Swimming the English Channel: A local woman's journey

From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dunn. The thing about super endurance athletes is that outside of their area of competition, they tend to look just like the rest of us. They don't tower above like basketball players or block out the sun like football players. No, they just look like everyday people. And someone like Robin Mayall, an IT professional at the city of Eugene, looks like, well, someone who runs a department at the city. But she is decidedly not like the rest of us. No, Mayall is a super endurance athlete, which she proved by braving the icy waters of the North Atlantic to try and swim the English Channel. Today on the show, you'll meet Mayall and hear about her motivation, training, and mental preparation to undertake one of the biggest challenges in swimming. That's next on Oregon on the Record. Robin Mayall, who is the director of information services at the City of Eugene and long distance swimmer. Robin, it's so great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Michael. Yeah. Nice to meet you. Yeah. Meet you virtually. Virtually. Are you a native Eugenian or did you move here?

Yeah, I actually mostly grew up in Jacksonville, Oregon, a

small town in southern Oregon. But I've lived a few other places as well. Okay. What do you do for the city?

I'm the director of their information services division, which basically runs the technology underpinning all the city's services, the networks and systems that kind of help run everything that the city does.

Yeah. And as exciting as that is, that's not. It's not the reason why I wanted to talk to you. It's this amazing challenge that you set up for yourself that people have certainly heard about, but very few people get to talk to someone or listen to someone who's tried it. Talk about what you tried to do swimming the English Channel.

Yeah. That's kind of like a big, uh, crazy thing to think about doing. Um, I can go back to kind of the origins of wanting to do it. If that's interesting. Yeah,

absolutely.

I found a book when I was about 10 years old, um, with a picture of this young woman striding down a beach with these weird looking, almost like a aviator goggles on her face. Um, And her name was Trudy Ederle, and she was the first woman to swim the English Channel. Wow. And I was just really captivated because just even what does that mean? What does it mean to swim the English Channel? And what did it mean to her to be the first woman to have done that? And that image just really captivated me. And so as somebody who loves to swim, that stuck with me, obviously, for my whole life till now.

When did you... Or when did the idea of doing something really monumentous like swimming the English Channel, when did it switch from kind of, oh, that image as a kid to kind of a dream to, no, I'm actually going to, you know, point towards that and try it?

I would say in the pandemic, you know, the pandemic for a lot of us was not necessarily full of pleasant memories. It was definitely some very hard times. But I think it also had some gifts hidden in there. And for me, the channel was one of them. I always had it on the back burner in my head. I've done other really