Advisor to swim Lake Ontario in polio fight

If all goes according to plan, next Saturday night Thie Convery will be cold, wet and exhausted. She will also be thrilled to have swum across Lake Ontario in a fundraising effort to wipe out the last vestiges of an ancient disease.

“I’m a Rotarian, and Rotarians worldwide have taken up the challenge of eradicating polio from the face of the Earth,” explains the IPC Securites wealth advisor, from Dundas, Ontario. “We all had the vaccine here in Canada and we haven’t seen it here in years,” she explains. “Generations older than us all have a polio story: a neighbour got it; a childhood friend had it; a school teacher went away sick and never came back.

“We figured it out here in North America, but there are still kids in the world getting polio. To me, its too simple to solve that problem — all we’ve got to do is put two drops of the polio vaccine in the mouth of every babe in the world. Its simple, but its not easy for a lot of reasons.”

Convery will be departing from Niagara on the Lake around 6 p.m. on August 6, and expects to arrive at Marilyn Bell Park in Toronto about 24 hours later.

While the beaches of Lake Ontario are popular throughout the summer, the waters further out a frigid year-round. Freighters and the natural current stir the depths, bringing the 4 degree Celsius waters to the surface. Convery has already been through 11 degree water in a practice swim, and says that the numbing effect can make it easier to keep going.

“I actually don’t mind the cold water. I’m not as fussy about waves — they make me sick, they slow me down — if I had a choice I’d take patches of cold water over waves.”

So what inspired her to swim the lake?

“I was out with some Rotarian friends for dinner, discussing what our next fundraiser would be and I said, ‘you know what, I’m going to swim across Lake Ontario!'” Convery says. “Now, I’ll tell you, there was Irish whiskey being served, so I blame the Irish. Someone said ‘that’s a great idea!’ and I thought ‘who just said that? Did those words come out of my mouth?’ Because I’m not a swimmer!

The next day, she set about researching just what she had gotten herself into, and discovered that the swim was 52km, and, as a sanctioned event, the swimmer had to first qualify to make the attempt.

She began training August 15, 2009, spending 30 minutes doing “a modified, head-up dog paddle. I knew to keep my mouth out of the water, I knew breathing was pretty important. Other than that, I didn’t know much.”

Since then, she has hired a swim coach. She has completed a 19km qualifying swim in Lake Erie on July 4, 2010, finishing the distance in 7 hours, 20 minutes.

“Last Thursday (July 22) my coach informed me that I had just passed the one millionth meter mark. She said ‘you’ve already swum the lake, you just didn’t do it all at once.”

She originally set about to raise one dollar for every meter of the swim, but that $52,000 target has since risen to $150,000 — enough to vaccinate 250,000 children. There is an added incentive to hit this target: polio eradication is one of the goals of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which will match dollar-for-dollar any funds rasied by Rotarians. The ultimate goal then rises to vaccinating a half million children.

For more information on Convery’s swim to eradicate polio, visit www.SwimToEndPolio.ca

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(07/30/10)