“The good news is that I have reached that point where swimming has become
inevitable. It is what I do because I no longer know how to do anything else.”
GOODWIN’S attitude toward the Channel is much
the same.
It’s notoriously difficult. It will require pushing her
body to previously untested limits. There is certainly
no guarantee of success.
But “success” doesn’t necessarily mean wading out of the water
onto French soil. The true achievement is simply attempting the
impossible. Or, as she puts it, being motivated and optimistic and
willing to fail.
— Laura Goodwin blog entry
“It is hard,” she says in a blog post. “But it is kinda fun to put
yourself up against something that is this crazy hard. Something
you are not quite sure you can accomplish.”
Goodwin is a member of North Carolina Masters Swimming
but doesn’t claim to be an elite athlete. The most difficult thing
she’s done in her life, she jokes, is completing grad school.
But she loves to swim, particularly in open water, and her child-hood
38 april 2022
WBM
dream never completely faded.
She began to get serious about an attempt in October 2014,
when she contacted a Channel coach. The timing wasn’t yet right
— her children were 6 and 2 — but that small step moved the
dream from a nebulous “someday” to a concrete “find a day and put
it on a calendar.”
Goodwin’s training became more purposeful. Her research into
what it would take to make the swim became more targeted.
She discovered the requirements to register with a certifying
organization, and the need to book a boat two or three years out.
She targeted 2021 as the year, but the pandemic deferred the
attempt to this year.
With the boat booked and the date on the calendar, training
became all consuming. She is in the pool a minimum of two hours
every weekday. Weekends are spent in long open-water swims,
alternating between a lake in the Raleigh area and Wrightsville
Beach.
At Wrightsville Beach, she’s joined by members of Swim Wilm-ington
NC, a group of open-water enthusiasts who form a big part
of her support team. Her most frequent training partners include
Burak Erdem, Michel Heijnen, Mike Treman, Paul Denison,
Henry Singletary and Bob Gibbons.
The trips to the coast are vital to help get her accustomed to
swimming in cold water. In the winter, ocean temperatures off
the Carolina coast drop to the low 60s — about the same as the
Channel in the summer.
“It’s all about acclimation,” she says. “Wrightsville is perfect for
training.”
It’s important because English Channel swimmers are required
to compete in the same conditions as Capt. Webb faced in 1875.
That means no wetsuits.
“There are a lot of purists out there,” Goodwin says. “Thank
heavens no one is going to make me drink brandy. Webb did
brandy and beef broth.”
She was in Wrightsville Beach the first weekend in December,
when she cleared an important hurdle. The certifying organiza-Waves
break on Goodwin as she enters the water on Jan. 9, 2022. tions require a six-hour qualifying swim in water that is 60F or
ALLISON POTTER