NC woman swims English Channel in under 11 hours, singing through the pain

Around age 9, Laura Goodwin became enchanted by the idea of stepping off one country and swimming to another. That dream that climaxed Monday when she pulled on a pair of pink goggles and launched into the English Channel.

For the next 10 hours, 44 minutes, Goodwin swam the famous waterway separating England and France, stopping only for brief chocolate milk breaks while treading water.

She suffered four or five jellyfish stings, one to the face and shoulder that was painful enough to leave a mark. But she passed the arduous hours singing to herself, often “You’re the Best” of “Karate Kid” fame.

“I feel really, really good,” she said by phone from England on Tuesday, “which is unsurprising mentally but surprising physically. It’s this impossible challenge and you never know what you’re going to get. But you never know if you can do something until you do it.”

A difficult challenge

Notoriously difficult, the 21-mile channel torments swimmers with cold, choppy water, powerful tides and bountiful jellyfish, offering its most favorable window in July and August.

Since Matthew Webb first traversed it in 1875, swimmers have managed only 2,696 successful crossings — far fewer than the number to summit Mt. Everest.

Goodwin, a 44-year-old swimming coach from Cary, grew up in West Virginia, a state she acknowledges isn’t known for its aquatic prowess.

But she swam at Washington and Lee University and started competing in open water on a California lake during her 20s.

Later, as she explains in her detailed swim blog, she coached swimmers in the crisp San Francisco Bay, where she once taught a 9-year-old to swim from Alcatraz, accompanied by a curious seal.

There, Goodwin learned to her delight that she could endure three hours in 60-degree water as easily as a backyard pool.

Her channel dream took real shape in 2019, when she reserved a pilot boat. Securing a guide crew, she said Tuesday, takes about two years of lead time and upward of $3,500.

Practice swims in Fontana Lake and around Charleston, S.C., boosted confidence, making Goodwin feel “bulletproof.”

But the pandemic and a variety of other factors slowed progress to a crawl, and at one point, Goodwin considered buying a garage pool for practice, finding none available.

Then in March, she moved her family, including two children, to Bournemouth, where she could practice immersing herself in the beast she hoped to tame.

The waiting is the hardest part

Waiting, she said, was harder to endure than the swim itself. She had a window of days when water would be calm and warm enough, but never knew when the starting horn would blow until it actually did.

With sky and seas calm, temperature around 62 degrees, Goodwin chose a near-perfect day, and she passed the time with introspection she’d been too busy to enjoy.

“In 10 hours and 44 minutes,” she said, “you have lot of time and no one to talk to. I thought about a ton of stuff. I did a lot of singing. I sang “Playing with the Boys” from “Top Gun” because I swim with a lot of guys and l like to beat them.”

She even forgave the jellyfish for the face sting because, as she put it, “I definitely squished the little guy.”

Then before the sun set, she reached France, touching the side of a cliff face she found too slippery to climb. It counted.

Now she belongs to a community of roughly 2,000 willing to brave a murky and seemingly bottomless adversary that pushes back relentlessly.

To paraphrase a quote she finds inspiring, Goodwin knows that swimmers and non-swimmers alike tend to overestimate what they accomplish in a day. But they underestimate what they can achieve in a year, much less a lifetime.

This story is part of our regular “On the Bright Side” feature. Got a suggestion for a story that will bring a smile to our readers? E-mail Josh Shaffer at jshaffer@newsobserver.com.