Inspired by a childhood hero, Eugene woman prepares to swim the English Channel

The library in Jacksonville, Oregon, wasn’t much bigger than Robin Mayall’s living room. 

Growing up in the southern Oregon town of 2,000, Mayall loved to do two things: read and swim. So it wasn’t surprising that, as she wandered the library at age 10, a photograph in one book caught her eye. 

A young woman in the black-and-white picture confidently strode down a beach wearing a pair of funny-looking goggles and a swimsuit. Her name was Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, and she was about to become the first woman to swim the English Channel. 

“She just looked like she was going to do something amazing,” Mayall said. “It was the photo that captured me.” 

Fifty years after she first saw that photograph — and almost exactly a century after Ederle’s record-breaking Aug. 6, 1926, swim — Mayall is preparing to cross the same waters. 

In August, the 60-year-old Eugene resident and director of the city’s Information Services Department will attempt to swim the English Channel, the cold, turbulent 21-mile waterway between southern England and northern France. 

If successful, Mayall — a former competitive swimmer, triathlete and serial skydiver — will join a small group of Oregonians who have completed what she described as the “Mount Everest” of long-distance, open-water swims. 

“This is the year I get to do it,” she said.

A dream that never disappeared

Mayall has spent her entire life in the water, from the lakes of Oregon as a little girl to the University of Oregon’s swimming pool as a college athlete. 

She took her first swim lesson at 2½ years old. Afterward, she refused to take off her swim cap and insisted her mom wear one while cooking dinner so they could pretend they were still in the water.

“I just always loved it,” she said. “My parents would tell you they couldn’t drag me out of any body of water without kicking and screaming going on.”

Mayall sometimes wonders if she was a sea creature in a past life. Ask her, and she can rattle off example after example of sea life approaching her in the wild — whales, dolphins, sharks, seals and porpoises. 

But it took years for her to realize distance, not speed, was her strength. Sprint sports weren’t her childhood forte. She recalled an early swim coach telling her she was slow and unathletic. 

“It was only in later life that I came to realize I’m not slow,” Mayall said. “I swim the same speed. I don’t get any faster, but I don’t get any slower.”

Case in point: Mayall coached the Downtown Athletic Club’s masters team between 2003 and 2014 and went to the state championships one year. There, she won the 1,500-meter, finished second in the 1,000, and third in the 500.

Then came a 5K open-water swim. Then a 10K. Mayall said she came in No. 20 in the national open water masters championships, including all age groups, in her 50s. 

Along the way, Mayall dabbled in other feats of endurance, finishing Ironman competitions, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and completing 700 skydives. 

Crossing the English Channel was always in the back of Mayall’s mind. But she feared the water’s cold temperature, which ranges from 41 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter to the low 60s in August. 

“I thought, ‘Well, I know I can swim, but I don’t think I could swim in that cold,’” Mayall said. “Sometimes you just have a little dream you put to the side.”

But during the pandemic all the swimming pools closed, and Mayall kept swimming in Dexter Reservoir — even after summer turned to fall, and fall turned to winter. The water got colder and colder, until, by 2021, her body had adapted.

“The pandemic had a lot of nightmares for us, and it kind of had some gifts,” she said. “The gift to me was that I can swim in cold water.”

A 2022 auto accident that totaled Mayall’s Volkswagen Jetta and left her “pretty banged up” set back her progress. But she recalled telling her physical therapist: “‘I have this crazy idea of swimming 21 miles across some of the worst waters in the world.’” 

He responded: “‘OK then. Let’s do this thing.’”

The grind begins

Imagine swimming 21 miles without stopping wearing nothing but a swimsuit, cap and goggles.

Now imagine swimming through one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, with more than 500 container ships, cruises and ferries per day sharing the same water. 

Now imagine being pushed miles off course by the English Channel’s powerful tides, and facing strong winds and rough seas capable of delaying attempts for days or forcing swimmers to abandon the crossing. 

Those are just a few pieces of what Mayall calls the channel’s “logistical puzzle.” This year’s fastest successful crossing took about 10 hours. The slowest took 19. 

In 2023, Mayall began training with coach Kevin Murphy, nicknamed the King of the English Channel after completing 34 crossings. (Australian swimmer Chloë McCardel holds the overall record with 44 successful crossings.) 

As part of Murphy’s training camp in Spain, Mayall had to complete a six-hour open-water swim to prove she was made of “tough enough stuff” to swim the channel. In April 2024, she did.

“He’s like, ‘You can do this. You need to book a boat and a pilot,’” she said. “That was sort of the official kickoff.”

Planning began early. The channel is swimmable for only about four months each year because of water temperatures and weather, and only about a dozen boats and pilots are certified to accompany swimmers across it.

Swimmers reserve a pilot, boat and a multi-day tide window. Each day, weather permitting, pilots take one swimmer after another until everyone in the group — usually four people — has either crossed, or run out of time. 

Due to weather, it often doesn’t go that smoothly, Mayall said. The uncertainty of not knowing when you’ll be cleared to swim is known among channel swimmers as the “Dover coaster.” (The swims begin in Dover, England.)

“Maybe it’ll be noon, or maybe it’ll be two in the morning, or maybe it’ll be six o’clock at night,” Mayall said. “Maybe you’ll land in the night, and maybe you won’t land at all. So you’re investing a lot in a big maybe.”

Because so much of the crossing is beyond her control, Mayall became laser-focused on the things she could control: her training and preparation.

Mayall estimates the swim will take her about 15 hours if all goes well. To prepare, she’s swimming roughly 35 kilometers — the length of the channel — every week.

Last week, she completed an overnight swim in San Francisco Bay. In June, she swam for 10 hours in eastern Oregon. Last year, she trained in 23 different lakes. 

Sometimes, by the end of her swims, a crowd of five or six people has gathered to watch her. 

“There’s days when I’ve gone for a two-hour lunch swim, come back and work, and then work a couple hours extra to make up for that, and then go and swim till 8:30 or 9 at night when it gets dark,” Mayall said.

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‘I’d be stupid if I wasn’t scared’

As part of her training, Mayall is paying special attention to practicing “feeds,” where the boat crew — in this case, her husband, Bryce, and daughter Asa — throws food and drink attached to a string overboard to the swimmer. 

“You flip on your back, you chug your sports drink, and you flip back over and keep swimming,” she said. “There’s no stopping.”

The move is a necessity to stay nourished on long-distance swims, and one that requires extra focus for Mayall, a self-described “dense human” who struggles to easily float. 

She was candid about her “huge fears” ahead of the crossing. Mayall said she has seen friends die from dangerous sports, and that taking precautions doesn’t always prevent tragedy.

“I’ve been really honest with my husband and my daughter on the boat, like, ‘You have to have eyes on me at all times. If I get a leg cramp, I’m gonna go down. I don’t float,’” she said.

Mayall’s window to swim the channel is Aug. 19 to 26. 

True to her self-described “science nerd brain,” Mayall reviewed a database of solo English Channel crossings and found that about one-third of attempts fail. The day with the most successful attempts was Aug. 22.

“I was like, ‘That’s my window. I’m going to go on the most successful week, [when] people get the best weather,” Mayall said. “I made a data-driven decision.”

The total cost of Mayall’s trip — travel, the boat and the pilot — is about $5,000. She took three weeks off from work at City Hall. 

A GPS tracker will document her swim. Mayall is also providing updates on the endeavor via Instagram, through her account with the apt username “robin_the_dolphin.” 

Mayall is raising money for Type 1 diabetes through the organization Mutual Aid Diabetes as part of the challenge. Her 26-year-old daughter Asa, a dancer, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 17, which she described as a “shocking” and “life-changing” experience as a mom. Mayall has raised more than $1,500 so far.

She grew emotional as she explained that the life expectancy for a Type 1 diabetic person without insulin is just four to six weeks. 

“It’s such a basic thing,” Mayall said. “It should be $16 to get insulin. It’s just one of those things that’s just very enraging about our medical system is that it’s so expensive, and really it’s a lifesaving, life-giving medication that should just be dirt cheap.”

After months of preparation, what remains is the crossing itself. Mayall said she draws from a mental and physical “tool kit” to stay motivated during long swims. 

She’s asked friends to help put together a playlist of songs that she’ll sing to herself in her head. Asa, responsible for manning her Instagram and Whatsapp, will shout out positive messages from loved ones and supporters if she has a “dark moment of the soul.” 

She’ll remember her swim coach at UO, Donald Van Rossen, who tricked her into running three miles by distracting her with old stories after she was convinced she couldn’t do a triathlon. (“‘The only thing standing in front of you is your brain,’” she recalled him saying.)

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She might look at her wrists, which carry one silver bangle stamped with the words “JUST KEEP SWIMMING” and a corded band that reads “TODAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR A SWIM.”

She will fantasize about signing the wall of a pub in England called the White Horse, where channel swimmers leave behind their signatures.

And most of all, she’ll think of Ederle, or as Mayall fondly calls her, Trudy. 

Mayall loves that, unlike modern-day triathlons, which can feel as much like a competition of gear and sponsorships as athletic ability, she’ll cross the English Channel the same way Ederle did in 1926. Ederle sewed her own swimsuit because women’s suits of the era were, as Mayall put it, “ridiculous bloomer affairs.” Her goggles were motoring glasses sealed with beeswax.

“I don’t get anything more than what Trudy got,” she said. 

Ederle was just 20 years old when she became the first woman to cross the channel. She completed the swim in 14 hours and 31 minutes, beating the existing men’s record by almost two hours. She held the world record for the fastest English Channel swim for 24 years.

When Ederle returned home from the swim, more than 2 million people — about one-third of New York City’s population at the time — lined the streets of Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade. 

“She was the most celebrated woman in America,” Mayall said. “Why don’t we know her name? In this era of women’s voices, women’s strength, women’s history, why don’t we know our own heroes’ names?”