Taking it for Granted

What do you take for granted?

Your health?  Your partner?  Your job, education, good looks, family?

I take my training buddy for granted.  Since 2022 when we first aspired to tackle ultra marathon swims, my training buddy has been by my side, week after week, in the water, on the water or beside the water.  Now he has a battle beyond testing his endurance swimming limits.  His wife, Annette, has Huntington’s Disease.  Like the partners of many cancer patients, he has no magic wand that will make her better, no sorcery that could reverse the cruel fate that will befall them both and no words that will ease the heartbreak.  Perhaps as an outlet for all that frustration or a tribute to her courage, he is continuing with his long-held dream to swim the English Channel.  Solo.

We knew it in 2019.  We were on our way back from France.  The crew asked our successful English Channel relay team, who will come back for a solo crossing?  There was never a doubt who it would be!  All of us pointed at swim buddy, Grant.

Grant knew then that Annette carried the HD gene but no medical specialists, least of all us, could have known that “Harry” (our effort at attribution theory helping all of us identify behaviours and symptoms of the disease) would choose this year to manifest his presence so overtly that denial as a coping methodology was as blown out of the water as Grant’s solo swim crossing might be.

But.  As Captain Matthew Webb once said “Nothing great is easy!”.

My best efforts to wean Grant away from my watery side and into the company of more accomplished swimming buddies, have met with considerable protest.  Instead, I find myself dragged along for the journey.  Literally.  I too have committed to attempt to swim to France in September 2026!

Not from Dover but from Jersey.  The swim shares many characteristics with its infamous English Channel swim counterpart, like a 6 hour cold water qualification swim in water less than 16 degrees.  It should, however, be mercifully shorter.  A mere 14 nautical miles or 22.5km in a straight line as opposed to 34km.  Not that anyone can swim in a straight line, courtesy of the same unpredictable tides particularly close to the French coast.  The average distance is 15-18 nautical miles (or up to 33km) and the average solo swimmer takes 7.5 to 10 hours.  I am a decidedly average swimmer in the Australian sense (=poor) as opposed to the mathematical one.  Much less popular than its globally famous counterpart, about a dozen swimmers a year successfully complete the challenge.  Organised and sanctioned by the Jersey Long Distance Swimming Club, from all I can see, if I were to get the chance to start and complete the swim, I could become only the second Australian woman to have done so!

Needless to say, Grant will be by my side on the support boat.  And I will be doing the same for him a fortnight or so later.  Grant will be raising money for Huntington’s Australia.  Jackie Cobell is the only identifiable channel swimmer that has raised money to support Huntington’s.  Until as recently as the summer swim season just passed, Jackie was the longstanding holder of the bizarrely inspirational accolade of being the slowest ever successful channel swimmer.  Jackie thought she would swim 21 miles (34km) but swam 65 miles (105km) in 28 hours and 44 minutes.  Let’s hope Grant can get the job done a tiny bit quicker.

As with many of my other swims, I am raising money for Can Too.  When times are tough (as they most certainly will be), it always helps to believe in achieving something bigger.  For me, that’s being part of an extraordinary community that has not only challenged thousands of individuals to do the thing which they think they cannot but, along the way, to have raised over $35 million for cancer research.  My fellow Can Tooers won’t take anything for granted and neither will I.