Last night I had the honour of being guest speaker at the Hamilton Aquatic Club's athletic banquet. I was a little nervous but I made it through!
I am so proud of all of HAC swimmers including my daughter Cadence and all my novice swimmers, whether they received awards or not.
I also presented a special award to a swimmer who had tried something new and persevered, to Adam Vowles who did his 1st open water 10k race this summer after being named to the junior world open water prepatory team!
~ congrats Adam and HAC on a great year!
This is my speech:
Hi, thank you! It is quite an honour to be asked to speak here today with so many accomplished and up-and-coming young swimmers
You'll be happy to know that although I enjoy swimming for hours on end, I'm not fond of speaking publicly, even if it is about swimming, so I won't keep you from celebrating your HAC accomplishments for too long…
I honestly have more fear of choking and sinking up here then I ever did in theLake … being a guest speaker really is not an easy task for me, but I like a little challenge every once in awhile...
And since I’m up here challenging myself, I will also dare you to challenge yourselves, to dream big! And to take a risk to reach for that dream! And then do your best to make it come true...
When you start telling your big dreams to others, they may call you Crazy! And maybe you are… but trust me, its okay to be a little crazy, if that’s what it takes to try and make a dream a reality.
I’m sure some of you thought I must be nuts when you heard about my goal to swim 42k acrossLake Ontario
I hoped my years of swimming plus the time spent swimming in Lake Ontario previously along with completing some endurance events in triathlons was a solid base to work from; but I couldn’t know how these would stack up to the longest athletic feat I’d ever even thought about.
The length of time I’d be swimming wasn’t the only challenge I’d face; conditions in theLake could also put me to the test.
I knew about the water temperatures,,, as I had been inLake Ontario
Still, I choose to go for it; so I also wondered if I had waterlogged a few brain cells along the way!
On top of the physical and mental challenges of distance and what Mother Nature could throw at me; were the organizational and financial challenges of aLake crossing.
I had to get 4 boats to accompany me. I had to gather a crew of boat drivers, medical staff, and lifeguards. I needed to feed my crew and figure out how to administer my own nutrition out on the water. There was swimming in the dark of night too. Certainly lots of logistics to work out before I’d even be ready to attempt my goal.
The first thing I did before deciding to follow my swim crossing dream was get on the crew of another aspirant’s crossing the year before, in order to gain some insight into all the organization that went into a Lake Ontario Crossing; as amazingly there aren’t that many others to draw direct experience from.
So even though a leap from 10k 15 years earlier to planning for a 42k solo swim is a little crazy, it was actually a well thought out insanity.
And, ironically I was the “chef” on Miguel’s crew; you’ll understand the humour in that if you’ve ever tasted my cooking, but I said I’d do anything for an opportunity to see what I was contemplating getting myself into with this dream.
And yes with all these big new challenges on my plate, at times, questions about whether I could achieve my goal would swim through my mind.
I think it is only natural, if you dare to dream big, to have moments of doubt…
People may add to these worries by telling you how hard it will be or that your odds of success are poor,,,
But that's what makes it a challenge.
Everyone would do it if it was easy!
So in moments when you question your sanity or fear your chances of success, remind yourself that courage is in the effort, not the outcome and that you are living your dream!
People often think of courage as the absence of fear, but true courage is standing up to your fears and attempting feats in the face of them.
In one newspaper article a few weeks before my swim I was quoted as saying “my biggest fear is of letting people down if I don’t succeed”, and a stranger emailed me because based on this comment, he thought my attitude would lead me to failure.
But in my opinion being unsuccessful in making a dream come true would not be a failure, as long as you have given a substantial, significant effort to reach for your dream.
In other words, I believe it is better to die fighting then to live without trying!
You have to take a risk or else there is absolutely NO chance of making your dream come true!
Not only that, but acknowledging there is a chance of not succeeding is not weakness. Instead this acknowledgement is necessary in order to make a solid plan to combat the risks.
When you experience fear, the goal is not to just banish it immediately, rather, it is to master the fear, by facing it, dealing with it, learning how to handle it and then you can actually put the fear behind you.
The potential for cold water for myLake Ontario
By admitting this early, I was able to make a training plan to reduce the risks that cold water would be my undoing.
It was fun eating anything I wanted, to put on some extra insulation.
But let me tell you, even though I used visualization techniques to image the sun on my back and pretend I was swimming in the tropics, it wasn’t easy or very enjoyable swimming in some pretty damn cold water to work on acclimatizing to it…
But you need to step outside your comfort zone and do what you need to do in order to better the odds of success.
This cold water training was facing my fear.
And the more experience I got in cold water, the more confidence I gained in an area I previously thought of as a weakness for myself.
If I was faced with cold water on crossing day I knew I could say, "I've trained in these conditions, I know I can handle it"
Experiencing my body learning to adapt to cold water was pretty cool (pun intended) and reinforced my belief that you can push your body to do some pretty amazing things!
Although you don't have to worry about hypothermia in the pool, the concepts of doing what you need to do and working on weaknesses, can also be applied to pool swimming or anything else you can dream up -
We all have weakness and fears and we can all work on them.
Don't shy away from doing a something because you aren't good at it, Yet.... because Yet is the key word.
The improvements you can make on your weaker areas can be huge and will make practicing them worth it!
A wise coach of mine once told me "winners have simply formed the habits of doing things others don't like to do."
He was basically telling me to develop good habits early, from the start, such as streamlining off every push-off and finishing right to the wall every length in training...because these good habits will pay off in the long run, on race day, when you may be nervous, you won't have to think about these things because you will just do them naturally!
By forming good training habits, not only are you working on being the best athlete you can be, you are learning how to become the best person you can be.
You are learning to finish what you start, to work hard, and to do your best; and these skills can be used in all aspects of your life, at what ever you do...
The attitudes and habits you develop in training will back you up on when it really matters in Life.
Yes, the day to day training is the hardest part, but it is important to enjoy the whole process of reaching for your dream.
When I decided myLake Ontario
The journey, the path can be just as beautiful as the destination!
You determine what scenery you take in along the way!
You have to go through the process to get where you want to go, you might as well enjoy it as you go!
Every step, every day, every set is part of the journey.
There will be sacrifices, no doubt!
But if you remember that you are living your dream, following your passion, you can enjoy the day to day, and I believe you have a better chance of toughing it out through the hard times by keeping your original reasons for wanting the dream, in mind at all times.
There will be pain, but learn to embrace it! Make it your ally!
Realize that pain from pushing yourself means you are working hard and aggressively pursuing your goals.
So stay positive, even on a bad day, find something good about it.
Overcoming and working through the day to day challenges is the real accomplishment!
The day to day grind is you becoming your best. It’s not one defining moment that makes you; it’s all of the little moments combined.
It's the process of reaching for your dream, the training, surpassing limitations, finding the strength to endure the pain and sacrifices - that is where you grow...
You will fall down at times along the way, but you need the guts to get back up, assess what happened, what went wrong, fix it, learn from it and try again.
It takes strength and courage, as falling down is part of life, but getting back up is living!
For me a winter spent building in 10 to 15 k swims once to twice a week on top of my regular swim training was tough. It was lonely and monotonous. But I always tried to appreciate that I was able to do something I loved, even when I didn’t feel so much like doing it some-days. I kept my love and joy of water in the back of my mind to help get me through.
Helping to raise awareness about the environmental issues facingLake Ontario
I’m embarrassed to admit to this group of speedy swimmers, that 10k takes me 3 hours; so with a full time job, volunteer coaching and my family, the training was a big time commitment.
But with my family helping to pick up my slack at home, (hey I think they were happy I wasn’t preparing the meals anyways) I managed to juggle it. Balancing many commitments is one of those life skills I credit swimming for teaching me.
Then finally open water swim season came to help mix up the scenery and add some variables to my long training days. But open water brought other issues:
For safety, swimming inLake Ontario
This schedule was working well until I got these chicken pox like bumps from being in this small lake. I learned these were caused by parasites found in smaller bodies of water that had burrowed under my skin and then died, leaving me with itchy red bumps all over. Yuck!
Needless to say, I moved all my open water training intoLake Ontario
I connected with a local kayak club and over the summer, on 5 different occasions, kayakers who were accompanying me got tipped by the waves, really getting them in theLake with me and providing me with some giggles too.
Also a bunch of my crew and my daughter Cadence went swimming inLake Ontario
I have some great memories about this journey, from before I even left the shore in Port Dalhousie.
Finally, I will skip ahead and take just a few more minutes to share with you a true story about the power of attitude:
After countless hours of being positive in the water, through darkness, chop and aches that started earlier into the swim then I had hoped,… with about 1500m left (less then 4% of the total distance to go) I hit a strong current which washed away my positive attitude.
The shore, my goal, was clearly in sight, but it wasn’t getting closer, in fact I was certain I was sometimes going backwards…
The negative thoughts crashed in on me: “I’m not strong enough; I’m too tired to battle this”.
This attitude had me thinking that trying to finish through the current was “useless torture”
I almost threw in the towel.
In fact, I closed my eyes to let myself go to sleep, wanting to just be pulled from the water.
But thankfully my mind wouldn’t shut-off or shut -up:
“Mel you are fighting a current, not a terminal illness;
No one’s ever physically abused you, except yourself;
That’s right, YOU choose this challenge,
How lucky are you that this is the hardest thing you’ve ever encountered"
…these thoughts made the negative ones seem so stupid…
By now, all the pacers had jumped in the water with me to keep me awake.
My pacers who included my good friends and my husband, were around me and I let myself believe they were in there supporting me because they believed I still had the strength to keep going…
My amazing team helped pull me out of my own mental darkness and started to bring my positive attitude back.
They stuffed mini Reese chocolate peanut butter cups in my mouth. When in a swim workout do you ever get to pig out on your favorite food?... Sweet! I felt more positive…
I was told they could hear the people cheering for me on shore… more positive still…
I had told people that I estimated it would take me 15-21 hours...I looked at the sky, the sun hadn't set, so although I didn’t know the time, I knew I wasn’t swimming beyond the upper time limits of what I had chosen to put myself through.
With this awareness and a rebuilt positive attitude I made a conscious decision to try for at least that long.
I wasn't certain if I could make enough forward progress to make it to shore in the current, but I was positive I could keep trying!
And try I did, I dug deep within myself, I thought of all the positive outcomes already achieved on my journey, all the support and generosity I had been shown; and used it all, to push on!
I eventually saw the people on shore; then it was shallow enough to see the bottom of theLake and finally, after an incredible and long 18 hour journey across Lake Ontario
A rock has never felt so amazing or overwhelming, but the rock just physically embodied the whole process of getting to it.
You all can and should feels this someday, so Dream Big, take the risk, work on your weaknesses, push yourself through your own personal cold waters, enjoy the process, fight off the negative and find the positives, give it your all and keep reaching for your Rock!!
I am so proud of all of HAC swimmers including my daughter Cadence and all my novice swimmers, whether they received awards or not.
I also presented a special award to a swimmer who had tried something new and persevered, to Adam Vowles who did his 1st open water 10k race this summer after being named to the junior world open water prepatory team!
~ congrats Adam and HAC on a great year!
This is my speech:
Hi, thank you! It is quite an honour to be asked to speak here today with so many accomplished and up-and-coming young swimmers
You'll be happy to know that although I enjoy swimming for hours on end, I'm not fond of speaking publicly, even if it is about swimming, so I won't keep you from celebrating your HAC accomplishments for too long…
I honestly have more fear of choking and sinking up here then I ever did in the
And since I’m up here challenging myself, I will also dare you to challenge yourselves, to dream big! And to take a risk to reach for that dream! And then do your best to make it come true...
When you start telling your big dreams to others, they may call you Crazy! And maybe you are… but trust me, its okay to be a little crazy, if that’s what it takes to try and make a dream a reality.
I’m sure some of you thought I must be nuts when you heard about my goal to swim 42k across
I hoped my years of swimming plus the time spent swimming in Lake Ontario previously along with completing some endurance events in triathlons was a solid base to work from; but I couldn’t know how these would stack up to the longest athletic feat I’d ever even thought about.
The length of time I’d be swimming wasn’t the only challenge I’d face; conditions in the
I knew about the water temperatures,,, as I had been in
Still, I choose to go for it; so I also wondered if I had waterlogged a few brain cells along the way!
On top of the physical and mental challenges of distance and what Mother Nature could throw at me; were the organizational and financial challenges of a
I had to get 4 boats to accompany me. I had to gather a crew of boat drivers, medical staff, and lifeguards. I needed to feed my crew and figure out how to administer my own nutrition out on the water. There was swimming in the dark of night too. Certainly lots of logistics to work out before I’d even be ready to attempt my goal.
The first thing I did before deciding to follow my swim crossing dream was get on the crew of another aspirant’s crossing the year before, in order to gain some insight into all the organization that went into a Lake Ontario Crossing; as amazingly there aren’t that many others to draw direct experience from.
So even though a leap from 10k 15 years earlier to planning for a 42k solo swim is a little crazy, it was actually a well thought out insanity.
And, ironically I was the “chef” on Miguel’s crew; you’ll understand the humour in that if you’ve ever tasted my cooking, but I said I’d do anything for an opportunity to see what I was contemplating getting myself into with this dream.
And yes with all these big new challenges on my plate, at times, questions about whether I could achieve my goal would swim through my mind.
I think it is only natural, if you dare to dream big, to have moments of doubt…
People may add to these worries by telling you how hard it will be or that your odds of success are poor,,,
But that's what makes it a challenge.
Everyone would do it if it was easy!
So in moments when you question your sanity or fear your chances of success, remind yourself that courage is in the effort, not the outcome and that you are living your dream!
People often think of courage as the absence of fear, but true courage is standing up to your fears and attempting feats in the face of them.
In one newspaper article a few weeks before my swim I was quoted as saying “my biggest fear is of letting people down if I don’t succeed”, and a stranger emailed me because based on this comment, he thought my attitude would lead me to failure.
But in my opinion being unsuccessful in making a dream come true would not be a failure, as long as you have given a substantial, significant effort to reach for your dream.
In other words, I believe it is better to die fighting then to live without trying!
You have to take a risk or else there is absolutely NO chance of making your dream come true!
Not only that, but acknowledging there is a chance of not succeeding is not weakness. Instead this acknowledgement is necessary in order to make a solid plan to combat the risks.
When you experience fear, the goal is not to just banish it immediately, rather, it is to master the fear, by facing it, dealing with it, learning how to handle it and then you can actually put the fear behind you.
The potential for cold water for my
By admitting this early, I was able to make a training plan to reduce the risks that cold water would be my undoing.
It was fun eating anything I wanted, to put on some extra insulation.
But let me tell you, even though I used visualization techniques to image the sun on my back and pretend I was swimming in the tropics, it wasn’t easy or very enjoyable swimming in some pretty damn cold water to work on acclimatizing to it…
But you need to step outside your comfort zone and do what you need to do in order to better the odds of success.
This cold water training was facing my fear.
And the more experience I got in cold water, the more confidence I gained in an area I previously thought of as a weakness for myself.
If I was faced with cold water on crossing day I knew I could say, "I've trained in these conditions, I know I can handle it"
Experiencing my body learning to adapt to cold water was pretty cool (pun intended) and reinforced my belief that you can push your body to do some pretty amazing things!
Although you don't have to worry about hypothermia in the pool, the concepts of doing what you need to do and working on weaknesses, can also be applied to pool swimming or anything else you can dream up -
We all have weakness and fears and we can all work on them.
Don't shy away from doing a something because you aren't good at it, Yet.... because Yet is the key word.
The improvements you can make on your weaker areas can be huge and will make practicing them worth it!
A wise coach of mine once told me "winners have simply formed the habits of doing things others don't like to do."
He was basically telling me to develop good habits early, from the start, such as streamlining off every push-off and finishing right to the wall every length in training...because these good habits will pay off in the long run, on race day, when you may be nervous, you won't have to think about these things because you will just do them naturally!
By forming good training habits, not only are you working on being the best athlete you can be, you are learning how to become the best person you can be.
You are learning to finish what you start, to work hard, and to do your best; and these skills can be used in all aspects of your life, at what ever you do...
The attitudes and habits you develop in training will back you up on when it really matters in Life.
Yes, the day to day training is the hardest part, but it is important to enjoy the whole process of reaching for your dream.
When I decided my
The journey, the path can be just as beautiful as the destination!
You determine what scenery you take in along the way!
You have to go through the process to get where you want to go, you might as well enjoy it as you go!
Every step, every day, every set is part of the journey.
There will be sacrifices, no doubt!
But if you remember that you are living your dream, following your passion, you can enjoy the day to day, and I believe you have a better chance of toughing it out through the hard times by keeping your original reasons for wanting the dream, in mind at all times.
There will be pain, but learn to embrace it! Make it your ally!
Realize that pain from pushing yourself means you are working hard and aggressively pursuing your goals.
So stay positive, even on a bad day, find something good about it.
Overcoming and working through the day to day challenges is the real accomplishment!
The day to day grind is you becoming your best. It’s not one defining moment that makes you; it’s all of the little moments combined.
It's the process of reaching for your dream, the training, surpassing limitations, finding the strength to endure the pain and sacrifices - that is where you grow...
You will fall down at times along the way, but you need the guts to get back up, assess what happened, what went wrong, fix it, learn from it and try again.
It takes strength and courage, as falling down is part of life, but getting back up is living!
For me a winter spent building in 10 to 15 k swims once to twice a week on top of my regular swim training was tough. It was lonely and monotonous. But I always tried to appreciate that I was able to do something I loved, even when I didn’t feel so much like doing it some-days. I kept my love and joy of water in the back of my mind to help get me through.
Helping to raise awareness about the environmental issues facing
I’m embarrassed to admit to this group of speedy swimmers, that 10k takes me 3 hours; so with a full time job, volunteer coaching and my family, the training was a big time commitment.
But with my family helping to pick up my slack at home, (hey I think they were happy I wasn’t preparing the meals anyways) I managed to juggle it. Balancing many commitments is one of those life skills I credit swimming for teaching me.
Then finally open water swim season came to help mix up the scenery and add some variables to my long training days. But open water brought other issues:
For safety, swimming in
This schedule was working well until I got these chicken pox like bumps from being in this small lake. I learned these were caused by parasites found in smaller bodies of water that had burrowed under my skin and then died, leaving me with itchy red bumps all over. Yuck!
Needless to say, I moved all my open water training into
I connected with a local kayak club and over the summer, on 5 different occasions, kayakers who were accompanying me got tipped by the waves, really getting them in the
Also a bunch of my crew and my daughter Cadence went swimming in
I have some great memories about this journey, from before I even left the shore in Port Dalhousie.
Finally, I will skip ahead and take just a few more minutes to share with you a true story about the power of attitude:
After countless hours of being positive in the water, through darkness, chop and aches that started earlier into the swim then I had hoped,… with about 1500m left (less then 4% of the total distance to go) I hit a strong current which washed away my positive attitude.
The shore, my goal, was clearly in sight, but it wasn’t getting closer, in fact I was certain I was sometimes going backwards…
The negative thoughts crashed in on me: “I’m not strong enough; I’m too tired to battle this”.
This attitude had me thinking that trying to finish through the current was “useless torture”
I almost threw in the towel.
In fact, I closed my eyes to let myself go to sleep, wanting to just be pulled from the water.
But thankfully my mind wouldn’t shut-off or shut -up:
“Mel you are fighting a current, not a terminal illness;
No one’s ever physically abused you, except yourself;
That’s right, YOU choose this challenge,
How lucky are you that this is the hardest thing you’ve ever encountered"
…these thoughts made the negative ones seem so stupid…
By now, all the pacers had jumped in the water with me to keep me awake.
My pacers who included my good friends and my husband, were around me and I let myself believe they were in there supporting me because they believed I still had the strength to keep going…
My amazing team helped pull me out of my own mental darkness and started to bring my positive attitude back.
They stuffed mini Reese chocolate peanut butter cups in my mouth. When in a swim workout do you ever get to pig out on your favorite food?... Sweet! I felt more positive…
I was told they could hear the people cheering for me on shore… more positive still…
I had told people that I estimated it would take me 15-21 hours...I looked at the sky, the sun hadn't set, so although I didn’t know the time, I knew I wasn’t swimming beyond the upper time limits of what I had chosen to put myself through.
With this awareness and a rebuilt positive attitude I made a conscious decision to try for at least that long.
I wasn't certain if I could make enough forward progress to make it to shore in the current, but I was positive I could keep trying!
And try I did, I dug deep within myself, I thought of all the positive outcomes already achieved on my journey, all the support and generosity I had been shown; and used it all, to push on!
I eventually saw the people on shore; then it was shallow enough to see the bottom of the
A rock has never felt so amazing or overwhelming, but the rock just physically embodied the whole process of getting to it.
You all can and should feels this someday, so Dream Big, take the risk, work on your weaknesses, push yourself through your own personal cold waters, enjoy the process, fight off the negative and find the positives, give it your all and keep reaching for your Rock!!
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