Record setting day on Lake Erie

CLARINGTON -- When Susanne Robinson sets a goal, she stops at nothing to accomplish it.

That trait was no more evident than in her recent 19.2 kilometre swim across the cool waters of Lake Erie.

A life long swimmer, Robinson joined up with the Clarington Swim Club a couple years ago in hopes of getting back into the sport that she enjoyed so thoroughly as a kid growing up just east from here in Kingston.

Her kids, now three and five, were beginning to get a little older at the time, so it afforded her the opportunity to jump back into the pool, a chance she more than happily took.

“Two years ago I decided to join the Clarington Swim club as recreation and to get back into swimming,” Robinson began. “I had taken a break from swimming when I had my children. They are three and five now and being that the Clarington Swim Club has very flexible hours, it made it possible for me to go when the kids were in bed in the morning and that type of thing.”

Not only did that opportunity allow Robinson to get back into the pool, she had found her way into the record books as well.

After accomplishing a childhood goal of swimming across a body of water near the Kingston home she grew up in, Robinson eyed a greater challenge.

One nearly three times the size.

At 19.2 km, Lake Erie provided just the challenge Robinson was in search of.

“Double the distance I knew I could do, triple the distance would be a nice push is what I thought,” Robinson says of what goals she set upon swimming the 7-plus km distance in Kingston. “I looked it up, and I had looked at doing some different swims because I wasn’t really set on doing a Great Lake. But when I found that Lake Erie was about triple the distance of (Nicholson Point), that was the one that I wanted to do. So I focused on that.”

With her coach, Karen Hillis and open water swimming champion Vicki Keith, in the kayak beside her, Robinson set out from Crystal Beach, Ont. en route to Sturgeon Point, NY, last month, after some two years of planing and training.

She was surrounded throughout the swim by a contingent of four boats under the direction of swim master John Munro, and a support crew consisting of her parents, siblings and close friends.

Attempting to keep track of the time in her head, Robinson had an inkling that she might be at or near the record time as she reached the three-quarter point of the swim.

But it wasn’t until the final stretch of water, 1500m to be exact, that she knew the record, previously owned by swim master Munro, would soon belong to her.

“I looked up and all I could see was bright white smiles from Karen and Vicki and I knew right there,” she said. “They had just given me their tell. I wasn’t 100 per cent positive, but I knew they were damn proud and so that moment was more exciting.”

Her official time was clocked at eight hours and 14 minutes, more than an hour better than Munro’s mark, which can be found at www.soloswims.com.