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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. 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 to 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.
Robin, it’s so great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Robin Mayall: Thanks, Michael.
Dunne: Yeah.
Mayall: Nice to meet you.
Dunne: Yeah, meet you virtually.
Mayall: Virtually.
Dunne: Are you a native Eugenian, or did you move here?
Mayall: 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.
Dunne: OK, what do you do for the city?
Mayall: 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 help run everything the city does.
Dunne: Yeah, and as exciting as that is, that’s not the reason I wanted to talk to you. It’s this amazing challenge you set up for yourself. People have certainly heard about it, but very few people get to talk to, or listen to, someone who has tried it: swimming the English Channel.
Mayall: Yeah, that’s kind of a big, crazy thing to think about doing. I can go back to the origins of wanting to do it, if that’s interesting.
Dunne: Yeah, absolutely.
Mayall: I found a book when I was about 10 years old with a picture of this young woman striding down a beach with these weird-looking, almost aviator goggles on her face. Her name was Trudy Ederle, and she was the first woman to swim the English Channel.
Dunne: Wow!
Mayall: And I was just really captivated. What does that even 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? That image really captivated me. And as somebody who loves to swim, it stuck with me, obviously, my whole life until now.
Dunne: When did the idea of doing something really monumental like swimming the English Channel switch from that image you had as a kid, to a dream, to “No, I’m actually going to point toward that and try it”?
Mayall: I would say in the pandemic. The pandemic, for a lot of us, was not necessarily full of pleasant memories. There were 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 long-distance stuff, like Ironman triathlons and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, kind of big, crazy things. But I always had the channel on a back list in my mind of “Oh, I could never do that because it’s too cold.” You have to swim without a wetsuit. You’re not allowed to wear one, and the water is 60 degrees, which is about like jumping into Crater Lake on a sunny day, if you’ve ever done that, or some of our other mountain lakes. It’s cold.
Dunne: Yeah.
Mayall: And you have to be in that for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours. So I just told myself this story that I couldn’t do it because it was too cold. Then in COVID, when everything shut down, I found myself swimming at the lake, and that was my only body of water to swim in. So I just kept swimming there as it got colder and colder, and I realized I can actually swim in cold water. It’s a thing you can acclimate to, that you can get used to. And that unlocked this door in my mind: Well, maybe I could swim this channel. So that was what created the possibility, the space for the possibility, in my mind.
Dunne: OK. If you’re just joining us, we’re talking with Robin Mayall. She’s a Eugenian, works at the city of Eugene and recently tried to swim the English Channel. You are an endurance athlete. Doing things like Ironman is a feat most people will never accomplish, and certainly climbing Kilimanjaro, over 20,000 feet. You’ve got the chops to do this sort of thing. But as I understand it, the English Channel, as you just brought up, brings its own set of challenges. Obviously, it’s a long way to swim, and for people who haven’t done endurance swimming, even a couple of miles is grueling. And also, as you mentioned, it’s extremely cold. And then there are the currents and all these other things. So talk about your specific training to get ready for this sort of epic endeavor.
Mayall: Yeah. One of the first things I had to answer for myself was whether I could swim longer than I had before. I had done some longer swims. I had done the National Masters 10K Open Water Swimming Championships, so that’s a three-hour swim, but it’s not super long. I had some endurance chops in open-water swimming, but in lakes and more controlled bodies of water. So I had to first answer the question for myself: Could I do the thing that would let me know if I could do this? For me, that solidified as doing what’s called an English Channel qualifier. That means you have to swim six hours in water under 60 degrees, and you have to do that to even attempt to swim the English Channel. The qualifier is a thing in itself.
Dunne: Yeah, yeah.
Mayall: So I embarked on that first. I signed up with a group called the King Swimmers, which is coached by a man named Kevin Murphy, who has swum the channel more than any other man, 34 times. Not more than any other woman, because a woman has swum it more than that, but they are called the King and the Queen of the English Channel. So he has, of course, a lot of experience doing this, and he now coaches swimmers. I went over to Spain, where he was running a swim camp in water under 60 degrees, and I spent a week there training under him and his coaches, learning the ins and outs of ocean swimming and open-water swimming in currents and other conditions, and jellyfish and all the fun things you encounter in the channel. And I did complete a six-hour channel qualifier. That gave me permission, I guess, or an understanding of myself that I could then train up from there. Like, I could do that. I can do this. That was April 2024, and in my mind, it kicked off a two-and-a-half-year training plan for the channel itself.
Dunne: In addition to getting your cardiovascular system ready for such a challenge, and I don’t even know how to ask this question, how do you get your body ready for 60 degrees for over 10 hours? Many people may not know this, but even if you’re swimming in 80-degree water, that water is still colder than your core body temperature. You’re going to get cold no matter what if you stay in the water long enough. How did you prepare for that? Is that really more of a mental challenge?
Mayall: It is definitely both a mental and physical challenge. One of the things I learned is the human body is an amazing, adaptable thing. If you get in cold water and swim in cold water, you can increase the time you can swim in cold water. You can increase the amount of cold you can endure, and you can do that over time. You can sort of sensitize yourself, and your body will actually move things around. It’ll develop more of what’s called brown fat around your internal organs to protect them from hypothermia. You’ll get mentally sensitized to the sensations of cold, and you’ll be able to understand when your body is entering more of a hypothermic state. So one of the things I did is what cold-water swimmers call “swimming the thermometer down.” That means you swim in the summer, and you just keep swimming into the fall as the lakes and the days get colder, and you keep swimming into the winter, and you swim shorter amounts of time. I swam in Dexter Lake when it was 41 degrees, and I only swam for 20 minutes. Then I got out and shook violently for about half an hour in my car and drank hot tea. That’s all adapting your body for this, and your mind, because it’s also a mind game. Cold is really unpleasant. People will tell me, “Oh, I could never do that. That kind of cold water hurts my skin,” and I’m like, “Yes, yes, it does. It is extremely painful.” So it’s developing that mental fortitude and the physical adaptations. And I have a cold tub in my backyard that I just sit in and freeze, and my family laughs at me. So I did a lot of different things to prepare myself for swimming the channel, and cold adaptation was one of them.
Dunne: Did you have folks going over to England with you? Tell me about those sorts of preparations, because I guess maybe you could just jump in the water and start swimming, but it’s probably a lot more complex than that, isn’t it?
Mayall: Well, you actually can’t jump in the water and just start swimming. Channel swimming is a logistically difficult thing. It is also regulated, in a manner of speaking. And to my knowledge, no one has ever swum the channel unaccompanied by a boat and lived, although people have, in fact, tried.
Dunne: OK.
Mayall: The currents in the channel are extremely strong. They’re guided by the tides, and the tidal currents can sweep you right past the coast of France if you’re not careful. You’re not even swimming in a straight line. You’re being swept up the channel by the tides in one direction and down the channel in the other direction, and you’re reliant on a boat pilot to navigate you through those currents and winds and waves and everything the channel throws at you, and to land you on a point in France. So one of the first things you do is book a boat and a pilot. There are only 12 boats and pilots certified to cross the channel. By the way, it’s also the busiest shipping lane in the world, so there are giant container ships and ferries and cruise ships. If you were out there alone, you would just be run over by a ship. The channel pilots, of course, have all the modern communications and GPS on board.
Dunne: What was it like the moment right before you jumped in?
Mayall: Well, I almost can’t talk about that without talking about the lead-up, because the channel has really volatile weather. It’s always been like that, but climate change is actually making it more changeable, more volatile, as you might imagine. When swimmers are waiting for their chance to go in Dover, where the swims start, people call that “riding the Dover coaster,” because your emotions go up and down. You look at the tides and the weather and the winds relentlessly, and you’re hoping for a long enough window where the winds are calm enough. Pilots will typically take out swimmers in force 1, 2 and 3 on the Beaufort wind scale, sometimes force 4, because anything above that just drives too much wind and currents and waves, and it just isn’t swimmable. You generally can’t swim fast enough to overcome it.
Mayall: So by the time it came time to jump off the boat, I was ecstatic because I was going to get to go. Even 24 hours before that, I did not know if I was going to get to go. I was nervous, of course, but also just really happy and excited. I felt like my training had led me to this moment. I felt really prepared. My husband and my youngest daughter were my crew, and they were amazing.
Dunne: So what was it like? Obviously, it’s a long, arduous process, and I realize you’re with a boat, and I know you’ve done this for many years, but it must feel somewhat isolating. It’s just you and the sea.
Mayall: Yeah, and I think that’s almost the beautiful thing about it. Swimming the English Channel, it really is you, a swimsuit, goggles, a cap, the ocean and the boat next to you. That is all it is. You get the same thing the first person got. I got the same thing to cross it as Trudy, my hero from 100 years ago, the first woman who swam the channel. You feel very small in a big, vast body of water, so it’s nerve-wracking. And also, my day was not going to be perfect. It was already windy when I started, and it was supposed to calm down. So I knew I was not going to have an easy day. I knew it wasn’t going to be a calm day, a nice day, a perfect day. My pilot did say, “It’s going to be bumpy, but it’ll flatten out.” So when I started out, there were waves and wind, and I already knew this was just going to really test me all the way. But I was also just really having fun. At one point, I hollered up to my crew, “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m actually swimming the English Channel.”
Dunne: But you did fall ill, right? What happened?
Mayall: Yeah. So a couple of hours after that, the wind had really started to pick up, much more than anticipated, and night fell. The moon came out. I was swimming into the night, the wind and the waves picked up, and it got really stormy. It actually turned into force 5 and 6 conditions, which people typically don’t swim in, for good reasons. At any point, if my pilot felt I wasn’t making progress, he could have just pulled me out. They have the discretion to say, “You’re not going to be able to swim against this. You can’t do this.” I think it’s also worth mentioning there were a lot of jellyfish. I think they had blown in on the storm, and right about three strokes into that sprint, I hit a jellyfish that really lit me up like a blowtorch. So I had a lot going on emotionally as I started swimming harder, knowing that if I couldn’t swim hard enough, my pilot was going to pull me, and I’m done, because you have to outswim the storm, and the storm was considerable.
Then they called out “last feed,” which is a really exciting moment, because that means you’re really close to France. I looked up, and there was a cliff in front of me. I was at France. There were lights. There was shore. There was cliff. I had done it, because last feed means you’re going into the beach. You’ve done it. I was so happy and so ecstatic. I was just like, “This is it. All I’ve got to do is cruise into the beach.”
And the adrenaline started bleeding away, all those hormones in your body that keep you going through something kind of crazy. I started noticing I was coughing as I swam, and I was clearing my throat every few minutes. I thought, “Well, of course. You just swam through wind and waves. You probably swallowed a ton of seawater. Your mouth is all salty. You inhaled water, of course.” And when your body is in cold water, especially when you’re exerting yourself very hard, it will push fluids inward toward your core. It’ll take blood out of your extremities and conserve it toward your core, and that pressure pushes fluids into your lungs, and your lungs start filling up with fluid and blood. As that dawned on me in horror, it started coming over my mind: “Oh, this might be what I have.” And of course I went through all the stages: denial, bargaining. “Of course not. It’s just a few hundred more yards, and you can go into shore, and you’ll make this, Robin. You can just tough it out.” But I had made a promise to my family, because I’m really capable of letting my brain drive my body right off a cliff and not knowing how much trouble I’m in until I’m really past that point. I promised my family that if I thought something was wrong, I would stop. My pilot hadn’t stopped me. I was still swimming. My family hadn’t stopped me, and they’re attuned to me. But I knew in my heart that I was in the beginning stages of something that could be deadly. I also knew I could make it to shore, but I didn’t know if I’d make it back to the boat and back to England alive. And that was tough.
Dunne: I bet. I can only imagine. I’ve done some mountaineering, and I’ve interviewed someone who climbed Everest. The hardest thing in the world to do is turn around within a few hundred yards of the summit, and that takes real bravery. To be perfectly honest, it takes knowing yourself enough to say, “OK, I made that promise, and I’m going to keep it.” Because, to be perfectly honest, I think a lot of other athletes would have pushed through, and that could have netted disastrous results.
Mayall: Yeah, and that’s a really good analogy and a really good point, because 70% of the people who die on Everest have already summited. They die on the descent because they summited too late, in too bad weather, in too bad a condition, and they pushed on. I have lost a friend that way. I’ve lost other friends. I’ve done a lot of extreme sports, skydiving and scuba diving and other things, and I’ve lost friends who kept their eye on the goal and not on themselves. I can tell you all of that went through my mind, all those losses. And I just decided not to be one of them. If there’s anything I take away from these experiences, I hope it gives other people permission to think of the goal as having done something amazing and surviving, and not necessarily that little thing that says, “Yeah, I went that last few yards.”
Dunne: Well, I will say, Robin, that as far as I’m concerned, and I think as far as all of my listeners are concerned, you are without a doubt an English Channel swimmer. It’s amazing that you got that far. And like I said before, I think it shows true courage to stick to the promise that you did. Truly amazing. We’re out of time, but I could listen to you all day, because I think what you did is pretty amazing. Robin Mayall works at the city of Eugene, but she is also an incredible long-distance athlete and swimmer. Robin, thank you so much for talking with us.
Mayall: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Monday on the show, we talk with a longtime photojournalist from The Register-Guard who’s leaving the paper after a lifetime in local newspapers. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
