopardize the success of such a long and complicated swim, but the big killer is weather. It can be the open-water swimmer's enemy.
"It can change on a dime," Mallette says. "Mother Nature can be very cruel."
For their solo swims, they had only to worry about weather and water conditions for a 24-hour period. Now they need five good days.
Strong winds from the southwest can slow them down or make the conditions too dangerous for swimming. Winds from the east can push them in the right direction, but are also signs of an impending storm. Winds from the north can cool the water down, which wreaks havoc on their body temperatures. At this point, though, given Toronto's recent heat wave, the water temperature looks about right. Even if it does cool down, the swimmers are not allowing themselves words like "cold" or "freezing."
"It's balmy," says Shields.
"Or refreshing," says Mallette.
If a lightning storm strikes, the swimmers will be pulled out and their exact location marked so they can return to the water when the conditions improve.
So far the long-range forecast is looking good. "Fingers crossed," Mallette says. They hope to make it to Burlington by Saturday afternoon, July 27. Folks back on land can follow their progress on the group Facebook page or Twitter, where they will post updates in real time.
"The weather will just slow us down," Mallette says. "It won't stop us."
A week before the marathon, the team is sitting around a table at a Toronto beach club after a quick lap together in the lake, and the conversation turns to the competitive nature of the swimmer.
Whiteside puts it like this: "You're swimming along beside somebody, and you just think, the whole time, even if it's just a practice and it's just a hundred metres …"
Mallette jumps in, and they finish the sentence together: "I want to beat you!"
They all laugh in that way people do when something is funny because it's true.
"When you're in the water," Mallette says, "it's game on."
That competitive nature is a character trait that has driven them all to success and delivered them here, to the edge of this upcoming record-setting journey. But it is also one that can drive them mad.
When Whiteside crossed Lake Ontario in 2006, she made it in an incredible 15 hours and 11 minutes. But that wasn't good enough for the girl who started swimming competitively when she was 9. She missed her goal of breaking the record for women's fastest solo swim by 71 seconds and was completely devastated.
Whiteside tried again the next summer, but she wasn't mentally ready. She pulled herself out after five hours. The next year, she quit swimming to focus on her studies — she is a doctoral candidate in microbiology and immunology at the University of Western Ontario — and only recently decided to take the sport up again for fun.
"This time, I just want to be able to associate something positive with Lake Ontario. I just want to finish," Whiteside says. "It's about redemption, I guess."
They've all had similar disappointments. When Mallette missed her shot at the 1984 Canadian Olympic team by three one-hundredths of a second after battling mono three months before trials, she quit swimming for 10 years.
"And for 10 years I was miserable," she says. "The day I started swimming again I was a completely different person."
It's difficult to imagine Mallette miserable these days. The team planner is also the team cheerleader. "When you're ready to throw in the towel," says Shields, "Nicole can get you going."
Each team member has her own concerns about the swim. Shields is worried she will slow down the "young whippersnappers" during their first tandem kilometre.
"I keep telling people, take the ages of the youngest three on the team and it still doesn't add up to my age," says Shields, who doesn't look 61 and doesn't feel it, but is keenly aware of the number.
When Shields confesses the concern about her potential pokiness at the beach club, the younger women shake their heads. Nuh-uh: they would never leave her behind.
"I get sick!" Mallette confesses. It happens just about every time she's about to swim long distance or in a race. Before the big start, she has to run to a quiet corner and throw up.
"That's part of it, that's just nerves," she says. "If I didn't get sick, I'd be worried."
Sharari jokes that during her English Channel crossing, her main concern was her belly.
"I was just waiting for my next feeding," says the team's littlest swimmer.
Among her favourite marathon snacks: chocolate, mint chocolate, chocolate bars.
Sharari's eyes go wide when Mallette explains how the shift change will work, with one swimmer touching the other's feet.
"I do not like feet," she says gravely.
Everyone laughs. Today is the first time the women have all swum together and they are excited about the journey ahead.
For once, the challenge ahead is not about timing or breaking records or pushing their bodies beyond the limit. There will be less pain and more time to joke around, to have fun, to actually enjoy the swim.
They just have to make it to Burlington.
They haven't even started yet, but the team can already see the finish line.
It looks like this: Spencer Smith Park in Burlington packed with hundreds of supporters squinting into the afternoon sun, scanning the lake for the five pink bathing caps flanked by a flotilla of zodiacs and sailboats.
The swimmers will finish as they started: together. They will hear the cheering, the honking horns and the ringing bells from a kilometre out, and this will send a surge of adrenalin through their tired bodies.
They will see their families and friends waving and grinning and jumping up and down on the shore.
They will know that $300,000 is sitting in a bank account, their fundraising mission for Because I am a Girl accomplished.
They will know that they are about to set a record. That they are about to accomplish something, together, that no one else has ever tried to do. And they will swim harder and faster until their feet touch the shore.
"It's going to be," Mallette says, "The best. Feeling. Ever."
Colleen Shields, 61, Georgetown
- crossed Lake Ontario south-north in 1990 and 2006
Nicole Mallette, 47, Hamilton
- crossed Lake Ontario south-north in 1997
Samantha Whiteside, 23, New Hamburg
- crossed Lake Ontario south-north in 2006
Rebekah Boscariol, 18, Markham
- crossed Lake Ontario south-north in 2011
Mona Sharari, 18, Richmond Hill
- crossed the English Channel in 2012
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